Word: brecht
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...reported that one cannot so much as whistle a few bars of "Mack the Knife" in the Square without some pomaded hood appearing from a crevice to explain the finer points of Alienation and Epic Theatre. That David Wheeler and his Theatre Company of Boston have decided to do Brecht their own way is, in itself, refreshing. Describing his brilliant production of Galileo in San Francisco, Herbert Blau wrote, "In approaching Galileo quite differently -- after years of pondering Brechtian notions -- my trust is that to be irreverent is to be more faithful." Probably so, but Wheeler's approach...
...problem is that, either by choice or technical incompetence, Wheeler and his actors don't vary their dramatic diction from scene to scene. The result is heavy-handed and curiously flat. We are left with the impression that Brecht is haltingly trying to say that it's hard cheese when Big People, like SS officers, make things tough on Little People, like Jews and Communists. I think the play is worth more than that. It is always simple-minded to present Brecht as a Champion of Liberal Causes, or to make his works play like second-rate Odets. But this...
...violin to the menacing timpani of wooden spoons. Eerie moans and whimpers fill the air like the cries of lost souls, recorded in limbo. A clownishly decked-out Greek chorus of whores and fools breaks into gritty tunes and cynical ditties on the age's corruption that evoke Brecht and Weill...
Cactus Flower. Humor is often the puckish shadow cast by national character. English comedy is a running display of oneupmanship, reflecting an indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry...
...sensitive Christian Weisbrod, at 26, had a bright future on the East German stage. He was the youngest member of the eminent Berliner Ensemble, the theater company famed for its productions of Bertolt Brecht's acid satires. Yet Weisbrod was not happy...