Word: brecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Uprising. Turning to the Associate Professor of English who was shepherding him around the Loeb, Sir Tyrone is said to have asked, "Isn't that the new thriller about de Sade and a lot of French lunatics?" Told that Plebeians was a recent play by Gunter Grass about Brecht, he shook his head, informed sources report, and muttered, "Jumping Jesus. Well, it's good to know it all goes...
...critics seem to have taken all this to heart. Popular thesis books like Brustein's Theatre of Revolt, Bentley's Bernard Shaw, and Blau's The Impossible Theatre argue that a binding social vision has characterized the best of twentieth century drama, and, in the case of Shaw and Brecht, has been responsible for the continuity of the century's finest playwrights. Few critics, other than Marxists, have been very disturbed that neither dramatist was particularly successful in getting programs adopted, legislation passed, or governments changed. It is enough that their didactic framework provided a sustaining discipline for their...
...neither Brecht nor Shaw would have been particularly pleased to hear that his political commitments and didactic intentions had, in the end, only served as a springboard for his art. The former dismissed as "culinary" the vast percentage of Western dramaturgy and the latter, avowedly, never wrote a word "for art's sake." In performance, to ignore the revolutionary premise of their work is to castrate the thrust of their dramatics. But in New York, today, Brecht and Shaw are performed as Good Liberals with whom a right-minded audience can curl up and agree. This season Galileo was presented...
...reason why this establishment audience should be preoccupied with social themes is hard to pin down with facts and figures, but I suspect that their interest stems from a variety of escapism, peculiar to the theatre. Many years ago, Brecht was aware that empathetic drama, which preeminently characterizes American theatre, tends to serve as a purgative force. (Whether he was able to change this very much remains for future generations to decide.) It is an easily observed phenomenon that by sharing in a theatrical passion, audiences frequently feel relieved. As Brecht pointed out in 1930, this sort of theatre, "involves...
...surpassed the imitation. It is because Miss Garson's satire renders her targets immune to further burlesque by grasping--just once, and fleetingly--all the obvious uglinesses of American politics without giving a sweet damn for what they point to. If her wry defloration of ideology is pale beside Brecht's, her portrayal of convention-hall mores does not begin to approach Mencken's Murray & Co. have slightly humanized a drastically inhumane play by virtue of taste and skillful joining, but the blood-spoor lingers on the air. MacBird begins with a ritual murder and then fails both to implicate...