Word: kragler
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BRECHT wrote Drums in the Night as a satire of revolution. The hero, Andreas Kragler, returns battered from the war to Berlin of January 1919, on the eve of the Sparticist rebellion, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht...
...Kragler wants his fiancee Anna back, but her parents are just about to marry her off to a corpulent war profiteer named Freirich Murk. Kragler is pissed, so much so that he begins spouting off about oppression, and rushes to join the revolution at the barricades. Anna has a change of heart, and catches Kragler on the way. Without a second thought, Kragler deserts his comrades for his girl and the ripe fruits of the bourgeoisie...
...presentational mode; the characters often seem to step outside of themselves, the bourgeois are prototype bourgeois, the proletarians a somewhat unsympathetic prototype. Yet the distancing serves artistic ends rather than those of propaganda and social justice, as in Brecht's later works. And the completely apolitical, uninformed resolution of Kragler's dilemma at the close of the play belies seeing Drums in the Night as much more than an anticipation of more mature work...
...Brecht, she is supposed to have a "certain run of the mill sensuality." It is missing. Her performance opening night was nervous and somewhat ferced. She seemed almost embarrassed at being on stage, rushing at moments to get through with it. Gary Halcott is convincing as an everyman Andreas Kragler. He is the confused warrior come home to an ungrateful Fatherland, wanting only to sleep with his old honey, sinking to revolutionary despair when be can't have her. Through the play he manages to look progressively more tired and more bored...
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