Word: brecht
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...traditional goal. Yet, in 1920 there began a German theatrical group which longed to hear that they had killed the realism, chattered the illusion, and had created false if not impossible situations. These were the impressionists of the Epic Staging School, led by director Erwin Piscator and writer Bert Brecht...
...summer night in 1928, first nighters crowded into a Berlin theater to see Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), composed by a young highbrow named Kurt Weill on a text by a proletarian poet named Bert Brecht. Nobody thought it would last more than a few performances. How could an eight-piece orchestra and a tatterdemalion cast compete with the great music dramas of Wagner and the moderns? But two years later, Threepenny Opera was still running, and since then it has had thousands of performances, including a handful in the U.S. Last week it was revived in Manhattan...
...most important offerings are verso plays: one a translation by Gerhard Nellhaus of Bertolt Brecht's "The Lesson," the other an original one-acter, "Three Words in No Time," by Lyon Phelps. "The Lesson," which is the better of the two, I think, defies analysis. It has almost no action, its characters have no individuality (they are called "The Speaker," "A One" and such), it has a chorus and a musical background, the audience is expected to join in and repeat certain lines. The ostensible topic of discussion is a crashed airman who is on the verge of death...
...thought that the ideas being expressed have a definite relationship with the character who is expressing them, and that he is expressing them primarily because they mean something to him and only secondarily because they may have general significance. Precisely the opposite is the case with the Brecht play: the characters do not speak as individuals at all; they merely express general ideas...
...Fischer's real name was Elfriede Eisler, the first of three astonishing Eislers. The other two were Gerhart, a Comintern agent, and Hanns,* a Communist composer. At the end of her book she brings the Eislers together again by quoting a play by a German Communist poet, Bertolt Brecht...