Word: brecht
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...Mary's retinue assembles, the pace quickens, and the play resembles a Marx brothers script co-authored by Genet and Brecht. As ladies in waiting attend the Queen, they are addressed from the rear by fornicating lackey-lovers. When Mary calls for her dogs, a bevy of stuffed canines are propped up before her. She chooses to disremember that she once had a hound killed for losing the scent in a foxhunt. Like unskilled pickpockets, her attendants try to plunder her last remaining jewelry. A marvelously comic doctor-apothecary team (John Bottom and Ron Faber) get the Queen deliriously...
Inverting the scheme of the traditional morality play, Brecht has his characters--a pair of sisters trying to earn money for their family home--avoid the traditional deadly sins so they can practice far worse ones more efficiently. One sister (both are named Anna) serves as guardian spirit to her suffering sibling: as they travel from city to city, climbing a ladder of fortune, the worldly temptations of Anna 2 are warded off one by her moralizing sister...
...production also succeeds in recreating the detail of Brecht's fanciful vision of America as a Babylon on wheels. Sordid vulgarity falls from the garish costumes, the trashy props, and the giant neon arch--inscribed with the names of the seven sins lighting up in succession like a stage-wide slot machine that lands on whichever sins is being acted out below. In this world, beauty becomes a painted go-go dancer, so it's no wonder lust, pride and anger should seem more virtuous than the alternatives of self-denial, hypocrisy and quiescence...
...morality play and spectacle both, the A.R.T. production well serves this idiosyncratic work; it fails only on a final count. Brecht's aesthetic of the theater allowed for no catharsis; his works end by posing the question of the world to the audience and waiting for the answer. The fault does not seem to lie with anyone in particular--Epstein, the performers, or Gary Fagin's energetic conducting but somewhere towards the end of this Seven Deadly Sins an alchemical transformation fails to take place: the dilemmas facing the characters fail to become the dilemmas facing the audience. It understands...
...worthwhile experiment; but on a double bill it undercuts its competition, turning its audience from theater-goers into listeners. Between the stern, subterranean gloom of the Requiem and the moral topology of The Seven Deadly Sins, the evening of theater becomes oppressive--more oppressive than necessary, even to portray Brecht's oppression-filled world...