Word: brecht
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...plays of the young Brecht are, essentially, an amalgam and a derivation. Not that the savagery and sharpness (or their intent) were borrowed: the rapacious soldiers and leering camp followers of A Man's a Man could not have been conceived by anyone else; yet they do most obviously have a model, the Kipling of "O, it's Tommy this an' Tommy that . . ." So too their spineless victim-- only he is patterned after, not Kipling, but Jaroslav Hasek's Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik--a book Brecht thought one of the "three literary works of this century which . . . will...
...Brecht's intent, of course, in manipulating these characters of other writers was to break the barriers of the theatre of illusion (the "culinary theatre" he called it contemptuously), and they became basic parts of his 'epic' narrative methods. By 1924, when work on A Man's a Man began, he had added Pirandello to his list of influences: this act, as A Man's a Man shows, finally gave him the skills to shatter completely the culinary arts. The audience is now at arm's length, and the actors can themselves glide from impersonations, now assuming a new role...
Having broken all the toys in his theatrical playpen, Critic Steiner feels a twinge of remorse. He closes his book with the memory of a great tragic moment in the modern theater. It was a performance by Helene Weigel, widow of Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht's Mother Courage. Mother Courage has just been forced to look at her dead soldier son twice without permitting herself a sign of recognition: "As the body was carried off, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso...
...State Department-sponsored troupe that included Helen Hayes, June Havoc, Leif Erickson and Helen Menken did The Skin of Our Teeth and The Grass Menagerie there. And this week Manhattan's Living Theater group arrives at the Théâtre des Nations with Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities and Jack Gelber's The Connection...
August 10 the group will stage the American premiere of Bert Brecht's A Man's A Man, translated by Eric Bentley. Hancock, who worked with Bentley last fall on Caucasion Chalk circle, will direct the Brecht play this summer...