Category Archives: Bertolt Brecht

Next season at the Public Theater

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The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

Ah, youth. In 1978, at the green age of 16, I first visited the Public Theater on Lafayette Street on a short weekend trip from my home of Hazleton, PA, for a day of theatregoing that could easily bruise the sensibilities of a callow youth. In the afternoon, I enjoyed Robert Woodruff’s staging of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class; after a dinner break, I returned for Thomas Babe’s A Prayer for My Daughter (a play ripe for revival here in New York; it had a London revival in 2008).

Those were the glory years for Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival; A Chorus Line was providing a fresh infusion of cash into the Public’s coffers, and it was a rare night on which any of the Public’s (five stages? six?) performance spaces were dark. I returned several times over the next twenty years or so, but I never found the same electricity as I did that March day in 1978. Papp died in 1991, and by then the Chorus Line cash cow wasn’t delivering quite as much milk. During the tenures of JoAnne Akalaitis and George C. Wolfe as subsequent artistic directors, the Public fell into something of an aesthetic and business funk — then, indeed, there were many days and weeks during which all of the Public’s stages were dark.

As a tyro playwright, even in those days, I duly submitted my plays — dreadful imitations of Brecht and Pinter — to the Public’s literary office, which still accepted over-the-transom manuscripts, and after no more than a month always received rejection letters (though sometimes with an encouraging handwritten note asking to see my next play, a sheer godsend for a teenager smitten with the theatre). The Public liked playwrights back then. Legend has it that when Joseph Papp discovered that Wallace Shawn had to work in a copy shop just to make ends meet, he offered Shawn the same amount of salary just to permit Shawn to spend his days writing plays instead. These days, this would constitute a revolutionary commitment to the “emerging playwright”; in those days, it was just good sense and a favor from an artistic director to an artist. (And it paid off, as you’ll see below; on one of my subsequent visits to the Public, I saw Shawn perform The Fever.)

Over the past few years, the Public, under Oskar Eustis‘ artistic direction, has been generating a little more of that electricity — and yesterday’s announcement of the Public’s 2013-2014 season exemplifies the energy. The Public will be co-producing the US premiere of Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors in the fall (and a revival of his best play to date, The Designated Mourner, this summer); also this fall, the Public is bringing in the Foundry Theatre’s new production of Good Person of Szechwan, directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Taylor Mac, which first opened at La MaMa earlier this year. There’s also Arguendo, a new performance from Elevator Repair Service; four “Apple family” plays by Richard Nelson in rotating repertory; new plays from Suzan-Lori Parks and the Civilians; a new production of Antony and Cleopatra; and 29(!) monologues from Mike Daisey.

It is, even by the standards of the grotesque hype and Facebook blubbering that accompanies these season announcements, a tempting menu, even for a confirmed skeptic like myself — and maybe one that will bring Ron Rosenbaum down to Lafayette Street again. More information here.

Other places: Beckett’s TV work, a “new” Churchill play, Brecht’s Galileo in Stratford-upon-Avon

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Jack McGowran in a BBC production of Samuel Beckett's Eh Joe.

Jack McGowran in a BBC production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe.

From Rhys Tranter of A Piece of Monologue comes a pointer to this essay by Jonathan Bignell about Samuel Beckett‘s television plays. As might be expected, Bignell writes, these were not exactly ratings blockbusters:

The BBC Audience Research Report on Eh Joe shows that 3% of the viewers in the BBC’s audience sample watched the play, and the Reaction Index for the programme (a measure of appreciation) was the low figure of 49. Several viewers liked the use of monologue over silent images, and one viewer wrote “obviously television could be the medium for this sort of thing, and it is a good experiment.”  But many viewers thought the play was very depressing.  A third of the sample said it was dull and dreary, with no visual appeal. …

In Britain there has always been a tension between television’s Public Service responsibility to raise the cultural standards of audiences, and the requirement to entertain. Broadcasts of Beckett’s television work show that the BBC could ignore negative audience responses and small numbers of viewers and present “the best” of arts culture as defined by BBC personnel and an informed reviewing culture in the press. The casting of high-profile theatre actors in Beckett’s television work, and the images of art-works by Bacon and Giacometti in Shades, for example, link Beckett’s plays to a valued European (and not just British) arts culture.

New Caryl Churchill plays only come every few years, so it’s a bit of a surprise to find yet another Churchill world premiere just after last year’s Love and Information at the Royal Court. Ah — a world premiere, yes, but the world premiere of a play written some forty years ago. Her 1972 The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution begins performances at London’s Finborough Theatre on 31 March. Set in Algeria in 1956, the play is described thusly:

A civil servant presents his psychologically disturbed daughter to the hospital for assessment and insists on her admittance. An inspector demands treatment for his helpless violence against his own wife and child. Three in-patient revolutionaries are delusional and paranoid. These products of a broken society are beginning to show symptoms, how should they be treated? The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution is a forensic insight into the adjustment of morality for the sake of conscience.

Bertolt Brecht is busting out all over. We’ve got the disastrously received Clive (an adaptation of Baal) and the rather more highly-regarded Good Person of Szechwan here in New York; now Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation A Life of Galileo is at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon. (Galileo was born on this day, 15 February, in 1564; don’t forget to send a card.) Michael Billington lauded the show in the Guardian this past Wednesday:

A reactionary pope dies, only to be succeeded by a seeming liberal who soon reverts to institutional conservatism. You could hardly have a more topical play than this. But the real pleasure of Roxana Silbert’s modern-dress RSC revival and Mark Ravenhill’s slimmed-down translation lies in the absolute clarity with which they put Brecht’s masterpiece before us. …  [The] real joy lies in seeing Brecht’s timeless debate about scientific morality rendered with such pellucid swiftness.

Brecht appears to be back, even if he never really left us. And thanks to Mr. Billington or whoever decides these things for the link to my own essay on Life of Galileo from his review.

Below, the trailer for the current RSC production of Life of Galileo for your viewing pleasure:

Review: Good Person of Szechwan

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Taylor Mac as Shen Tei in the Foundry Theatre's Good Person of Szechwan. Photo: Pavel Antonov.

Taylor Mac as Shen Tei in the Foundry Theatre’s Good Person of Szechwan. Photo: Pavel Antonov.

Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht; translation by John Willett. Directed by Lear deBessonet; dramaturgy by Anne Erbe; choreography by Danny Mefford; lighting by Tyler Micoleau; costumes by Clint Ramos; sound by Brandon Wolcott. Music by César Alvarez w. The Lisps. With Vinie Burrows, Kate Benson, Ephraim Birney, Clifton Duncan, Annie Golden, Jack Allen Greenfield, Brooke Ishibashi, Paul Juhn, Mia Katigbak, Lisa Kron, Taylor Mac, David Turner, and Darryl Winslow. A production of the Foundry Theatre. At La MaMa ETC, Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, 1 February-24 February 2013. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, one 10-minute intermission. Tickets here. Reviewed at the 5 February performance. More about the play here.

“Charming” isn’t a word usually applied to Bertolt Brecht’s plays; that grating sound you hear is the dramatist’s body rotating in his Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery grave. When I apply the word to the Foundry Theatre‘s new production of Good Person of Szechwan, though, I mean it in the most positive sense. Lear deBessonet’s staging, like her Saint Joan of the Stockyards in 2007, engages the audience without ever encouraging that audience to lose itself in empathy with the characters of the play (which would have sent Brecht’s corpse spinning even more wildly) — it retains its power to provoke critical thought about culture and society, the mission of the production company itself. Yes, it is charming — it is also thought-provoking, wildly entertaining and fun.

Let us take the plot and history of the play as read. The character of Shen Tei requires a performer of unique talents and charisma, and in Taylor Mac it finally has one. A long-time denizen of downtown theatre, Taylor Mac appears here in a rare foray into traditional theatre form (and, a hundred years on, Brechtian practice has become a tradition of sorts), and indeed he does play against the sentimentality that might be associated with the character. He is a striking figure — a whitened bald head, his camisole making no pretense at hiding his body hair as he performs and demonstrates the persona of Shen Tei — yet the expression of goodness and desire is all in the voice, the gesture. It does take him a while to fully invest in the character and the play — it isn’t until the “Song of Defencelessness of the Good and the Gods” about midway into the first act that he finally hits his most impressive stride — but until then the plot and explication are ably carried by the kabuki-via-Lower-East-Side charms of David Turner’s waterseller, Wang, who helps the three gods (Vinie Burrows, Annie Golden, Mia Katigbak) on their quest to find a single “good” individual. Other standout members of the uniformly excellent ensemble include Lisa Kron as Mrs. Mi Tzu and Mrs. Yang (though she does risk dipping into stereotype now and again more than the other performers, one doesn’t go to Brecht looking for psychological realism — at least, I don’t); Kate Benson as Shen Tei’s confidant Mrs. Shin, channelling a cynical Thelma-Ritter-style knowingness; and Clifton Duncan as Shen Tei’s arrogant and scheming beau, Yang Sun.

Accompanying the whole is a disarmingly complex neo-rustic score from César Alvarez w. The Lisps, with Sammy Tunis as the standout vocalist here; Matt Saunders’ set, a series of brown platforms that rises to the rear of the stage, becomes more and more elemental as the evening progresses, from a childlike assemblage of Szechwan shanties in the first act to a sparer look for the bleaker second act (including a surprisingly effective but minimal evocation of Shui Ta’s sweatshop).

A word or two more should be said about Taylor Mac’s performance, especially since it addresses what John Willett and Ralph Manheim wrote about the pitfalls of staging the play: “What seems rather surprising, in view of the high risk of having Shen Teh interpreted as a sweet-natured oriental waif, is that Brecht’s experience of Chinese acting, which so influenced him in other respects, never led him to propose giving the dual role to a man. This would instantly correct any undue softness that may stem from the sexually loaded ‘good woman’ image; moreover it seems to make it easier to see elements of Shui Ta in Shen Teh and vice versa, as the parable surely demands; nor is there anything in the text to rule it out.” Lear deBessonet’s mosaic of acting and production styles here includes both kabuki and queer theatre. Talk of “queering Brecht” is in the end probably just as academic as talk of “straightening Kushner,” but it does have the effect of injecting into this late mid-period work the irrational sensual and sexual drives of Brecht’s Weimar-period plays like Drums in the Night and In the Jungle of Cities. Indeed, as the play goes on, Shen Tei becomes more and more trapped in the body, gender identity, and persona of her bitter businessman cousin, Shui Ta, indicating how trapped in falsehood we may all become as we make our way through a culture which does not reward goodness. Taylor Mac, it must be said, captures this sense of entrapment brilliantly.

Good Person of Szechwan remains, I’m afraid, one of Brecht’s minor plays in my  estimation, but like the less successful plays of Shakespeare, his failures are often more interesting than the successes of lesser talents. Lear deBessonet, who is one of America’s leading interpreters of Brecht these days, makes Good Person of Szechwan most interesting, delightful, and charming indeed. This is a rare Brecht for all ages, too — and a special nod to second-grader Jack Allen Greenfield, a most impressive ensemble member here, for whom I predict a stellar future. It only runs for a few more weeks. You should help them sell it out by purchasing your tickets here.

Reading Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan

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From the 1943 premiere of The Good Person of Szechwan, Zurich Schauspielhaus (Scene 8).

From the 1943 premiere of The Good Person of Szechwan, Zurich Schauspielhaus (Scene 8).

The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht. Written 1938-41; premiered at the Zürich Schauspielhaus on 4 February 1943. Text: In Collected Plays: Six: London: Methuen, 1994. A new production of Good Person of Szechwan opens on 1 February 2013 at La MaMa ETC.

Bertolt Brecht was never a doctrinaire Marxist — his poetic vision was too complex to fit easily into any ideological dogma. Even his most didactic play, The Measures Taken, was met with confusion and despair from Communist groups in Germany. His harsh assessment of the revolutionary project — that the expression of compassion for the downtrodden masses was a hindrance, rather than a help, in the establishment of a socialist utopia — did not go down well with revolutionary groups; later, Brecht was reluctant to permit productions of the play.

The same general theme informs The Good Person of Szechwan, written in the early 1940s while Brecht was sojourning in Finland, but composed with an eye to Broadway, which Brecht hoped to conquer upon his upcoming emigration there. It was also a play which gave the dramatist a great deal of difficulty. Three gods come to earth in search of a “good person” to justify the continuing existence of the world; they find one in Shen Teh, a prostitute, who turns away a client to give them a place to rest for one night. Upon their departure, they expansively pay for their lodgings; with this money, Shen Teh purchases a tobacco shop and hopes to use it as a basis for her continued good works. Unfortunately she finds herself at the mercy of the demands of the angry poor, which she can’t possibly satisfy. Instead, she creates a persona, her male cousin Shui Ta, whose ruthless management of her business at least permits her to survive. At the end of the play, the gods descend one last time and Shen Teh’s ruse is discovered, but the gods can offer no hope for a change in the situation, providing only empty encouragement before they disappear again.

The play as we have it in its final form is a confused mess, over-complicated and over-plotted. “Despite its obvious attractions The Good Person of Szechwan is made up of too many conflicting layers simply to convey the thin steely strength or the clarity and ease for which Brecht variously aimed,” write editors John Willett and Ralph Manheim (xi); Brecht had hoped to attract a star like Jessica Tandy to appear in the Broadway premiere, but a variety of these plans came to nought, and the play first premiered at Zürich’s Schauspielhaus in 1943 (the same theatre had premiered Mother Courage in 1941).

Kathe Reichel as Shen Te and Shui Ta in Benno Besson's production, Rostock, 1956.

Kathe Reichel as Shen Te and Shui Ta in Benno Besson’s production, Rostock, 1956.

All that said, as Willett and Manheim assert, the play does have obvious attractions. It contains one of Brecht’s most tender love scenes, and Shen Teh is given a remarkable monologue in which she imagines introducing her unborn child to the blessings and evils of the world; this may reflect the influence of Brecht’s two credited collaborators on the play, Ruth Berlau and Marguerite Steffin. Its “parable” structure also hints at the later Caucasian Chalk Circle, a far more successful play, similarly set in a stylized Asia but more lyrical and confident.

Brecht was aware of the failures of The Good Person of Szechwan, and his notes indicate that he knew that severe cutting and pruning were necessary to any successful production of the play. And, as with Mother Courage, he saw that it had to be made harder, more unsentimental. Brecht toyed with the idea of making Shen Teh’s tobacco shop a cover for an opium factory, undermining any pity the audience may have for her situation. And there was the figure of Shen Teh herself. “The difficulty is that despite Brecht’s warnings against a fancy-dress orientalising approach there is some danger of sentimentality and prettification in the play as he left it to us,” Willett and Manheim write. “What seems rather surprising, in view of the high risk of having Shen Teh interpreted as a sweet-natured oriental waif, is that Brecht’s experience of Chinese acting, which so influenced him in other respects, never led him to propose giving the dual role to a man. This would instantly correct any undue softness that may stem from the sexually loaded ‘good woman’ image; moreover it seems to make it easier to see elements of Shui Ta in Shen Teh and vice versa, as the parable surely demands; nor is there anything in the text to rule it out.” (xi-xiii) Whether the editors’ suggestion will succeed in making the play more vital will be discovered soon; the Foundry Theatre’s upcoming production of the play will feature Taylor Mac in the dual role, and director Lear deBessonet has put together a script based on a variety of drafts. We’ll find out then.

Upcoming: The Foundry Theatre’s Good Person of Szechwan

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Taylor Mac in La MaMa's upcoming Good Person of Szechwan.

Taylor Mac in La MaMa’s upcoming Good Person of Szechwan. Photo: Matthew Snead.

In a particularly silly essay for the Wall Street Journal last week, critic Joseph Epstein wrote, “[Lyricist Yip] Harburg believed it was the political dimension ‘that Bernard Shaw added to all of his plays that makes him alive forever.’ Truth is, Shaw isn’t any longer much alive, nor are most of his plays. A more recent, even more political playwright, Bertolt Brecht, is even deader. Tony Kushner’s plays will soon end up, two tombstones to the left, in the same graveyard. Art anchored in politics is almost always art condemned to early demise.” (Epstein also wrote in the same essay, “I walk the streets with dozens of song lyrics in my head and, with the exception of the verse of Philip Larkin, not a single line from a poem written after 1960. Which makes one wonder, in the realm of creative fantasy, if it would have been better to write ‘Over the Rainbow’ than ‘The Waste Land’ or ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’ than ‘Sunday Morning.’” Well, shantih to you too, Prof. Epstein.)

Actually, the plays of Bernard Shaw and Tony Kushner are produced with far more frequency than any of Harburg’s musicals, which include Finian’s Rainbow and of course the legendary, masterful Bloomer Girl, so I wouldn’t assign Epstein to any obituary desk anytime soon. Brecht’s plays continue to appeal, too. In fact, coming up soon at La MaMa ETC is a new staging of the German dramatist’s Good Person of Szechwan, a production from the Foundry Theatre directed by Lear deBessonet and starring the downtown genderbender Taylor Mac in the dual roles of Shen Tei/Sui Ta. The production features live music from “indie rock vaudevillians” César Alvarez w. the Lisps. The show’s Web page at La MaMa describes the play thusly:

Can we practice goodness and create a world to sustain it?  In Brecht’s comic and complex play, this question is raised by one of his most entertaining characters — Shen Tei the good-hearted, penniless, cross-dressing prostitute, who is forced to disguise herself as a savvy businessman named Sui Ta so she can master the ruthlessness needed to be a “good person” in a brutal world.

Good Person of Szechwan opens on 1 February and runs through 24 February; tickets are now available here.

Taylor Mac is a particularly inspired choice for the role, and I look forward to seeing how this may “eroticize” Brecht’s play, something I wrote about here. I have high hopes for this production — back in 2007, Ms. deBessonet staged a fine version of Brecht’s difficult and thorny St. Joan of the Stockyards at PS122. In those days, I reviewed such things; my review of that staging is below. (I wouldn’t recommend either show to Joseph Epstein; I’ll let him know, however, when I hear about the next revival of Flahooley.)

St. Joan of the Stockyards by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Ralph Manheim. Directed by Lear deBessonet. Music composed and performed by Kelley McRae & Band. Choreography by Tracy Bersley; set design by Justin Townsend; light design by Peter Ksander; costume design by Clint Ramos; sound design by Mark Huang; dramaturg, Helen Shaw. Produced by Karina Mangu-Ward. Production company: Stillpoint Productions, by special arrangement with Culture Project’s Women Center Stage. With Kristen Sieh, Richard Toth, Kate Benson, Mike Crane, Jessica Green, Jonathan Co Green, Peter McCain and Nate Schenkkan. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes (with one intermission). June 16-July 1, 2007 at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, New York.

Bertolt Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards, written in 1932 as Brecht was in his most intense period of Marxist studies, wasn’t staged until two years after his 1956 death; its only public performance during his lifetime was as a short radio play in April 1932 (featuring Peter Lorre as Slift and Carola Neher as Joan Dark). Inspired, as were so many of his other plays of the period, by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Brecht fashioned the play from the wreckage of the disastrous Threepenny Opera “sequel” Happy End, and it has remained something of an odd-man-out in the canon. It was the first of two major Brecht plays written in a parody of Shakespearean blank verse (The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, his Hitler play, was the second), but the stridency of his politics, married to a materialist vision of tragedy, rendered it problematic in the geopolitics of the time.

And it remains curious. Brecht would flee Germany following the Reichstag fire the next year, with various possibilities for the production coming to naught, and in trying to establish a career outside the German-speaking countries Brecht turned to projects that he believed would be more commercially viable, which St. Joan certainly was not (its large cast and virulent politics rendered it practically unstagable). Lear deBessonet’s production of the play in Ralph Manheim’s translation at P.S. 122 (through this Sunday), I’m happy to say, makes an excellent argument for the centrality and importance of this play in the Brechtian canon, not only as part of the playwright’s more politically-engaged, explicitly Marxist plays, but also in the development of Brecht’s career itself. DeBessonet, in hewing close to the text which is here produced nearly uncut, demonstrates Brecht’s Shakespearean range in a pared-down urban lyricism more closely resembling his poetry than any of his other plays.

In determining a Marxist approach to the form of Shakespearean tragedy, Brecht made a variety of clever, witty substitutions. The Shakespearean letter that shapes the lives of its victims no longer arrives via a messenger, but via Federal Express (in this production); instead of the machinations of various members of a family (which in Shakespeare’s time meant machinations among geopolitical powerholders), the dynamics of the play are driven by industrial leaders, workers, unions, social service agencies. Here, Pierpont Mauler is the king — a leading Chicago producer of canned meat who, warned of an impending market collapse by his New York financial backers, makes plans to exit the business. In this he is stopped by the appearance of Joan Dark, a social activist investigating the condition of the working poor in Chicago. The play describes Dark’s growing social consciousness as well as Mauler’s vulnerability to economic forces and his own heart; ultimately, it leads Dark to the Communist Party and Mauler to a consolidation of all the social forces — his competitors, the workers themselves, the unions, social service organizations, the church, the media — that threaten the success of his capitalist profiteering.

Director deBessonet wisely lets the play speak for itself; no updating here, even for a play which must tempt updating, given its 1932 composition and its setting in Chicago in 1900. So far as its picture of post-capitalist society and industry goes, one only has to turn to work by Peter Singer and Eric Schlosser to note that St. Joan‘s concerns remain relevant in the early years of the 21st century. While deBessonet has dumped the Brecht-Weill songs in favor of a country-blues score by Kelley McRae, McRae’s songs have more of a Hank Williams/Jimmie Rodgers edge to them than a Billy Rae Cyrus pathos, and are appropriately reminiscent of 1930s country music. The set itself, of a stripped-down industrial simplicity, runs down the center of the large upstairs theatre space at P.S.122 (fine work here from set designer Justin Townsend and light designer Peter Ksander, who are now indisputably among downtown’s most exciting visual artists in the theatre, along with costume designer Oana Botez-Ban), all steel and metal sliding along hard plastic casters and metal cable strung along the flies, and industrial-strength barrels and grates providing necessary tables, chairs and walls.

As Iago often takes center stage in Othello, the manipulative Pierpont Mauler often takes center stage in St. Joan. Richard Toth plays Mauler as a man torn among various forces, not the least of which is his own heart; while trying desperately to feed the greed which is at the center of his business, he is drawn to compassion for the animals ritually slaughtered upon the floor of his factory, and recognizes in Joan Dark a human connection not unlike that between a father and a daughter (and this is one of the major parallels between this play and Major Barbara). Toth often plays Mauler as lost in a deep contemplation, a morass of doubt; as his sidekick Slift recognizes (here played with an insidious, malignant serpentine grace by Mike Crane), it’s the blood of meat that forms the center of Mauler’s soul. Toth handles this most Brechtian vacillation between sensuality and rationality with aplomb and a haunting deliberation.

As Joan Dark, Kristen Sieh develops a performance that moves from an alternately giddy and lachrymose naivete (her dances, when she scores a small victory for the poor, are buoyantly joyous but so unschooled and graceless as to resemble an epileptic fit at times) to a dark, hard-edged viciousness as she herself experiences first-hand suffering and hunger in the cold of a Chicago winter and, in her dreams (the voices of this particular Joan), begins to recognize the horrifying extent of the corruption that maintains Mauler and his colleagues in permanent power. Sieh herself is slight and waiflike, which testifies to the effectiveness of her transformation into a violent radical by the end of the play; semi-crucified in the play’s final moments, her final words drowned out in a raucous second-rate disco beat (delivered directly to the audience by the ensemble) by the corrupt society that surrounds her, her performance sears into the experience of the evening.

In terms of Brecht’s gestural theatrics, choreographer Tracy Bersley pursues a truly echt-Brecht visualisation of the play’s political components. Like the language itself, movement and gesture in this St. Joan is spiky and deliberate, demonstrative and pedagogical. In the brilliant staging of Joan’s dream that opens the second act of this production, the sleeping Joan is surrounded by the sharp, violent gestures of the workers, whose presence and motions in elevating her awareness of capitalist culture and the suffering of the poor provide the final physical and gestural impetus to Joan’s transformation into a violent revolutionary. Staged in a soft blue light, the ensemble’s sharp gestures play dialectically against the stage illusions of night and snow (which is thrown up into the air by the workers themselves before settling softly on Joan’s body). It is a beautiful and effective example of the possibilities of Brecht’s gestural theatre: eschewing sentimentality, its social relevance is as clear as day.

While religion forms a central theme of the play, Brecht’s target isn’t God Himself but the uses to which society and culture put the idea of a God. Eventually, Mauler buys God when he agrees to subsidize the play’s Salvation Army stand-in, the Black Straw Hats; in aggrandizing spirituality to the benefit of the status quo, he provides the metaphysical umbrella under which a capitalist society can rationalize its corruption. “[Joan Dark] is not speaking about God at all but about talk of a God, or, more precisely, about specific talk in a specific situation, and specific remarks about God,” Brecht wrote in his notes to the published play. “She is in fact speaking about talk to the effect that God need have no function whatever in social matters, and that those who believe in such a God are called on to accomplish nothing in particular. It is enough if they have certain inner sensations. The faith thus recommended is without effect on the world around us, and Joan defines such recommendation as a social crime.”

Stillpoint Productions’ staging of this rare Brecht play (more a discovery than a rediscovery; unless I miss my guess, this is the first professional New York production of St. Joan of the Stockyards) is a fine example of a poetic text shining through performance and production, revealing the text’s enduring power.

***

As I noted above, Joan Dark’s final words are drowned in a pathetic, loud disco beat — an example of Adorno’s Culture Industry smothering deeper recognition of human consciousness. Below is the text of Joan’s speech, from the Manheim translation:

So anyone down here who says there’s a God
And that even if no one can see Him
He can, invisibly, help us all the same
Should have his head bashed against the sidewalk
Until he croaks.
And those preachers who tell the people they can rise in spirit
Even if their bodies are stuck in the mud, they too should have their heads
Bashed against the sidewalk. The truth is that
Where force rules only force can help and
In the human world only humans can help.