Hey there, I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we are hanging with
playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht.
As theatrical modernists go, Brecht is the lace to Artaud’s leather.
Or is it the other way around?
His plays are hugely literary and staunchly political—surprise surprise!—but they’re
also designed to wake up the audience, providing a more intense and essential vision of reality.
Feeling alienated yet?
Lights up!
INTRO Bertolt was born in Augsburg, Germany, in
1898.
He studied medicine, but he also took classes in theater.
And in 1924... he apprenticed himself to the director Max
Reinhardt.
His early works were episodic plays about macho heroes and fragmenting societies in
the expressionist style of Ernst Toller or Georg Kaiser.
In the late 1920s, he began to work with the theater director Erwin Piscator, who we briefly
discussed in our episode on expressionism.
One of the first multimedia directors, Piscator created a theater that was overtly political.
He thought that theater could be a means of educating the audience.
And boy, did he love scaffolding.
Brecht combined Piscator’s technique with elements borrowed from cabaret, silent film,
and Shakespeare’s history plays to create his own unique style.
In 1928, he had maybe his greatest success with “The Threepenny Opera,” a tale of
the criminal underclass, co-written with the composer Kurt Weill.
This became the runaway hit of Weimar Germany.
Brecht, however, sensed that his politics weren’t a great fit for Nazi Germany.
He left in 1933, first for Denmark, then Sweden and Finland, and then the United States.
In exile, he wrote several of his major plays, “Mother Courage and Her Children,” “The
Life of Galileo Galilei,” and “The Good Person of Setzuan,” and he formally articulated
his theories.
In 1947, he was summoned before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
He agreed to testify.
But, while he didn’t name names, he also didn’t win any popularity contests with
Hollywood.
So he left the U.S., ultimately resettling in East Germany.
Back in Germany, he and his wife, Helene Weigel, created the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company
that would perform his texts and put his theories into practice.
Brecht died in 1956.
Brecht is credited with developing the idea of “epic theater,” although Piscator used
that term first.
Epic theater is supposed to be the opposite of dramatic theater and also the opposite
of Aristotelian theater.
It’s largely achieved using the Verfremdungseffekt or the V-effekt.
That’s often translated as the “alienation effect,” or the “distancing effect”;
a better translation is “the estrangement effect.”
Why would you want to estrange or alienate an audience?
Like a lot of dudes in the non-realist camp, Brecht worried that conventional plays were
too easy to sit through.
You see a psychologically realistic show, you have all the feels, and then you leave
the theater mostly worrying about whether the currywurst stand was still open.
Currywurst is delicious!
But using theater as mere escape is no way to topple exploitative capitalism!
Instead, Brecht tried to create plays that would force an audience to think critical
and uncomfortable thoughts about money, power, and ethics.
“Art,” he wrote, “is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with
which to shape it.”
Yes, this is about waking up an audience.
Just like Artaud!
But it’s not about working on an audience’s unconscious and waking them up to myth and
magic and violence and ritual.
Epic theater is about working on their waking brains and waking them up to the political
realities just beyond the door of the playhouse.
The appeal is intellectual, not emotional.
There’s no crying in Dialectical Materialism.
Brecht believed that an estranged audience would be forced to engage with a play’s
content actively and intellectually.
Here’s how Brecht put it: “The dramatic theatre’s spectator says:
Yes, I have felt like that too—Just like me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change
… I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.
The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it—That's not the way—That’s
extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop … I laugh when they weep, I
weep when they laugh.”
How do you do this?
Well, you know how, in most productions, lights, sounds, sets, costumes, and songs all work
together to produce one coherent vision?
Brecht was all, how bout not?
He wanted a theater in which the various elements wouldn’t integrate but actually sort of
cage fight each other, continuously ejecting the audience from the theatrical illusion.
DISBELIEF WILL NOT BE SUSPENDED.
A good example is in “The Threepenny Opera,” when the sweet and virginal Polly Peachum
steps out to sing the violent revenge ballad “Pirate Jenny.”
The audience is supposed to be like, whaaa!?
Why would she sing that!?
But often the audience is like, hey!
This is a Fun song!
Because mimesis is powerful.
And estrangement is hard.
Brecht also encouraged a style of acting in which actors don’t fully embody characters,
but just sort of gesture at them, often with an actual repeated, symbolic gesture that
Brecht called the “gestus.”
Brecht also provided dialogue in which actors speak about their characters in the third
person.
He described this model in his essay “The Street Scene.”
In the essay, he imagined an eyewitness demonstrating a traffic accident to some bystanders.
The witness doesn’t try to fully become the driver or the victim.
Instead, he gestures at those roles, allowing the bystanders to make up their minds.
“The actor is not Lear,” Brecht wrote.
“He shows Lear.”
Brecht also cut off interest in story or suspense by describing what would happen at the beginning
of a scene or actually writing it out on a half-curtain.
Because full curtains are too disbelief suspending.
There’s often a narrator and a use of signs and placards.
He wanted each scene to exist independently and for the audience to have to work out how
to put them all together.
He was also big on speaking stage directions out loud.
Brecht wrote that he wanted theater to feel like a boxing match.
No one attending a boxing match thinks that these guys pummeling each other are doing
it because they’re super mad at each other.
The audience understands that the construct is artificial.
That said, maybe Brecht didn’t choose the best metaphor, because in boxing the punches
are real.
And if you’ve been to a match, you’ll know that the ringside audience is not especially
… distanced.
But here’s a funny thing about Brecht’s plays: yes, they’re episodic and brainy,
and they keep reminding you that YOU ARE DEFINITELY WATCHING A PLAY.
But even when they’re directed in a V-effect style, you usually end up pretty engaged with
the characters and the story, and not necessarily with the dialectics.
Curse you, entertainment!
“The Threepenny Opera” was such a runaway success not because people were so on fire
for Brecht rendering London’s criminal underworld as an allegory for exploitative labor practices
in a play-staged-as-such.
It was probably because Kurt Weill wrote some fire tracks.
I mean “Mack the Knife.”
Come on!
And all that stuff about girls, crimes, and general skulduggery was pretty fun.
UH HUH SURE A SKULL JOKE Brecht wrote in a bunch of styles—comedies,
dramas, biographies, history plays, musicals, and folk dramas.
His plays cover a huge temporal and geographical range, too—part of the whole estrangement
thing.
They’re smart and playful.
They often have really good roles for women, which isn’t always a given.
And the balance of political dynamics with narrative pull is usually fascinating.
But there’s one more thing to know about Brecht.
His own labor practices were maybe exploitative, too.
He had a whole bunch of co-writers, usually women he was involved with, and he almost
never gave them credit for their significant contributions…
Like mostly writing some of the plays!
I guess maybe that partly explains his well written female roles?
Let’s look at “The Good Person of Setzuan,” first performed in 1943 with songs by Paul
Dessau added later.
It’s the heartwarming fable of a kindly prostitute who learns to protect herself from
exploitation by dressing and acting like a really, really mean dude.
It’s full of sweet, sweet Brechtian devices like talking directly to the audience and
explaining the action before it happens.
Help us out, ThoughtBubble: A bunch of gods drop in on Setzuan, looking
for a really good person.
They have trouble finding one until they come to the door of the prostitute Shen Teh, who
takes them in even though she’s penniless.
The gods reward Shen Teh with money and tell her to continue to be good.
She takes the money, buys a tobacco shop, and tries to be good, but her generosity just
makes her a target.
She falls for a pilot, Yang Sun, but he steals her money and leaves her pregnant.
Then Shen Teh has a bright idea.
She invents a cousin named Shui Ta, dresses up as him, and orders all of the freeloaders
to leave the shop.
Turns out, Shui Ta is really good at business, so good that he turns Shen Teh’s tobacco
shop into a full-on tobacco factory.
But this subterfuge is hard on Shen Teh.
People hear her crying behind a door when only Shiu Ta is supposed to be around, and
they find some of her clothing.
So they try Shui Ta for murder.
Shui Ta convinces the judge to close the courtroom and reveals all.
The gods are present, but they leave Shen Teh, who cries out that it’s impossible
to be good AND survive in the real world.
In an epilogue, the responsibility is foisted onto the audience:
“You should now consider as you go What sort of measures you would recommend
To help good people to a happy end.
Ladies and gentlemen, in you we trust: There must be happy endings, must, must, must!”
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
Was that happy?
In having the same actor play both Shen Teh and Shui Ta, Brecht distances us from strictly
identifying with the character, and the story creates a dialectical conflict between right
moral action and social survival.
The gods can’t resolve that - can you?
Be the change Shen Teh needs to see in the world.
Maybe Brecht never really achieved his goal of turning the theater from a place of entertainment
to a place of education.
His plays are too entertaining!
But his style became a huge influence on modern and postmodern theater, television, and film.
Or is that just what Mike Rugnetta would say?
We’ll see you next time, when things are going to get absurd.
[[[Yorick flies in, and they have a moment in which everyone acknowledges that our sidekick
is a non-verbal skull.]]]
More absurd.
We’ll be exploring the Theater of the Absurd with Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Samuel
Beckett—the whole madcap and deeply-pessimistic-about-the-human-condition gang.
Until then… curtain.
Which is a device the theater uses to obfuscate the machinery of stage craft, and maintain
the illusion of the stage as a location subject to different rules than the so called “real
world”, a division that is ultimately [[the curtain actually closes]] HEY HEY C’MON