Word: brecht
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...commercial crap around here," said Stan Edelson, director of the Caravan Theatre. We sat across from each other in his basement office before Friday night's performance of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle as he talked about the formation of his semi-repertoire group. "We're interested in finding and performing the things that reach people," he told me in an almost inaudibly quiet voice. "It can be fucking or fighting or loving or hating: in that senses we're a political theatre...
...interested in radical theatre, whether in form or content," Edelson had told me. His direction and the spontaneous creativity of his cast achieved the former, and the substance of Brecht's play guaranteed the latter. The story uses two major vignettes, tied together by a denouement that verges on theatre of the absurd, to depict the tortuous battles of a peasantry ravaged by imperial oppression and revolution...
...second act is less powerful, largely because the portrait of peasant life becomes redundant. The clerk Azdak, Brecht's anti-hero- who survives on wit, predatory cunning, and cowardice when the occasion demands- becomes supreme judge of the land during the period of revolutionary chaos. He gleefully accepts bribes and doles out a whimsical brand of justice that defies anyone's analysis ("Because he mixes everything up and because the rich never offer him big enough bribes, the likes of us get off lightly sometimes."). His "Golden Age was almost just," because the law of averages prevents his judgments from...
This sense of bestiality accommodated one of the play's major themes very well. Brecht offers a contrast between the best and the worst in all of our natures. The predatory hideousness of the peasants, which upsets our romantic images of the harmony of rustic life, stands counterpoised to Grusha's courage and her magnificent love with Simon. Edelson emphasizes this dichotomy in his direction to a point that stretches credibility. The simplistic harshness of the contrast may be the production's only significant flaw...
...Caravan Theatre-Bertolt Brecht's Chalk Circle. 1555 Mass...