Word: brecht
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Treat by Contrast. This story line could have been as sticky as a candied apple, except that the co-creators of The Fantasticks, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, have used a favorite device of Bertolt Brecht's. Brecht traded on the sentimentality of a song or story while ironically kidding it. Thus an audience could feel emotionally stirred and intellectually superior at one and the same time. What Jones and Schmidt have done is to write a fairy tale that knowingly winks at itself...
...address each other as "gentleman." They put their feet up on my table. And say: things will improve. And I don't ask when. Bertolt Brecht...
...Brecht lived by what he always pretended to suppress: his sentiment bordering on sentimentality, the lyric-cynic play of his heart and mind, a vein of mordant humor, and his drink-drenched ability to keep one eye on the dawn and the other on the clogged gutter of life. He claimed that the greatest single influence on his prose was the Lutheran Bible, and there was something of the masked disciple of Christ in him. His Communism was basically a desire to multiply the loaves and fishes for the multitude...
...Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is Brecht's play to prevent Hitler by, or rather, future Hitlers. It is as if a public accountant were to attempt to sum up the nature of evil on a balance sheet. Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Roehm, under various aliases are presented as Chicago gangsters who muscle into a vegetable trust (the depression-ravaged German industrialists) and bulldoze the honest but senile leading citizen (Hindenburg) into legalizing their protection racket...
...When Brecht's own Berliner Ensemble performs the play, the discipline and virtuosity of the company turn a somewhat silly drama into a comic nightmare. European experience underlines every speech with blood. But Americans tend to regard gangsters with nostalgic indulgence as individualistic resistance fighters against society (witness the vast popularity of Bonnie and Clyde). In the U.S., the play takes on the eerie quality of a faintly sinister success story, in which an immigrant boy from Brooklyn overcomes his bad accent and deplorable manners to achieve dominion and power over the second largest city in the nation...