Word: brecht
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...possible that years from now, when all of Brecht's plays have been performed and assessed, Trumpets and Drums will be considered one of the most successful, at any rate one of the most playable, of all. Certainly its American premiere performance at the Loeb is one of those all-too-rare occasions when all the technical resources of Harvard's drama center have been applied by a skilled cast to a play that is absolutely worth all the effort...
...excellent voices in the company; most of the voices are not passable, the lyrics rarely intelligible. One song is bad enough that the singing must have been intentionally off-key; this is wrong--it makes it impossible to understand the lyrics and this is not supposed to happen in Brecht. The songs are reputetdly the weakest part of this play, but I would refrain from judging them until a later production gives them a chance...
Trumpets and Drums is an adaptation of George Farquahr's The Recruiting Officer, written in 1706. The play was an ideal vehicle for Brecht to tinker with, for the conventions of Restoration comedy his theatrical purposes perfectly. His dream of a didactic theatre, where audiences could watch plays detachedly and learn from them, was spoiled on occasion by audiences that emotionalized over his characters. He rewrote the last scene of Mother Courage so that audiences would be disgusted as his heroine, he children all killed by the war, picked up her wagon and went off following the soldiers...
Farquahr, however, made no pretense of "character development." The figure in his comedy are caricatures, and no audience can romanticize a caricature--they are human alienation effects. So Brecht can show us his Plumes and Melindas for scene after scene, but leave one free of emotional attachments to them. When a devastating final scene shows the county bourgeois entertaining themselves while thet poor are led off to fight in America, no emotional tie to any of the characters prevents you from condemning them if you choose to. Thus Trumpets and Drums succeeds in doing what Brecht...
...histrionics. True, the actors didn't have a great deal of substance to work with. There's limit to how many different ways you can vent your frustrations with life on "the rain." But I think that more understanding of the play, and less of an effort to assist Brecht in his valiant effort to make sure nobody in the audience missed the impact of what he was trying to say might have helped...