Word: brechtian
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Crowd Orchestration. Even if it had been planned, no Brechtian genius could have staged the audience participation better. Before Nixon was 60 seconds into his speech, the platoon of hecklers began to shout: "Tell us about Kent State!" "Right on!" "Make more bombs!" The vast majority of the audience began a counterpoint of loud and sustained applause. Nixon, hearing the radicals, hurried his speech, with half-stops in his monotone. But his lines about "the willingness to listen to somebody without trying to shout him down" summoned up thunderous ovations...
...this level, Playwright Myrna Lamb casts one ambiguous vote for hanky-panky. On the Brechtian Greek chorus song-and-dance level she casts one unambiguous vote for women's freedom. The chorus delineates the roles into which women have presumably been thrust and demeaned-cook, clerk, wife, mother and sexual plaything...
THROUGH these internal and external ambiguities. Criss's production places the audience in a uniquely Brechtian position. The audience is not to identify, is not to personalize, is not to become individually involved with the characters on the stage. In Brecht's words, a member of the audience must be a "spectator"-a spectator who "takes up the attitude of one who smokes at case and watches." In this play, the characters' points of view are changed often. The spectator must be content simply to watch all of the events and to become involved as a viewer...
...breaking your creativity. With this. that is a plastic ball. and no matter how you look at it. or where you are, it's a plastic ball. You know exactly what you're working with and there isn't this great discontinuity, which is very important for the Brechtian style of acting...
INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has taken up the cause of the American Indian and has tried to mesh segments of a vaudeville-styled Buffalo Bill Wild West show with segments of Hochhuth-Brechtian didactic polemicism. The idea is to spank the audience while making it laugh, but the whole thing refuses to cohere. Stacy Keach, however, plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance and charm...