Word: theatertreffen
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That is a partial tally of deliberate affronts to the audience in 15 acclaimed stage shows from East and West Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Bochum and Schwerin. All were imported for, or staged locally to enrich, last month's Berlin Theatertreffen, the city's 27th annual festival of productions from around the German-speaking world. Although the doctrinaire Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, Germany's greatest 20th century playwright, has fallen out of fashion, his zeal to shake up bourgeois spectators still seems to inspire his artistic successors...
...Performers are often treated like puppets. In staging Brecht's A Man's a Man for the Thalia Theater of Hamburg, director Katharina Thalbach encased the actors in masks and bodysuits so that they resembled cartoons. Playwrights, too, often find their vision subordinated to directors'. This year's Theatertreffen included two contemporary plays that were in the 1988 or 1989 festivals, on the basis that the 1990 productions were so different as to render them virtually new works...
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