Word: schweyk
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...Schweyk in the Second World War--Brecht's play in a radical adaptation by Charles Sabel. At ELIOT HOUSE...
...qualities which render the dreaded state intolerable--its impressive size, structural inefficiency, and grotesque involution--also render it effectively invulnerable. Hasek, on the other hand, saw in these same qualities the faults which invite the wedge: nothing so ludicrous could really expect to survive. Hasek created the figure of Schweyk, the good soldier, whose will to survive encompasses his will to resist, and whose native innocence and peasant cunning provides the specific antidote to corporate petrification...
...alternative. In the extremely informal comfort of an Eliot House main dining room spotted with wrestling mats, army blankets, cushions and chairs, the next weekends offer a free, funny, and frequently poignant update on Hasek, in the form of a rare English language production of Bertolt Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War. An update it is, for in his telling epilogue to the production, translator Charles Sabel would have it emphasized that even for folk heroes times change...
...Hasek's Schweyk was an Austro-Hungarian Imperial recruit whose very literal-minded obedience proves the bane of his superior officers. By the time of the Second War, Schweyk's position has become more complicated, and Brecht's hero has as more difficult task; a civilian now, he juggles the roles of partisan and seeming colla-borator. He still feeds his friends, still rattles military authority, still tries to stay alive, but there is somewhat less call on his innocence, somewhat more on his cunning. Brecht's Schweyk is already a conscious, canny resister. Nor does the progress end there...
...Eliot House Drama Society will present Brecht's Schweyk in the Second World War, in an original translation by Charles F. Sabel '69, at 8:30 p.m. tonight in the House dining hall...