Word: brecht
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LOEB DRAMA CENTER presents Gisela May in an Evening of Songs by Brecht and Weill Saturday and Sunday...
...Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht refined the characters that Gay created, while Kurt Weill provided a tart and tangy score that is one of the marvels of the musical theater. The juice of art and life, however, flows richly enough through the original Beggar's Opera. The dominant motif-Gay's as well as Brecht's-is that money is thicker than blood. By now, the characters are classic, and they all live up to their names: Peachum (Gordon Cornell), the informer and fence; Lockit (Ralston Hill), the venal jailer of Newgate; and MacHeath (Timothy Jerome), the saucy...
...first moments, the action is set off as a play within a play. Each scene played by the agitators, moreover, is set off by their explanations, and directors Martin Andrucki and Frank Kinahan are careful to have each actor preserve the particularity of each of his different roles. Brecht is a master at building convincing symmetry into a play, and here the recurrent exclamations and questions of the chorus, either individual or collective, are set into dialogue with the group of leaders...
...Brecht is best produced with the simplest of scenery, as the current production illustrates amply. The stage takes on two foci: the massed chorus and the red box which the leaders use as a multi-purpose prop for their scenarios. Three objects make up a sort of backdrop. A sign-board carrying the number and title of the current scene expresses the movement of the play and places each scene in the whole. A map of Mukden and environs locates the action in space. A poster of Lenin indicates the dominating ideology, and shows that the whole dramatic inquest...
...BECAUSE Brecht builds distance into his plays, because dramatic language has become propaganda and ironic formula, acting can more effectively be recitation than it can be effusion. "The word has become a weapon in the class struggle," one leader says. This might also mean that it is hard to mis-act a Brecht play, since the current production, only fairly acted by normal standards, succeeds splendidly both as theater and as lesson. Produced by Humanities 96v, The Measures Taken represents a bona-fide learning experience. For the work of a playwright who sought always to give perspective, to express totality...