Word: brecht
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PRESENTING a show with the full title The Seven Deadly Sins of the Lower Middle Class to a Cambridge/Loeb Drama Center audience risks a failure of communication: the gulf between Brecht's selfish characters clawing away at each other on the stage and the dainty gourmet shops sitting outside on Brattle St. seems wide enough to swallow Seven Deadly Sins' compact message. The great virtue of Alvin Epstein's American Repertory Theatre production is its dextrous explication of Brecht's easily garbled multiple ironies. Epstein uses his performers, music, dance, mime and even neon signs to illuminate Brecht's critique...
Instead, the "new realists" proposed something more detached, skeptical and hardheaded: an art of the street, the cafe, the factory line, the docks and brothels. Some of its collective character might be gleaned from the title Bertolt Brecht gave one of his poems: "700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tank." It was a pessimistic movement. Nobody involved with Neue Sachlichkeit believed in the machine-utopias that were an article of faith among the romantics at the Bauhaus. When an artist like Carl Grossberg (1894-1940) painted factory installations, he gave them a deserted, haunting quality, as though some German...
...POSSIBLE that no dramatist of similar stature could match the sexual activity of Frank Wedekind; it was characteristic of him that he would bring this personal obsession to the stage. "His greatest work," Brecht eulogized, "was his own personality." Wedekind was the first playwright of the polymorphous perverse, and his sexual emphasis and stylistic departures from photographic naturalism opened the door for Brecht, as well as all of the modern drama that followed. Somewhat simian in appearance, Wedekind was the Missing Link in German drama between the mad prodigy Georg Buchner and the Twentieth Century, the first one to come...
...Brecht might be said to be the cynosure for the contemporary theatre, so is Wedekind, as Brecht's mentor, a star ascendant in the night sky. This is Wedekind year at the Loeb; the American Rep is scheduled to perform Lulu early next year, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club started its season last week with an auspicious production of Spring's Awakening, Wedekind's first work...
Sidney Hook's attack on certain popular figures [April 28] brings to mind another false idol of our time: Bertolt Brecht. Brecht's purpose was not to bring down the Nazis but that tender sprout of democracy, the Weimar Republic. Rather than undermine the Nazi movement, Brecht et al. made the brown-shirted thugs acceptable to millions of middle-class Germans ("Somebody's got to do something!"), and thus contributed to the eventual rise of Hitler...