Word: brecht
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Disneyland represents a total defeat of the anxiety that is Los Angles. It is a repository of American myths in their well-scrubbed korm, spotless and inert. It is also California's version of Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny, the City of Nets. In this city, anyone can do anything he likes, all sensual pleasures are available, and there is no crime, except for one: the inability to pay, which is a capital offense. And Disneyland is also a global village: one entire world, with scaled-down continents (Disneyland, like the outside world has seven major bodies of water), all psychological...
...Screens, however, lacks the caste v. outcast tensions of The Blacks and the musky eroticism of The Balcony. In a Genetic mutation of Bertolt Brecht, the playwright doubly fails. He tries to apply the epical veneer of The Caucasian Chalk Circle to the theme of little people whipped about in a historical convulsion, in this case France's punitive struggle with Algeria. Brecht succeeded because he had a certain sympathy for the last-ditch valor of his little people even when he portrayed them as cagey sneaks. Genet fails because he regards all people as maggots...
...Black Terror, "a revolutionary adventure story" by Black Playwright Richard Wesley, and Sticks and Bones, by David Rabe, about the family life of a blind Viet Nam veteran. In previews is a musical version of the Greek tragedy Iphigenia. And the workshop is preparing a production of Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities...
...both outlook and musical style, 200 Motels is an updating of the 1931 Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Instead of Brecht's thieves and prostitutes, however, Zappa gives us rednecks, rock stars, and groupies who populate a movie set that at times is supposed to pass for a small American town. ("Centerville--A Real Nice Place to Raise Your Kids Up.") The rock stars are, of course, the Mothers of Invention, all of whom portray themselves, except for Zappa, who rarely appears in the film, but is sometimes represented...
...Clowns" is the first act of the Polinskys' entertainment and, since it's written by Bertolt Brecht, it's also their one fling with a sure thing. Except that "Clowns" as adapted and performed by Theater Two is very minor Brecht indeed. Little more than a commercial of a parable in which it is demonstrated that even when acting under the banner of mutual aid men may actually be out to destroy each other. Case in point, a wooden dummy which the two clowns of the title systematically set about to dismantle. Since it's all over before...