Word: brechtian
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...banker's wealth and unction to the silver wedding anniversary Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1968 re-writing--or choreographing" as he terms it--of Strindberg's Dance of Death converts that play from a tragedy about marriage to a comedy about marriage tragedies and translates it into the terms of Brechtian "epic" theater...
...epic theater"--theater that tells its story without attempting to delude the audience that it is actually happening. He has cut Strindberg's work up into small sections, added and subtracted material, and worked out changes in collaboration with the actors who first produced the work. There is typically Brechtian disrespect for the sanctity of the source, and a typically Brechtian effort at distancing the audience through frequent interruptions...
...consumer goods, from prefab houses to athlete's foot powder, ordered and sometimes resold by Saigon officials. Since U.S. personnel changes roughly every twelve months, Americans tend to maintain a kind of earnest, timeless sangfroid, but around them have gathered "professional beggars, pimps, drug dealers, thieves-a Brechtian cast of characters in the midst of a new Thirty Years...
...have-a-tiny-set-I'm-gonna-move-my-camera-anyway style (which produced the most glaring defects in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf). It is staged as a conscious theater piece, with actors orating to the audience--failing to produce what I suppose was intended as Brechtian effect, but making the whole affair come off like a video-taped TV show. And the treatment of the text is so reverential that any discussion of the issues is precluded by liturgical overtones (the Berrigans are saints--live like them...
...extraordinary decades. Rid of its tasteless Hohenzollern constraints, and at the same time having avoided the constricting new dogmas of Marxist revolution, Germany blossomed intellectually. In the liberal, democratic '20s, Berlin was feverish with new ideas in atonal music, Einsteinian physics, Freudian psychoanalysis, expressionist art, Bauhaus architecture, Brechtian theater, not to mention kinky sex and despairing occultism, all pursued against a counterpoint of political riot and assassination...