Word: brechtian
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INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has taken up the cause of the American Indian and has tried to mesh together 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 plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance and charm...
...Hero of Our Time deals with political decisions, but it is not, Shea points out, political theater, at least not in the Brechtian or propaganda sense. The author prefers to call his work a "play of character," in which the audience is supposed to deal with the problems in the play by identifying with the characters, not by being estranged from them. It is, then, a psychological play...
...author discounts any direct influence by a play like Marat-Sade (which he doesn't think is great), though it shared similar concerns and form on the surface. Nor does he agree with Brecht's theory of the theater, though he does use a few Brechtian techniques. He feels much closer to the theatrical ideas of the black theater in New York, and to the political interpretations of Shakespearean plays that Harvard directors like Mayer and Babe have experimented with...
...warlocks, maniacs, hippies, fags and dictators. Somehow it is reassuring to know that there's still an actor left who will play a leathery oil-well firefighter with the unlikely name of Chance Buckman. That's John Wayne. The Duke may not be too good at rendering Brechtian anguish, but no one else can play a better John Wayne...
...lyrics were by Tim Mayer--many from his great show--and the arrangements by Ivers. Mayer's songs are wry, delicately structured, and astutely poetic. The same song might fluctuate from near-Brechtian understatement to near-melodramatic astringency...