Word: puntila
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Repertory Boston, so recently given up for dead, is demonstrating not only life but considerable liveliness in presenting the English-language premiere of Bert Brecht's "episodes from the history of the landowner, Puntila, and his hired man, Matti." Its official opening, scheduled for Tuesday, was postponed until tonight because of an injury to a cast member; at Tuesday night's preview Puntila appeared as an odd, erratic, interesting, annoying, basically refractory and intractable script, worth, in its Wilbur incarnation, more than many considerably smoother enterprises...
Brecht devoted much of his career to his ever-recurring contention that whatever decent impulses men have are frustrated by a social system based on inequality of income, and Puntila is a variation on this theme. But it is more cheerful than many of his works, since the emphasis is not so much on the system and the monstrous creatures which it makes of men, as on the abounding exuberance and health of the impulses it cannot entirely suppress. As Puntila gropes drunkenly toward the friendship of his hired man, and as the hired man gropes cockily toward the privy...