Word: brecht
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...judge from Brecht's track record, putting spin on a familiar story was one of the surer ways of accomplishing this. Even when Brecht was ripping off no one in particular, he felt the need to cloak his work with the patina of plagiarism. According to Brecht's doctrine of the epic play, setting works in an unfamiliar and unsympathetic context allows the audience to absorb the message of the works rather than getting absorbed in the character and stories. If Andrei Serban's seminew production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan shows anything, it's that...
...well enough until Shen Te falls in love with a grounded pilot (James Andreassi), whose sole desire in life is to fly. She sees in him the romantic dreamer--he sees in her the ticket to a pilot's job in Peking. Passion, betrayal, a broken wedding, pregnancy & lawsuits; Brecht packed enough plot threads in here to power a whole season of Dallas...
...that's not the only similarity. Brecht subscribed to the J.R. Ewing school of human relations--he is never less than mocking, and usually down right cynical, about human character. Though Brecht, like Sartre, Orwell, and other European intellectuals of his generation, was never really a fellow traveler, he did subscribe to Marx's belief that evil and suffering were the products of a capitalist society...
...Good Woman has all the nasty wit of his best known work, The Threepenny Opera. Unfortunely, Opera collaborator Kurt Weill was long gone when Brecht wrote this play, so director Serban commissioned hip New York composer Elizabath Swados to score Brecht's songs. Some of her past work like Runaways, has been pretty vile, but in Good Woman some of her curt, antimelodic songs are pretty fair substitutes for Weill. This is less laziness on Swados's part, I think, than the fact that Weill's music was the perfect accompaniment to Brecht's cynical, plebian lyrics...
...been characterized by astonishing visual elegance, The Good Woman can only be described as kitsch chinoiserie. There are lots of "Ah so"s and "Honorable sirs" and wavings of fans here, which in almost any other context would look offensively cliched but here fit in perfectly with Brecht's consciously artificial evocation of China. The odd thing about Serban's kitchen sink approach is that he seems to borrow almost as many Japanese conventions as Chinese, suggesting that Serban has been dealing his Orientalism from a rather shallow supply. But who cares, when the production works so well...