Word: brecht
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With this jarring first image, the current production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera captures the cardinal principle of epic theater: a rigid separation between the stage and spectator. This separation, or alienation, prevents the spectator from identifying with the characters. Brechtian theater presents man for scrutiny, to entertain and instruct the spectator. Didactic in intent, it forces him to observe, make decisions, and act on them. Under R.J. Cutler's direction, Threepenny Opera shines with all the power and excitement inherent in Epic theater...
...Threepenny Opera, the most enduring example of Brecht's epic theater, Brecht shows how closely the capitalist business interests relate to the criminal element. The entrepreneur, J.J. Peachum (Ernest Kearns), trafficks in sentiment. He outfits an army of "the poorest of the poor" with begging clothes and districts of operation. Aware of the efforts required to soften a man's heart to the point where he will part with his money, he believes, "no one can make his own misery sound convincing;" he has built an empire on this statement...
Kitaj's works from the '60s, like The Ohio Gang, set forth dramatic melanges, Bertolt Brecht plus Constructivism plus Al Capone-irresistibly nasty stuff, Neue Sachlichkeit run through a fragmented lens...
...simultaneously involving and distancing the audience, Nickleby embraces and reconciles many theatrical modes?realism and impressionism, the medieval pageant and the Victorian theater, Brecht and the Living Theater?while telling Dickens' story with enough conviction to make the fine hairs stand up on every playgoer's neck...
Sure, the playwright was penning propaganda to some extent (as we find in plenty of great drama from the 15th-century Everyman through much of Ibsen to most of Brecht). But he was also doing a good deal more, for Shakespeare is rarely as simple as he is often made out to be. There are ironic subtexts in the play; and the dramatist includes inglorious aspects of war as well as unbecoming traits in Henry's character. The Bard gave us something far more complex than a cardboard king of diamonds, as more and more people are coming to realize...