Word: brecht
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...everyone knows, Brecht sought a theater of alienation which shocks the audience into constant awareness of social and moral problems. By using ritualized, non-naturalistic devices--slides and signs, self-consciously artificial musical numbers, characters addressing the audience directly--he blocked simple escapist identification with the characters on stage...
...Brecht's best plays create a tension between the techniques of alienation and the humanity of the story line. His worst plays are like lectures with unusually ingenious visual aids...
Though not physically equipped to play the big of that Brecht intended Galy Gay to be, Bro Uttal is, with some cutting of lines, adequate as a little oaf. He whines piteously at first and shouts fiercely afterwards; that he has no occasion for any other sort of verbalization can hardly be his fault...
...belonged to the dreamlike round of Vienna, capital of the inbred Habsburgs and the waltz. In the changing '20s, Paris provided a moveable feast for Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald and Joyce, while in the chaos after the Great Crash, Berlin briefly erupted with the savage iconoclasm of Brecht and the Bauhaus. During the shell-shocked 1940s, thrusting New York led the way, and in the uneasy 1950s it was the easy Rome of la dolce vita. Today, it is London, a city steeped in tradition, seized by change, liberated by affluence, graced by daffodils and anemones, so green with parks...
...play is not tediously didactic. It is a little bit as if Brecht had purified the character of Mother Courage, made her an ardent, spunky, dutiful young girl, and graced her with luck as well as pluck. The Caucasian Chalk Circle's essential mood is playful and bucolic. But anything bucolic in this repertory production at New York's Lincoln Center is lost in the grinding whirr of revolving stages and the clanking rise and fall of scenery. The music, crucial to any decent Brecht production, seems to have been composed by a tone-deaf mute. Watching...