NOT SO EPIC BRECHT
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That sound you hear is Bertolt Brecht scrambling frantically around in his coffin. Not necessarily to defend himself from playwright Brian Edwards’s depiction of him as a ranting shit unrelieved by human virtue–by all accounts Brecht was and didn’t care who knew it. No, it’s this Off the Street Theatre production that Brecht would be more apt to despise. Given the sloppy acting, appalling inattention to detail, and clumsy staging by director Paul Wolf, it is difficult to discern whether Edwards’s play has anything interesting to say about Brecht. The production does little to either instruct or entertain–two principles Brecht himself insisted on.
The play dramatizes the didactic playwright’s lifelong infidelity, impatience, and arrogance, from his early days in Berlin to his exile in Finland, and thence to the United States, where Hollywood, Broadway, and eventually the House Un-American Activities Committee awaited him. To present Brecht’s life as though he were in one of his own plays, juxtaposing his high moral tone with his low-down actions, is an interesting idea. Many of Brecht’s most memorable characters (Mother Courage, Arturo Ui) were presented in much the same unsympathetic manner. But Brecht always gave clear social or economic reasons for their villainy. In Edwards’s play the rise of Nazi Germany and Brecht’s eventual exile don’t so much cause his bad behavior as interrupt it.
