Word: brecht
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...Salvation Army preacher (name unknown) whose skin is so thick "it bends anything you stick into it" lets a man spit in his face as a condition to a donation, and later shoots himself, uttering somebody else's last words. These people have the poetic, imaginative quality of other Brecht characters, but the fantasy Chicago of this early Brecht play doesn't confront the issues of the usual Brechtian world...
...first prime minister of England. From time to time, the characters explain that they are at least more honest than England's unpunished rich people, but mostly they're too busy trying to sell each other out. At the end, Macheath the highwayman--the original of Weill's and Brecht's Mack the Knife, in their updated Threepenny Opera--stands with a rope around his neck while a beggar-narrator explains that for strict poetical Justice he'll have to be hanged and all the other characters hanged or transported, but that as in operas it doesn't matter...
...Brecht's theme was the revolutionary farmers' takeover of what was best in the past, its songs and the belief in personal and communal dignity that lay behind them. So he showed the roots of the farmers' anti-fascist slogans and collective ambitions in simple, legendary stories, and the way the values of the stories made the anti-fascist slogans make sense, like Azdak's Solomon-like decision that Grusha keeps the governor's child because she won't try to pull him from a circle in a tug-of-war with the governor's ambitious widow. As a result...
...scenes before the last, and be more simply sincere at least in his initial revulsion at mistakenly helping the grand duke escape and in his questions to the defendants he plans to acquit. But he turns in a virtuoso performance, and the most important thing shines through it: Brecht's call to action, for another Azdakian era of disorder at the end of which Azdak won't have to apologize for not being a hero or address his Ironshirted attackers as "Fellow dogs," for a dialectical revolution like the one the Ironshirts announce when they first dress Azdak in judicial...
...Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle ranks with the greatest plays ever written. It's based on an old legend about a wise judge who has to decide which of two mothers a child belongs to, and it has a tender quality that blends with the acerbic honesty you expect from Brecht. The Winter's Tale is the only other play I know with as deep a feeling for dialectic change and the hope it makes possible. With any kind of production, it should be a good play not to miss. Opens tonight, 7:30 p.m. at the Loeb...