Word: brecht
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...emotions explain the need for dramatic art," Bentley stated in discussing the psychology of identification with characters on the stage, and tracing the roots of this identification to infancy. Referring to Bertolt Brecht at the conclusion of the lecture, Bentley described the aims of the playwright's epic theater" as an attempt to break down emotional identifications and create an intellectual distance between the audience and the stage...
...Loeb to the neglect of art is not as terrifying as it sounds. Plays are not "for" audiences in the sense in which rings are for fingers or America is for the Americans. The relation is not one of possession or even one of pleaser and pleased: to Brecht, for example, whose plays are "for" audiences in the most explicit sense, the last thing de- sired was that the audience should be "pleased" in any fashion Broadway understands. The playwright's task and the actor's and the director's and the designer's is to hold that necessary attention...
...ignoble fear, and can become ridiculous, as in the pronouncements of those who revolt against the age by reversing its values. We are doubtless a contemptible generation, but it is not true that whatever succeeds with us must be bad. Frost and Eliot and Faulkner and Joyce and Brecht and O'Neill are and were enormous successes--far more successful than the great of other generations have been in their lifetimes. And it is not inconceivable at all that the big stage at the Loeb, by dedicating itself to "plays for audiences," may some day present a truly and wholly...
...unquestionably an antique, with scratchy sound, uncertain lighting and a mannered kind of acting carried over from the silent films.. But it is not the sort of antique that must be watched with embarrassment. Lotte Lenya, as Jennie, is gawkily charming, and such Kurt Weill-Bert Brecht songs as Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny retain their peculiar combination of sentiment and cynicism, even when filtered through English subtitles. Viewers who have seen the English stage version that has played for several years in Manhattan's Greenwich Village will notice differences; the film, for some reason, has fewer...
Many of Wilder's fans think that he is capable of being far more than an entertainer, that he could turn into a Brecht of the cinema. But if Billy did that, he might find himself playing the lead role in a terrifying "opener": big director wins fame and fortune by making solidly entertaining movies, suddenly gets ideals and loses everything on one big flop, winds up living in the ladies' room in the Chateau Marmont...