“I do not allow my feelings to flow into the theatrical embodiment,” Bertolt Brecht told an interviewer in 1926, around the time the rising German sensation had begun work on the play Fatzer: Demise of the Egotist. “This would falsify the world. I do not write for the scum who value having their heartstrings plucked.”
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Brecht, of course, was passionate about ideas. Though German theater of the day was choking under a thick fog of expressionist excess, his theater was a place to think, not swoon. “Today the meaning of a play is usually blurred precisely by the fact that the actor plays his way into the heart of the spectator,” he avowed, and he may as well have been talking about contemporary Chicago theater. “The figures presented ingratiate themselves to the audience and thus are falsified.”
In Fatzer, which Brecht never finished, he turned to a favored theme: the monstrous exploitation of war by industrial capitalists, who line their pockets while soldiers die and the proletariat scrounges for the occasional turnip. In this world, AWOL soldier Fatzer leads three comrades on a whirlwind of greed, debauchery, and betrayal. While society has discovered a “newfound pleasure of marching in step,” Fatzer’s boys learn to mimic his relentless selfishness until even they see what a monster he’s become.
Prop Theatre, at the National Pastime Theater
