Word: brecht
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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...
...better company, and the celebration of the sexual instincts which they represent borders, at its best, on comic poetry. But this erotic yea-saying degenerates in lesser moments into remarkably explicit single-entendre that is crude without being funny. Crudity seems, generally speaking, to be the defect inherent in Brecht's attempt to simplify life to the point where it can be described in his almost-allegorical terms. His characters are often lifeless stick-figures whose only identity is a label, and his political and social pronouncements are over-stated, over-emphasized, over-dramatized past the point of exasperation...
This harsh, shrill, constantly-hammering quality in Brecht's writing has led Alex Horn, who directed, to impose upon his cast a degree of rough broadness in their playing that they cannot convincingly sustain. Ray Reinhardt plays Puntila with considerable authority (he can actually look like a dying deer while somebody is telling him not to); Anne Meara as his daughter has a high-spirited charm that shines out of everything she does. But even they have strained and labored moments, and certain minor cast members have no moments of any other kind. John Lasell plays the hired man with...
...course of an hour between lunch at the Riesmans' and punch with the populace in the Winthrop House Senior Common Room, Tynan ranged, on request, all over the theatrical map. Discussing playwrights unjustly neglected on the commercial stage, he nominated Brecht first of all, added Ibsen, Pirandello and Wedekind, and commented that "Giraudoux has been not neglected, but so often misinterpreted that it's worse than neglect." Jean Genet to Tynan is "a natural, who shouldn't be imitated... He's a bad model but an interesting artist"; Eugene Ionesco is "bright as a button...