Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exiles most deeply affected by American culture were not painters at all but writers, musicians and directors, from Bertolt Brecht to Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Lubitsch and Thomas Mann, who gravitated to Los Angeles, worked fitfully but sometimes successfully for the movies and for a while between the Anschluss and the McCarthy years made that palmy city into an extension of the Berlin, the Vienna they had lost. "It is wonderful here on the Pacific, and life is a thousand times better here than in New York," wrote the great director Max Reinhardt to his son. "But I grew...
...poster were anything to go by, Baal was to be an earnest, wrenching and dark drama of sunken sockets and deep grimaces. Weary of exactly such grand concepts and heavy emotions, the young Brecht wrote this play as a mild satire of late-nineteenth-century symbolist drama. This is not to say that the play is not be treated seriously but certainly not with the solemnity that the cast of Baal at the Loeb Ex did. In fact, many, especially amateurs, stay away from lyrical, intense tragedies on stage these days precisely because of the danger of ending...
...most grating element of the Ex production was the pacing. Given Brecht's short, segmented scene structure it is strange that many scenes seemed interminable and remarkably static, particularly those involving group male drunken hysteria. In contrast the smaller, controlled scenes between Baal and his lovers were sharp and tense, especially those between Baal and Ekart. Homosexual themes and lesbian undertones gave a greater subtlety that was lacking in the rest of the play...
...similar manner, Brecht's later theories on theater--the "alienation effect" cliche--were applied to this much earlier and apolitical play. Gender inequalities were also emphasized, with a view at being more political, by having the audience sit in separate male and female sections, and a lengthy last scene had Baal surrounded and tormented by all the women he had abused and discarded...
...Brecht's original libretto ends with the city's destruction by fire. Although the director has chosen to end on a more ambiguous note, the production staff compensated by raising the dining hall to near-broiling temperatures...