Word: brecht
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...chorus-jury files in, and the four figures turn into leaders explaining their reasons for the execution of a certain "Young Comrade." A series of scenes portrays Young Comrade's repeated betrayals of the group. Brecht never takes long to come to the point, and soon the moral is clear: pity for the oppressed is not always in order, revolutionary action is not always in order, doing what is human is not always in order. What is necessary for the Revolution is distance: heroes cannot make the Revolution; only the party can, through the objective truth of its ideology...
...sheer dramatics as well as theatrics, Brecht is the great modern master of distancing, the inventor of the so-called "alienation effect," which seeks to keep the auditor from mere emotional involvement, which rationalizes the theater in order to teach rational lessons. He sets his plays in a real but simpler world. The setting here is Mukden, the revolutionary leaders come from Moscow; yet the focus is not on these real-world places but on the wider-reaching lessons involved...
...Mather House is an altogether headier brew. Instead of light Parisienne melodies Brel's tones are cloudy and foreboding--substantial with the threat of storm. The music has a vaguely northern flavor, almost Germanic as if it had some spiritual connection with the songs Kurt Weill wrote for Brecht. But there is also a carnival air, with melodies spinning faster and faster up and then down...
...MEASURES TAKEN by Bertoldt Brecht: Harvard Dramatic Club and Hum96v (Winthrop House), director Martin Andrucki, Loeb Experimental May 7-9 7:30 FREE...
Disproving the false barrier between academia and the arts, Winthrop House will be doing Brecht's "The Measures Taken," a production that originated in Martin Andrucki's Humanities 96v seminar on politics and theatre. Heading in an opposite direction from Brecht's political consciousness. Eliot House will be presenting Jean-Louis Barrault's "Rabelais," a modern adaptation of Rabelais's "Gargantua" and termed by one of the production staff "a dramatic obscenity, or to be more subtle about it, a dramatic game in two parts." Dunster House, too, may well create a stir with its production of the success...