Word: baal
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...TEMPTING-and far too easy-to judge Brecht by political criteria, to praise or condemn him for his Marxist perspective. Brecht himself encouraged political judgements of his work, viewing his plays as vehicles for his repudiation of the bourgeois lifestyle. He writes of his first play, "Baal is a play which could present all kinds of difficulties to those who have not learned to think dialectically." Likewise, he repudiates the popular success of Drums in the Night because he felt that it was based on a bourgeois misunderstanding of his purpose: "... the people who were so wildly anxious to shake...
There are some immediate problems to an artistic critique of Brecht. The most difficult is his preoccupation with results and outcomes, to the exclusion of beginnings and motives, a preoccupation which separates him from the realists. This tendency is present in most of his early plays, especially Baal and In the Jungle of Cities, where the reader finds himself faced with characters and situations acting in a seemingly irrational, or at least inexplicable, manner. Brecht creates these situations to explore the possibilities they contain, not the motivations which led up to them. In the prologue to In the Jungle...
...contains variant readings for all the plays, as well as the author's notes on the performance, conception, and meaning of each play. The plays have been translated by a number of people, and the quality of the translations is vastly uneven. William Smith and Ralph Manheim, who translated Baal, Drums in the Night, and The Life of Edward the Second of England, have not done justice to Brecht. Their translations, although technically accurate, are not performable. They have left the Baal's monologues in a kind of stilted, Germanic English which no actor could do anything with. Their best...
...company's faults-and how it turns them into virtues. Both performances tended to be concerts in costume. Nicola Benois' massive, upward-sweeping sets were effective in a traditional vein. Nabucco, in particular, had moments of rousing stagecraft, especially when a 35-ft. purple statue of Baal split down the middle and the surrounding temple exploded, filling the stage and auditorium with steam. But mostly the singers forgot about the drama and one another, turned toward the audience, and simply belted out their best. Frequently it was more than good enough. Drenched by the robust melodiousness of Soprano...
What chiefly impelled him to this view was ministering to a parish in Detroit from 1915 to 1928. He saw the Ford Motor Co. as a devouring god Baal that dehumanized and depersonalized man, and Henry Ford I as a false prophet who "promised to solve all social problems but aggravated most of them." As Niebuhr saw it, Ford's boast of a $5-a-day wage was nothing but a sham, since most of his workers were employed only sporadically and had no insurance against unemployment, illness and old age. In the same pragmatic way, the slaughter...