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The Good Soul of Szechuan

Image courtesy of Library Theatre of Manchester 2009

By Bertolt Brecht, Translation by David Harrower

Directed By Dyana Kimball

Production Dramaturgy by Sarah Simmons

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The Good Soul of Szechuan Production Team

Producer: Mary Fleischer

Director: Dyana Kimball

Assistant Directors: Nicole Doring, Hunter Johnson, Freddy Mancilla

Composer and Music Director: Bruce Lazarus

Scenic Designer: Ray Recht

Costume Designer: Elise VanderKley

Lighting Designer: Bethany Taylor

Sound Designer: Ido Levran

Technical Director: Rob Dutiel

Voice and Speech Coach: Barbara Adrian

Dramaturg: Sarah Simmons

Production Stage Manager: Maura Holloran

Assistant Stage Managers: Ami Shibasaki

Produced by special arrangement with A & C Black Ltd

November 16, 2011-November 20, 2011

Theresa Lang Theater Marymount Manhattan College

221 E 71st Street New York, NY 10021

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Table of Contents

Dramaturgical Statement ..............................................................................................................1

“Who’s Who of Szechuan ........................................................................................................ 2-10

Bertolt Brecht ................................................................................................................... 3-4

Collaborators .................................................................................................................... 5-9

Ruth Berlau ..............................................................................................................5

Margarete Steffin .....................................................................................................6

Paul Dessau .......................................................................................................... 7-9

Translator ...........................................................................................................................10

David Harrower ........................................................................................................10

“What’s What” of Szechuan ................................................................................................. 11-34

Chinese Influences ....................................................................................................... 12-13

Chinese Theater .................................................................................................................14

Themes ...............................................................................................................................15

Internal References ...................................................................................................... 16-21

Imagery ........................................................................................................................ 22-34

Production History................................................................................................................. 35-52

World Premier Productions................................................................................................36

Other European Productions ..............................................................................................36

Proposed Productions.........................................................................................................37

American Premier ..............................................................................................................38

Premier of David Harrower Translation - London ............................................................38

Recent American Production of David Harrower Translation ..........................................39

Reviews from London and Chicago Productions ............................... 42-52

Context .................................................................................................................................... 53-90

Historical ...................................................................................................................... 54-55

Contemporary ....................................................................................................................56

Pertinent Socio-Economic Ideologies .......................................................................... 57-58

Socialism ................................................................................................................57

Capitalism ..............................................................................................................57

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Communism ...........................................................................................................57

Marxism ........................................................................................................... 57-58

Articles from http://econlib.org ........................................................... 59-85

Theatrical ..................................................................................................................... 86-87

Overview ................................................................................................................87

Romanticism ..............................................................................................87

Realism ......................................................................................................87

Naturalism ..................................................................................................87

Expressionism ........................................................................................................88

Characteristics ............................................................................................89

Forerunners of Expressionism ..................................................................90

Epic Theater ......................................................................................................................... 91-104

Introduction ........................................................................................................................92

Characteristics .............................................................................................................. 93-95

Epic Theater Terminology ................................................................................................96

Brecht‘s Collective ............................................................................................................97

Lehrstücke & Didactic Theater .................................................................................. 98-100 Glossary of Collaborators ....................................................................................... 101-104

Bertolt Brecht: Poet, Playwright, Author, Etc. ............................................................... 104-112

Brecht‘s Heroes ....................................................................................................... 104-105

Making Love, Not War ............................................................................................ 106-107

Dramatic, Literary & Theoretical Works ................................................................. 108-110

Appendix ............................................................................................................................. 112-113

Miscellaneous ................................................................................................................113

Bibliography ...........................................................................................................................114

Sources Cited ...................................................................................................................115

Annotated Bibliography ...................................................................................................116

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Dramaturgical Portfolio Statement

The materials in this portfolio have been prepared as a resource for the director and cast of The

Good Soul of Szechuan at Marymount Manhattan College in preparation for developing a clear

approach to performing the material. They serve the purpose solely of being a supplemental

article in your process of creating a functional, vibrant piece of theater - with the expectation of

supporting rather than dictating the contextual development of this production.

This portfolio contains biographical and topical information pertaining to the playwright‘s life

and body of work, as well as the social and political issues being dealt with at the time the piece

was conceived. With knowledge of the issues for which Bertolt Brecht was invested in while

creating this piece of didactic material, it is my hope that you will find a path to your own

conclusions and desires for resurrecting the play in our post-modern world, in ways that will

resonate with a 21st Century audience, and satisfy your own needs for teaching and exploration

just as Brecht did over sixty years ago.

Furthermore, the presence that Bertolt Brecht had in the theater world in his lifetime is

remarkable - and he is an important figure to study for any student or practitioner of this

medium. Theatrical artists of any kind can garner some shred of insight with even the smallest

amount of study, and you all have the opportunity to experience much more than that with

production of David Harrower‘s translation of The Good Soul of Szechuan.

Sarah Simmons

Production Dramaturg

The Good Soul of Szechuan

Marymount Manhattan College - Fall 2011

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“Who’s Who” Szechuan

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Bertolt Brecht

(born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.—died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin) German poet,

playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of

theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.

Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria, where he was born, studied medicine (Munich, 1917–21),

and served in an army hospital (1918). From this period date his first play, Baal (produced

1923); his first success, Trommeln in der Nacht (Kleist Preis, 1922; Drums in the Night); the

poems and songs collected as Die Hauspostille (1927; A Manual of Piety, 1966), his first

professional production ( Edward II, 1924); and his admiration for Wedekind, Rimbaud, Villon,

and Kipling.

During this period he also developed a violently antibourgeois attitude that reflected his

generation's deep disappointment in the civilization that had come crashing down at the end of

World War I. Among Brecht's friends were members of the Dadaist group, who aimed at

destroying what they condemned as the false standards of bourgeois art through derision and

iconoclastic satire. The man who taught him the elements of Marxism in the late 1920s was Karl

Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician who had been a Communist member of the Reichstag

but had been expelled from the German Communist Party in 1926.

In Berlin (1924–33) he worked briefly for the directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, but

mainly with his own group of associates. With the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical,

successful ballad opera Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) and the

opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny).

He also wrote what he called ― Lehrstücke‖ (―exemplary plays‖)—didactic works for

performance outside the orthodox theatre—to music by Weill, Hindemith, and Hanns Eisler. In

these years he developed his theory of ―epic theatre‖ and an austere form of irregular verse. He

also became a Marxist.

In 1933 he went into exile—in Scandinavia (1933–41), mainly in Denmark, and then in the

United States (1941–47), where he did some film work in Hollywood. In Germany his books

were burned and his citizenship was withdrawn. He was cut off from the German theatre; but

between 1937 and 1941 he wrote most of his great plays, his major theoretical essays and

dialogues, and many of the poems collected as Svendborger Gedichte (1939). The plays of these

years became famous in the author's own and other productions: notable among them are Mutter

Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), a chronicle play of the

Thirty Years' War; Leben des Galilei(1943; The Life of Galileo); Der gute Mensch von

Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a parable play set in prewar China; Der

Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1957; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), a parable play of

Hitler's rise to power set in prewar Chicago; Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948; Herr

Puntila and His Man Matti), a Volksstück (popular play) about a Finnish farmer who oscillates

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between churlish sobriety and drunken good humour; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (first

produced in English, 1948; Der kauka sische Kreidekreis, 1949), the story of a struggle for

possession of a child between its highborn mother, who deserts it, and the servant girl who looks

after it.

Brecht left the United States in 1947 after having had to give evidence before the House Un-

American Activities Committee. He spent a year in Zürich, working mainly on Antigone-Modell

1948 (adapted from Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his most

important theoretical work, the Kleines Organon für das Theater (1949; ―A Little Organum for

the Theatre‖). The essence of his theory of drama, as revealed in this work, is the idea that a truly

Marxist drama must avoid the Aristotelian premise that the audience should be made to believe

that what they are witnessing is happening here and now. For he saw that if the audience really

felt that the emotions of heroes of the past—Oedipus, or Lear, or Hamlet—could equally have

been their own reactions, then the Marxist idea that human nature is not constant but a result of

changing historical conditions would automatically be invalidated. Brecht therefore argued that

the theatre should not seek to make its audience believe in the presence of the characters on the

stage—should not make it identify with them, but should rather follow the method of the epic

poet's art, which is to make the audience realize that what it sees on the stage is merely an

account of past events that it should watch with critical detachment. Hence, the ―epic‖ (narrative,

nondramatic) theatre is based on detachment, on the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect),

achieved through a number of devices that remind the spectator that he is being presented with a

demonstration of human behaviour in scientific spirit rather than with an illusion of reality, in

short, that the theatre is only a theatre and not the world itself.

In 1949 Brecht went to Berlin to help stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (with his wife,

Helene Weigel, in the title part) at Reinhardt's old Deutsches Theater in the Soviet sector. This

led to formation of the Brechts' own company, the Berliner Ensemble, and to permanent return to

Berlin. Henceforward the Ensemble and the staging of his own plays had first claim on Brecht's

time. Often suspect in eastern Europe because of his unorthodox aesthetic theories and

denigrated or boycotted in the West for his Communist opinions, he yet had a great triumph at

the Paris Théâtre des Nations in 1955, and in the same year in Moscow he received a Stalin

Peace Prize. He died of a heart attack in East Berlin the following year.

Brecht was a superior poet, with a command of many styles and moods. As a playwright he was

an intensive worker, a restless piecer-together of ideas not always his own ( The Threepenny

Opera is based on John Gay'sBeggar's Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a sardonic humorist,

and a man of rare musical and visual awareness; but he was often bad at creating living

characters or at giving his plays tension and shape. As a producer he liked lightness, clarity, and

firmly knotted narrative sequence; a perfectionist, he forced the German theatre, against its

nature, to underplay. As a theoretician he made principles out of his preferences—and even out

of his faults.

Reproduced from http://www.biography.com/articles/Bertolt-Brecht-9225028?part=1

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Collaborators

Ruth Berlau

Born August 24, 1906 she was a Danish actress, director, photographer and writer. Like many

woman in his lifetime, Ruth filled the roles of mistress/collaborator/secretary to Bertolt Brecht in

1933 when his period of exile brought him to Denmark. She was also a contributing founder to

the Bertolt Brecht archive in Berlin.

She came from a merchant family, and attended school at a convent, but had to drop out early

due to a pregnancy at 13 years old. In turn she studied acting, and first established her talent

playing Anna in a production of Brecht‘s Drums in the Night. Eventually she worked with the

Royal Theater of Copenhagen. An avid cyclist, she funded her way through France on bicycle by

writing about the excursion for publication in a Danish newspaper. That trip was followed by a

tour of the Soviet Union where her return trip led to finding a place for herself within the ideals

of the communist party, and also later was involved in the Spanish Civil War. When Brecht and

his family arrived in Denmark in 1933, Ruth promptly introduced herself and within two years

time had become one of his lovers. Three years later she divorced her husband, a doctor named

Robert Lund and jumped into the collaboration process with Brecht, offering her services as a

secretary, writer, translator, photographer and director. She and Margaret Steffin were the

primary collaborators on the plays written during his exile period from 1933 to 1947, which

included The Good Woman of Szechuan. Ms. Berlau also published a collection of short stories

with Brecht entitled Jedes Tier kann es (Every Animal Can Do It), which at the time was deemed

obscene. Then in 1940 she traveled with Brecht and his family to Sweden, Finland, and the

USSR, eventually also to the United States where a rift in their relationship started to develop in

1944. It was there that she gave birth to her only child, which did not survive more than a few

days. Following World War II, she again followed the Brechts as they returned to Berlin, but she

did not continue her involvement following his death, as she had been blacklisted from The

Berliner Ensemble by his wife, Helen Weigel. Ruth Berlau died on January 15, 1974. Her life is

featured in a film Red Ruth: That Deadly Longing, which is part of a larger award winning

documentary series entitled Women of Power.

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Margarete Steffin

The eldest of two daughters, her parents Johanna and August Steffin brought their children up in

a middle-class home. While she was herself an extremely gifted writer, translator and actress, her

talents were greatly overshadowed upon becoming one of Brecht‘s lovers. The focus of any and

all accomplishments achieved by Steffin were always overshadowed once involved with Brecht.

However, he was her mentor and she fell madly in love with him. Her contributions have only

recently been acknowledged within the last ten or fifteen years. She learned all her talents

through self-tutelage and her intellect was an attribute that caught Brecht‘s focus immediately.

When she joined his entourage, she made herself a valuable asset, especially during his European

exile. She served as his secretary, critical editor, literary agent, general organizer, as well as his

interpreter. Ms. Steffin‘s knowledge of languages was remarkable with fluency in Russian,

English, French, Danish and Swedish, in addition to basic understanding of Norwegian and

Finnish. Due to contracting tuberculosis years earlier, when Brecht and company immigrated to

the United States as Stalin came to power in Russia, Margarete had to stay behind in a hospital,

and she passed away in Moscow on June 4, 1941. This was not before she contributed to the

creation of The Good Woman of Szechuan, along with Ruth Berlau.

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Paul Dessau

The German composer and conductor, Paul Dessau, was born into a musical family. His

grandfather, Moses Berend Dessau, was a synagogoue cantor, his uncle, Bernhard Dessau, a

violinist at the Royal Opera House, Unter den Linden, and his cousin Max Winterfeld became

generally known under the name Jean Gilbert as a composer of operettas. He first took up violin

lessons at the age of 6, and 1909 (or 1910) he majored in violin at the Klindworth-Scharwenka

Conservatory in Berlin. However, he chose conducting as his career goal. In 1912 he became

répétiteur at the City Theatre (Stadttheater) in Hamburg. There he studied the works of the

composers Felix Weingartner and Arthur Nikisch and took classes in composition from Max

Julius Loewengard. He was second Kapellmeister at the Tivoli Theatre in Bremen in 1914 before

being drafted for military service in 1915.

After World War I, Paul Dessau became conductor at the Intimate Theatre (Kammerspiele) in

Hamburg, and was répétiteur and later Kapellmeister at the opera house in Cologne under Otto

Klemperer between 1919 and 1923. In 1923 he became Kapellmeister in Mainz and from 1925

Principal Kapellmeister at the Städtische Oper Berlin under Bruno Walter. Meanwhile his

composing career also produced an abundance of works. His Concertino for solo violin with

flute, clarinet and horn won him a prize in Donaueschingen. The aspiring musician was soon

attracted by the new medium, film, and started a prominent career as music director at various

film theatres. During this period, he strove to bring new music and sound techniques into film.

His first experiment in sound movies, Episode, entered the 1929 Baden-Baden festival, where he

had met Bertolt Brecht for the first time two years before. While his major output was film

music, there were also concert pieces as well as works for proletarian children's choirs.

In 1933 Paul Dessau emigrated to Paris, earning a living by composing music for other èmigrè

film directors from Germany. In 1936, he met Rene Leibowitz and started to study the 12-tone

system. As the Spanish Civil War broke out, he composed such political marching songs

as Thälmannkolonne to the text by his wife Gudrun Kabisch (both under pseudonyms). This

exile period also saw his attempts in compositions with Jewish themes as he struggled to find the

root of his religious background. In 1938 he composed music for the Paris performance of the

Brecht play Fear and Misery in the Third Reich (then titled 99%) which was directed by Slatan

Dudow. The next year (1939) he moved to New York. The first years in the USA was

particularly difficult for him, surviving on various odd assignments like teaching music lessons

or commissions from synagogues.

In 1943, Paul Dessau met Brecht again on the occasion of an anti-Nazi concert where his 1936

song Kampflied der schwarzen Strohhüte was included on the program. The German refugees

from California subsequently persuaded Dessau to work in the film industry. In October 1943, he

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moved to Hollywood. In addition to close contact with Arnold Schoenberg, he mainly composed

or arranged orchestration for movie studios. A new phase began in his career as he collaborated

with Brecht in various projects. He was now more committed to political causes and historical

dialecticism, which eventually led to his joining of the USA Communist Party in 1946.

Dessau's musical aesthetics shifted in a new direction after his working relationships with Brecht

began. Influenced by the latter, Dessau's music can be described as a parallel along the text. Its

function is to interpret instead of to support. There are many contradictions in his music language

which require the listeners to resolve by themselves, thus fostering a heightened political

awareness.

In 1948, Paul Dessau returned to Germany with his second wife, the writer Elisabeth

Hauptmann, and settled in East Berlin. Besides his work for Berthold Brecht, he first made

acquaintance with Hans Werner Henze in 1949. In 1951 his music for the Trial of Lucullus was

charged with formalism when socialist realism was held as the official principle. While Brecht,

throughout the course, has been changing parts of the scripts and subsequently, the title to avoid

misinterpretation, Dessau remained reticent. On Brecht's insistence due to the antiwar message,

the newly revised opera received its official premiere in October of the same year. Then, it was

not performed until 1960. Starting in 1952 Paul Dessau taught at the Public Drama School

(Staatliche Schauspielschule) in Berlin-Oberschöneweide where he was appointed to a

professorship in 1959. In 1952 he was elected member of the Academie der Künste (and was

vice-president of this institution between 1957 and 1962) and was now enthusiastically involved

in music education for school-age children. He taught many Meisterschüler (pupils in a master

class), including Friedrich Goldmann, Reiner Bredemeyer, Jörg Herchet, Hans-Karsten Raecke,

Friedrich Schenker, Luca Lombardi and Karl Ottomar Treibmann. The next major project in

theatre The Caucasian Chalk Circle began in 1953 as Brecht finally settled on Dessau as the

composer. This score absorbs a variety of folk traditions and its exotic nature fittingly underlines

the alienation effect generated through the setting of the play. After the premiere of this latest

play in October 1954, he moved to Zeuthen in the suburb of Berlin. There he would live until his

death.

The untimely death of Brecht in August 1956 also affected Dessau's career as he sought to find

other lyricists who were compatible with his aesthetic views. Dessau now once again turned to

the 12-tone system as his major vehicle, attracting young admirers in the avant-garde movement

such as Luigi Nono, while he continued to put his ideas of music education in a socialist state

into practice as he taught at the Zeuthener Grundschule. The result of the latter effort would be

published in Musiarbeit in der Schule. During the new phase, he also completed two operas

which were based on Brecht's ideas. Puntila was premiered in 1966, and Einstein, 1974.

Paul Dessau was married four times: Gundrn Kabisch (1924), Elisabeth Hauptmann (1948),

Antje Ruge (1952), and choreographer and director Ruth Berghaus (1954). Their son Maxim

Dessau (b 1954) studied at the College of Film and Television (Hochschule für Film und

Fernsehen) in Potsdam--Babelsberg. Maxim Dessau is now a movie director. Paul Desaau also

had a daughter Eva (b 1926), and another son Peter (b 1929). Dessau died on June 28, 1979 at

the age of 84, in the then East German city of Königs Wusterhausen, on the outskirts of Berlin.

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Paul Dessau composed operas, scenic plays, incidental music, ballets, symphonies and other

works for orchestra, and pieces for solo instruments as well as vocal music. Since the 1920‘s he

had been fascinated by film music. Among others he wrote compositions for early movies of

Walt Disney, background music for silent pictures and early German films. While in exile in

Paris he wrote the oratorio Hagadah shel Pessach after a libretto by Max Brod. In the 1950s in

collaboration with Bertolt Brecht he focussed on the musical theatre. During that time his operas

were produced. He also wrote Gebrauchsmusik (utility music) for the propaganda of the German

Democratic Republic. At the same time he lobbied for the musical avant-garde (e.g. Witold

Lutosławski, Alfred Schnittke, Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono).

His Awards include: Award of the music pSchott (1925); National Prize III. Category (1953);

National Prize II. Category (1956); National Prize I. Category (1965); Vaterländischer

Verdienstorden (Decoration of Honour for Services to the GDR) in Gold (1965); Karl-Marx-

Orden (Karl-Marx-Decoration) (1969); National Prize I. Category (1974)

Reproduced from http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Dessau-Paul.htm

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Translator

David Harrower

Knives in Hens (Traverse Theatre 1995) was David‘s first professional production - a brilliant

theatrical debut that proved a critical and popular success, the production transferring to the Bush

Theatre later the same year. Knives in Hens was revived at the Traverse in 1997 and received its

German premiere at Berlin‘s Deutsches Theater, where it won the Theater Heute Best Foreign

Play (Critics Award) 1997. It has been translated for performance in more than twenty countries

including France, Holland, Belgium, Scandinavia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Colombia, Australia

and America.

Other work includes adaptation of John Wyndham‘s The Chrysalids (RNT/BT Connections) and

a play for BBC Radio 4, 54 % Acrylic which aired in Spring 1998 and was nominated for a Sony

Radio Award. David‘s second original stage play Kill The Old Torture Their Young was

performed in August 1998 at The Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, again receiving great critical

acclaim. It was performed in Germany in translation in autumn 1999. For this play he was

awarded the Meyer Whitworth Prize 1999.

In 2001, his adaptations of Pirandello‘s Six Characters In Search Of An Author and Buchner‘s

Woyzeck were produced at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh and the Young Vic

respectively and his new original play Presence was produced by the Royal Court Theatre,

London. His English language version of Jon Fosse‘s The Girl On the Sofa was presented by the

Edinburgh International Festival in August 2002. His play Dark Earth was presented by the

Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival 2003. David‘s version of Horvath‘s Tales From the

Vienna Woods opened at the National in October 2003.

His widely acclaimed play Blackbird was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival

and premiered at the King‘s Theatre, Edinburgh in August 2005. The production then transferred

to the Albery Theatre, London in February 2006. Blackbird was on the final shortlist for the

Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award, it won Best Play in the Scottish Theatre Critics

Awards and Best New Play at the 2007 Laurence Olivier Awards. It has since been performed

worldwide with productions as far afield as Japan, Mexico, Australia, France, Sweden, and India.

Landmark Productions presented the second major English-language production the play in

February 2007, and it had its New York premier at the Manhattan Theatre Club later that year.

David‘s adaptation of Schiller‘s Mary Stuart for the National Theatre of Scotland toured

Scotland in October 2006 and his translation of Brecht‘s Good Soul of Szechuan opened at the

Young Vic Theater in May 2008. His play 365 was presented at the Edinburgh International

Festival in 2008 and subsequently played at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. His new

adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler‘s Sweet Nothings ran at the Young Vic March-April 2010, and

his most recent work , A Slow Air was presented by The Traverse Theater in August 2011.

David currently has two films in development, one being a film version of Blackbird.

Reproduced in part from http://www.knivesinhens.com/davidharrower.htm

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“What’s What” of Szechuan

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Chinese Influences

The Chinese province we are dealing with in The Good Soul of Szechuan is a fictionalized place,

and although Brecht was fascinated with Chinese theater and culture, to say his interests have

anything to do with setting the story there would be jumping to the wrong conclusion. The link

can actually be made by looking into the separation tactic as part of epic theater theory. Brecht

set the action in what appears to be an Asian location, but the social structure is Capitalist - the

contradiction makes for a strange and unfamiliar look at this area of the world; a pairing of

details that would make the familiar setting strange to spectators, maintaining their awareness

and promoting an active audience presence. However, beyond this, there is no deep-rooted

meaning for him to have chosen the locale. In fact, Brecht was not even aware until after creating

the piece that there was an actual Sichuan Province. Like a lot of choices he arrived at by sheer

desire to do them. For example, when writer Abe Burrows was brought in on The Life of Galileo

to help write lyrics for a ballad singer character, his conversation with Brecht went as follows:

Burrows: Tell me, Bert, how does this street singer feel about Galileo?

Brecht: He feels nothing.

Burrows: (hesitantly) I mean….is he praising Galileo?

Brecht: No.

Burrows: What do the pamphlets he’s selling say about Galileo?

Brecht: They just tell about him.

Burrows: (puzzled) Are they for him or against him?

Brecht: It doesn’t matter.

Burrows: Well, just tell me one thing Bert. Why is the man singing a song?

Brecht: Because I want him to.(Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan (p 95))

Still there is no harm in at least becoming acquainted with the culture - if only for the sake of

appreciation. Speaking to the gods specifically, it was interesting to read about the spiritual

beliefs in terms of deities for the sake of comprehending the sheer volume of gods which

Chinese culture recognizes. It is helpful to acknowledge that the idea of deities is unlike spiritual

belief systems where a supreme being is considered and worshipped, in that both mortal and

immortal entities, as well as natural forces and elements have been given focus - which provides

context to the presence of the gods in the piece as they are existing among the citizens of

Szechuan. Chinese spirituality believes that the three realms (heaven, the living, and the

deceased) exist side by side.

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Furthermore, in the earthly domain both humans and gods coexist, with the deities interacting in

many varied ways with the people. There are many sources to look at regarding Chinese

mythology, but I came upon a page that provided exceptional context to the structure of it, so

I‘ve included a link to that below. Knowing and understanding the structure thoroughly will give

way to living in the world of the play without having to question the why and how. It‘s a set of

circumstances, non-specifically delineated - and would be true of any Chinese society depicted in

a story - fictionalized or not. Why Brecht chose it for a setting is not important - but the task of

accepting and understanding how to exist within that world is.

Additionally, the link after will lead to a site that contains links to some of the stories related to

Chinese mythology. Although not entirely pertinent to putting up a production of Good Soul,

they‘re kind of fun to read, and I‘m pretty certain that the humor and charm they encompass

were probably attributes that attracted Brecht to the culture. Enjoy!

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/cosmos/prb/heavenly.htm

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Ca-Cr/Chinese-Mythology.html

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Chinese Theater influences

Two plays influencing Brecht to write The Good Woman of Szechwan

Klabund‘s adaptation of 14th

Century Chinese playwright Li Hsing-tao‘s The Chalk

Circle

o Performed at the Deutsches Theater in 1924

o Drama in 4 acts; Chinese prose and verse

o The source material was written during the Yuan dynasty and Brecht himself later

adapts it in The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Friedrich Wolf‘s play Tai Yang Wakes Up (1930)

o This was purposely written to alter the tone of Klabund‘s adaptation, as Wolf

thought it to be too sentimental. It was staged by Edwin Piscator in 1932.

Chinese theater as a form does not follow the European model with a basis in text.

Instead the central focus traditionally is the performance by the actor which entails song,

dance acrobatics, martial arts, pantomime and face painting. It is no wonder then why

avant-garde theater practitioners of the twentieth century took to it so positively. Brecht

and Meyerhold have been noted specifically, and it‘s appeal features the ability of

applying techniques in order to further distance a production from the realistic and

naturalistic realms of theater theory.

Important to note also - At one time China did not have a public education system, so

people who were illiterate (very common) watched theater as a means to become

educated, obtain moral guidance, and lastly for entertainment. Through this medium they

were provided lessons in the history of their culture, while also being instilled with

traditional values of society such as loyalty, fidelity, chastity, and justice. This aspect

most certainly inspired Brecht‘s desire to utilize the medium as a didactic tool.

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The Good Soul of Szechuan -Themes

Altruism

Devotion to the welfare of other without regard to oneself.

Good vs. Evil

In thought-related mediums such as religion or philosophy a determination of good and evil is

speaking to having a spectrum that is black or white - wrong or right. Duality exists within your

choice to act pertaining chiefly to desire and behavior. The ―good‖ direction is one taken in

reference to morals and is considered positive, and the ―bad‖ direction would be the alternative

or negative end of the spectrum. However, good is a broad concept, and usually applied in terms

of life, continued happiness, love and a perhaps also measuring prosperity. When these aspects

are in the negative spectrum, you‘ve entered into the realm of ―evil‖. The good and evil in other

ways often display personal judgment of an individual or persons based on what is deemed

wholly good in society. Inevitably - we cannot have one without the other - conflict is necessary

for life within social constructs to continue.

Love vs. Money

The age old dilemma of finding economic security vs. seeking out love. Our present society has

taken down the social barriers which previously played into this decision - as people now have

more self-sufficient means of survival available to them, regardless of demographics or social

status. The choice is more of a choice and not a necessity. Still - this sort of issue is not

completely archaic - there are just more socio-economic factors adding to the complication of

making a decision.

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The Good Soul of Szechuan - Internal References

Szechuan Province - pg 7 Although the Szechuan in the play is a fictionalized version, for point

of reference the real Sichuan province is located in China where the map indicates.

Principle Gods - pg 9 - There are no ―principle‖ gods in Chinese mythology, but most likely this

would have been referring to the ―City Gods‖ who were part of the celestial administration. They

kept track of the happenings of the people within their locality, or location of jurisdiction. For

more information go to http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/cosmos/prb/heavenly.htm

Palatial pg 9 - Resembling a palace in being spacious and splendid.

Chinless git pg 9 - ―Worthless person‖; 1946 origin; British slang, a southern variant of Scottish

get ―illegitimate child, brat‖ which is related to beget.

Bloody - pg 11 and repeated elsewhere - Intense British swear word - at least since 1676 -

etymology is not entirely clear, but suggests it could be connected with bloods in the slang sense

of ―rowdy young aristocrats‖ - ―drunk as a blood‖ - it was deemed respectable before c 1750, but

from 1750-1920 became taboo. Some also suggest this happened due to possible association with

menstruation. The word was deemed very vulgar, and for a time was only in the mouths of the

lowest classes, while respectable people considered it a ‗horrid word‘ - it was debarred from

polite society during the whole of the nineteenth century. In American English, fucking used as

an adjective is the most comparable term.

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Water-carrying pole pg 12

Ciggies - pg 15 - slang for cigarette - he‘s asking for the undesired scraps that can be salvaged

and made into some semblance of a cigarette.

Bugger off - pg 22 - British term asking someone to go away; also ―piss off‖ American

equivalents; ―fuck off‖ or ―get lost.‖

Lot - pg 30 - colloquial term for all when referring to a group a people.

―Look at the lovely carps‖ pg 31 Carp are freshwater fish native to Europe and Asia.

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Bandy legs pg 33 - curved, development of the leg similar to the shape of a stick used in a game

called bandy which was a precursor to field hockey- going towards bowlegged with the extreme

look being like one just got off of a horse.

Crane - pg 34 Chinese

symbol for crane. White crane is the symbol for longevity in Chinese culture.

Zither pg 35

Seven Benevolent Kings - pg 41 Reference to ―Benevolent Kings‖ in Chinese culture refers to

the Benevolent Kings Sutra which specifies that seven disasters will occur when the correct

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teaching perishes. It stresses that the only way to avoid these disasters and ensure the protection

and prosperity of the nation is to uphold the teaching of the perfection of wisdom. In China,

Korea, and Japan, the Benevolent Kings Sutra was revered widely as a sutra for the protection of

the nation. In terms of this referring to a group of people, the reference is just fictional.

Kung the Just - pg 41 - no such person exists, just as there are not Seven Benevolent Kings.

―spongers start queing‖ pg 43 - spongers would be free-loaders/beggars; queing refers to waiting

Heroin addicts -- pg 54

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Catalpa, cypress, mulberry trees - pg 64 Catalpa tree

Mulberry tree

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Dodgy dives - pg 66 Dodgy is mainly a British term for something that is unreliable, or

questionable - dive is referring to an establishment or place of business usually gone downhill.

Besotted pg 68 Besot is to affect with a foolish manifestation

Rubbish pg 73 - related to the word rubble - can equate to saying ―garbage‖ when refuting

somebody‘s claim about something - you‘re saying what they‘re saying is untrue.

Fobbing pg 75 - ton fob is to pocket stealthily, but also to cheat or trick - in the action they aren‘t

intentionally trying to do anything to him, but he overreacts and makes the accusation.

Dosshouse pg 84 (UK English) - flophouse (US English), is a place that offers very

cheap lodging, generally by providing only minimal services. Occupants generally

share bathroom facilities and reside in very tight quarters. The people who make use of these

places are often transients. In the late 20th century, typical cost might have been about US$6 per

night. Other suitable substitutions - hostel or halfway house.

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Good Soul of Szechuan - Imagery

Definition of Capitalism: Dualism of religious freedom of Cash

Dealers + loss + law and order for Cash Addicts

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Socialism

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27

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Communism

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30

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Marxism

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Altruism

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Poverty

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Production History

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World Premier Production

Premiered at the Zurich Schauspielhaus on February 4, 1943

o Directed by Leonard Steckel

o Scenic design by Teo Otto

o Original musical score and songs by Swiss composer Huldreich Georg Fruh

o Replaced with music composed by Paul Dessau for production in 1947-48

Other European Productions Following World War II a production took place at the Theater am Josefstadt in Vienna

in March of 1946 - but none of his collaborators were in on the production, and Brecht

belittled it in a letter to critic Eric Bentley

o It may interest you to know that notices I’ve received from Vienna, where The

Good Person of Szechwan was played last summer are absolutely idiotic; the

poor fools take everything symbolically, they interpret a conflict between Shen

The and Shui Ta as an eternal, universally human conflict, etc. The difference

between a symbol and a parable should be made clear once and for all. In a

parable a passing historical situation (i.e. one that should be made to pass) is

depicted realistically. The rending in two of Shen The is a monstrous crime of

bourgeois society.(Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht p 205-206)

A production by the Berliner Ensemble in 1957 with Kathe Reichel as Shen The and

designs by Karl von Appen.

A production took place in Cologne in 1957 with designs by Caspar Neher.

o Scenic design by Caspar Neher courtesy of

http://www.english.emory.edu/DRAMA/BrechtSetzuan.gif

The London premier occurred on October 31, 1956 as part of the first season of the newly

formed English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater

o George Devine directed with Peggy Ashcroft as Shen Te/Shui Ta.

o Designs by Teo Otto

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Proposed Productions

The Good Woman of Sezuan was the subject of several aborted proposals in the United

States when Brecht was there during his exile.

o There was a plan to work on it with Erwin Piscator in New York - but that never

materialized

o Brecht at one point had the desire to set it in Jamaica with an African-American

cast

o Kurt Weill proposed to turn it into a musical which lead to the 1943 Santa Monica

version that we are utilizing, which features an opium addition - also the script is

much shorter in length

This piece never came to production existence during Brecht‘s lifetime

because he was unable to persuade Christopher Isherwood to translate it,

and he also never took to directing it himself.

Upon returning to Berlin he asked Elizabeth Bergner to play Shen Teh

with the Berliner Ensemble in 1953, but she declined.

Production photo from 1989 production starring Fiona Shaw

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American Premier

Phoenix Theater in New York on December 18, 1956 with direction by Eric Bentley and

featuring Uta Haggen in the title role.

o Teo Otto designed the scenery for this and the London premier production

o Music was by Paul Dessau

Premier of David Harrower Translation in London

Young Vic - London, UK

May 2008

o Directed by Richard Jones

o Design by Miriam Buether

o Music by David Sawer

o Cast

Jane Horrocks - Shen Te/Shui Ta Susan Porrett - God # 1

Adam Gillen - Wang The Water Seller Sophie Russell - Wife

Linda Dobell- Mrs. Shin Liza Sadovy - Mrs. Mitzu/Mrs. Yang

Steven Beard - God # 3 David Osmond - Nephew

Gareth Farr - Policeman/Priest Tom Silburn - Father

Shiv Grewal - Carpenter/ Mr. Shu-Fu Sam O'Mahony-Adams - Agent/Trumpet

Michelle Wade - God # 2 John Marquez - Yang Sun

o Link to video trailer for production

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOpypUxo9qw

o Link to interview with Jane Horrocks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXFR5ShGZIU

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Recent American Production of Harrower Translation

The GOOD SOUL of SZECHUAN

BY BERTOLT BRECHT TRANSLATED BY DAVID HARROWER

DIRECTED BY SHADE MURRAY

APRIL 24, 2010 - MAY 29, 2010

Images reproduced from

http://www.strawdog.org/index.php?section=history&production=goodsoul

Strawdog Theater Company

Chicago, IL

Directed by Shade Murray

Music by Mike Przygoda and Mikail Fiksel

Cast

Adam Shalzi - God # 1 Amy Dunlap - God # 2

Anita Chandwaney - God # 3 Paul Fagen - Shu Fu

Carmine Grisolia - Wang Shannon Hoag - Mrs. Shin

Michaela Petro - Shen Te/Shui Ta John Henry Roberts - Yang Sun

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The Telegraph - UK - Review The Good Soul of Szechuan: Brecht's cruel punishment

Jane Horrocks captures the inner conflict of Shen Te, but The Good Soul of Szechuan is a stinker of a play

Charles Spencer

12:01AM BST 16 May 2008

Comment

Charles Spencer reviews The Good Soul of Szechuan at the Young Vic

One of the incidental benefits of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism was that

for a time we were spared the cruelly punishing plays of Bertolt Brecht.

Suddenly a writer who curried favour with the regime in East Germany and whose plays were often

little more than an advertisement for Marxism didn't seem so attractive even to Left-wing directors.

Mother Courage's bloody cart began to gather dust, those ghastly tuneless songs were no longer

sung by theatre-in-education companies and the wearisome alienation effects of Brecht's epic

theatre were consigned to the dustbin of history.

Or so it seemed. Slowly, however, Brecht has been making a comeback. His supporters would say

that it is because the plays are so good they transcend the old monster's dogmatic theory, and a

couple of years ago even I found myself applauding Simon Russell Beale in Galileo at the National

Theatre.

The Good Soul of Szechuan, however, which I was seeing for the first time, strikes me as an utter

stinker. Even the presence of the delightful Jane Horrocks in the title role, and a spectacular if

somewhat self-advertising production from Richard Jones, isn't enough to sugar the bitter pill.

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It's unfortunate of course that the play should be opening even as the bodies of children are being

lifted from collapsed schools in the same province of China, making Brecht's glib Marxist

sermonising seem even more specious than usual.

But even without that natural disaster to put the play into perspective, the piece would still seem

intolerably preachy and intellectually dishonest.

In Brecht's scenario, three harassed minor gods descend from the heavens to see if they can find

one good person who obeys their commandments. What they find are impoverished people

struggling so hard to survive that goodness is a luxury they can't afford.

Only one woman appears instinctively charitable, a prostitute called Shen Te who offers lodging for

the night.

The gods are delighted, reward Shen Te with a thousand dollars, and go on their way while our

heroine uses the money to buy a tobacco shop, only to find that she is overwhelmed by scroungers.

The only way she can survive is by disguising herself as a fictitious male cousin, Shui Ta, who can

make all the brutal decisions required of a fledgling capitalist. Once determined to help society, she

ends up helping only herself and her unborn child, even going so far as to become a heroin dealer.

Goodness and capitalism cannot co-exist, Brecht bellows. Bring on the revolution!

David Harrower's translation of a mercifully abbreviated version of the play still feels a desperately

long haul.

And all the wonders of Jones's staging and Miriam Buether's epic design - the theatre is

reconfigured and turned into a harshly-lit cement factory - cannot disguise the didactic dreariness of

the writing which has no higher ambition than to develop an arid political thesis.

In this kind of theatre, characters are types rather than people, but Horrocks captures the inner

conflict of Shen Te, a sweet, instinctively kind woman who finds that individual charity doesn't work

in a corrupt capitalistic society.

She's rather less impressive as her alter ego Feng Shui - sorry, Shui Ta - even if she looks very

fetching in male drag. The diminutive Horrocks simply hasn't got it in her to seem callously cruel.

The supporting company play their mechanical characters efficiently enough, the ghastly songs

seem even more unendurable than usual, and I can't tell you how nice it feels when the show finally

grinds to a halt.

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The Guardian - UK The Good Soul of Szechuan Young Vic, London

o Michael Billington o The Guardian, Friday 16 May 2008

Jane Horrocks as Shen Te in The Good Soul of Szechuan. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Richard Jones is a director who oscillates between the sublime (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) and the ridiculous (A Flea in Her Ear). But this revival of Brecht's political parable reveals Jones, in tandem with designer Miriam Buether, at his inventive best. My only doubts, even as an admirer of Brecht, spring from the play itself.

Visually, the evening is extraordinary. The audience enters through the dust and grime of a cement factory where sweating workers despatch heavy bags towards a travelling chute. This instantly establishes a context of capitalist toil: ideal for a play about the difficulty of doing good in a wicked world. Shen Te, a prostitute chosen by three gods as an example of shining virtue, opens a tobacco shop to serve factory workers, only to find herself exploited by dossers, drug dealers and even the pilot with whom she falls in love. Her only solution is to adopt the ruthless persona of a male cousin, Shui Ta, whose hard-heartedness enables her to survive.

Brecht's main point still rings true: that morality is inseparable from economics. When the gods tell Shen Te to be good, she cries: "How can I when everything's so expensive?" But what Brecht fails to acknowledge is the adaptability of capitalism. Living, as we do, in a world where corporations espouse "green" values and even the Chinese attempt to reconcile communism with market forces, Brecht's vision of unreconstructed economic slavery begins to look anachronistic.

Jones's production and David Harrower's translation counter this by suggesting that processes may have changed, but the climate of exploitation remains the same: the industrial chute that contained cement bags eventually turns to heroin production. They also highlight the unashamed emotionalism of Brecht's play. There is a wonderful aborted wedding scene, both comic and sad, where Shen Te realises that her marriage to the pilot depends on the arrival of her "cousin" with the necessary cash. Jane Horrocks, all doe-eyed, child-like trustfulness, plays this perfectly. She is also quirkily eccentric:

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when, told by John Marquez's double-dealing pilot that she is not much fun, she replies: "I can play the zither a bit."

The final image of Shen Te, trapped inside a glass booth as she is instructed by the escaping gods to carry on being good, also brands itself on the memory as searingly as a Bacon painting. But this is typical of a production whose visual resourcefulness overcomes the limitations of Brecht's world-view.

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Socialist Review - UK

The Good Soul of Szechuan

Theatre Review by Colin Wilson, June 2008

Director: Richard Jones; Young Vic, London until 28 June

Three gods are travelling through China, looking for a good person - so far, without success. In Szechuan province the kind-hearted prostitute Shen Te takes them in for the night. In return they give her over $1,000. She buys a little tobacco shop, but unemployed and homeless people at once begin arriving and taking advantage of her generosity. So gentle, loving Shen Te disguises herself as a fictitious male cousin, ruthless and hard-hearted Shui Ta, who protects her by turning out the hangers-on.

Between them, Shen Te and Shui Ta try to cope with their complex situation. Should Shen Te marry a rich barber, who would provide more funds for her to help the desperate? Or should she believe a young pilot, with whom she falls in love and who says he needs $500 to get a job in Beijing?

Bertold Brecht's play breaks with established dramatic convention to create a highly political theatre. Shen Te's conflicts are not the result of her individual psychology, but the dilemma of a person trying to be good in a capitalist society where gentleness and love expose you to danger. The audience is not to identify with her as if she were a real person, or forget they are in a theatre. Instead the drama leads you to question the characters' actions and ask what else they could have done.

So you reach your seat by walking through the set, as actors carry about sacks of cement in a Chinese factory. At the start of the second half, theatre staff climb up and down ladders getting the stage ready. The gods are thoroughly bourgeois - exhibiting pomposity, spite and cowardice in varying proportions - and all wear slightly ludicrous wigs. Indeed, no one's costume consists of clothes a living person could wear.

These devices combine to wonderful effect with the subtlety of Brecht's writing. Lack of money doesn't make his characters saintly - it restricts their choices, and often makes them brutal and callous. Yet they are neither monsters nor victims to be pitied: they make their way as best they can through a world they do not control. They risk relationships that may bring disaster: women fall in love with men who may be exploiting them; parents act with inhuman selfishness to preserve their beloved, vulnerable children. None of these dilemmas and contradictions can be resolved within the play, only by creating a new and different society where Shen Te and Shui Ta can be one whole person.

All in all, this is a superb staging of a classic socialist play. Jane Horrocks is excellent as Shen Te/Shui Ta, but every aspect of the production is worthy of praise, from the lighting to the wonderfully unmusical songs. Get a ticket if you can - if you're under 26, they only cost a tenner.

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Sunday Times Review - UK

May 16, 2008

The Good Soul of Szechuan at the Young Vic Benedict Nightingale

It’s hard to avoid thinking of today’s Szechuan when Jane Horrocks, playing Brecht’s embattled title

character, declares that there’s too much misery in the province. But she’s not talking of natural disasters,

which can’t be prevented by economic action, but of poverty, which perhaps can. However, this is a play

in which the communist dramatist is honest enough to acknowledge the difficulty of changing the world.

Brecht’s purposeful conceit is to split his protagonist into two. At first Horrocks is Shen Te, “the angel of

the slums”, a woman who, in defiance of her author’s social beliefs, was born in punishing poverty yet is

instinctively generous, helpful, good. She’s given a fortune by gods who arrive, fairytale style, to search

for a virtuous person. This she spends on a tobacco shop, only to be brought to the brink of ruin by the

freeloaders she’s too kind to reject.

Brecht doesn’t shy from presenting the downtrodden as an ugly, unprepossessing lot, the worst of whom

is Yang Sun, who professes love for Shen Te to get her to finance his career as a pilot.

All this explains why Shen Te sometimes disguises herself as her male cousin, Shui Ta, who has the

ruthlessness to ensure that she herself survives to do good. It isn’t an easy transition for Horrocks,

especially as she glows with warmth and naive sweetness when she’s in virtuous mode. Her voice falls

an octave as she dons Shui Ta’s trousers and toughens up her body language; but it takes quite a jump

of imagination to see this small, slim figure as an alpha male who terrifies mere betas.

Still, there’s no missing Brecht’s dual points, which are that a culture of need forces people to distort

themselves and that we can’t rely on the gods, here a comically desperate, dilapidated lot, to solve

earthly problems. I don’t know why Richard Jones, who directs, transforms the theatre into a mix of

factory (sacks on conveyor belts) and arid hall. But he gets fine performances, not only from Horrocks’s

Shen Te but from Adam Gillen as a fraught, distraught water-carrier and John Marquez as a Yang who

starts out sleazy and ends up a sweaty, shattered opium addict.

Anyway, I left David Harrower’s brisk, crisp adaptation feeling that Brecht was far more than a doctrinaire

didact. Not only does he tell a terrific story, he makes you think, really think, about the place of love and

goodness in a dauntingly complex world.

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The Independent - UK Review

First Night: The Good Soul Of Szechuan, The Young Vic Theatre, London Brecht strikes again in grotesque comedy of doomed altruism

By Paul Taylor

Thursday, 15 May 2008

The Young Vic scored a critical hit last year with the Big Brecht Fest, a season of short plays that showcased unfamiliar facets of Marxism's

favourite dramatist and proved it's occasionally possible to put "Brecht" and "knockabout fun" in the same sentence.

The theatre pulls all the stops out again with Richard Jones's wildly

inventive production of a play that is usually called The Good Person of Szechuan, the person upgraded to soul in this robust new translation by David Harrower.

The main house is unrecognisable – spectacularly transformed with boarded walls into a Chinese cement factory that wraps round the audience who sit on plastic chairs. Given that this setting is peripheral

in the play to the main dramatic action, it might seem an odd choice of environmental design but it powerfully contributes to the sense of jarring strangeness and dislocation that informs the proceedings.

In Brecht's "parable play", three gods descend to earth in search of a good human being. They award a sum of money to the prostitute Shen Te who is the only person prepared to offer them hospitality. She uses

this windfall to buy a small tobacco shop and it's then that her troubles begin. Sponging freeloaders colonise her premises, here even bringing their piano and washing line, and take advantage of her good nature.

She can only survive by creating and impersonating a male alter ego, the ruthless and exploitative Shui Ta.

Switching between these identities, Jane Horrocks brings a vivid and

vital force to the idea of a personality that's painfully split because, according to Brecht, altruism cannot be sustained in a corrupt capitalist society without causing counterproductive consequences. As

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the Angel of the Slums, Horrocks is an eager, black-wigged waif with a North Country accent. As the Tobacco King who becomes a heroin

dealer, she's a hard-eyed go-getter with a Southern snarl. Unable to stop loving the unemployed airman (John Marquez) despite the proof he's given to Shui Ta that he only wants her money, her Shen Teh is a

poignantly divided figure. Once pregnant, though, she surrenders the remorseless values of her other self.

The production has a grotesque comic energy; jabbing Weill-style

music for the songs; droll visuals (the townsfolk spill out of metal locker-homes); and an incisive grasp of Brecht's message. It's a deliciously funny and apt touch that the gods are presented as a trio of

pompously middle-class and complacent divinities. They are desperate to get back to heaven where their now discredited belief in abstract goodness will once again go unchallenged.

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Chicago Critic - Review

The Good Soul of Szechuan

By Bertolt Brecht

Translated by David Harrower

Directed by Shade Murray

At Strawdog Theatre, Chicago

Epic Theatre is deftly presented by the ensemble of Strawdog Theatre

David Harrower‟s translation of Bertolt Brecht‟s 1943 parable, The Good Soul of Szechuan is a gritty work

featuring crude humor and references to heroin sales and the low qualities of the human condition. Director

Shade Murray and his cast of 18 players utilize Brecht‟s epic theatre techniques that features pop/rock songs as

actors play several roles, use bare staging with actors changing on stage. Add some over-the-top acting with

screaming and the breakdown of the fourth wall and Brecht‟s parable defining the “good” tendency of human

nature can quickly become a tediously aggravating work. This worthy production isn‟t for the faint of heart.

While the show runs 2 hours and 30 minutes and sure takes an adjustment in your theatrical expectations, once

you „tune-in‟ to what Murray and his talented cast are trying to do, you find a manic, creative, humorous and

tuneful epic fable.

This parable (with music) follows a trio of gods (Adam Shalzi, Amy Dunlap and Anita Chandwaney) as they

journey through Szechuan, China in search of one “good” person. Aided by Wang (Carmine Grisolia), a water

carrier, the gods finally find a poor prostitute Shen-Te (Michaela Petro) who demonstrates her pure heart and

charitable righteousness and is rewarded by the gods with wealth.

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We witness Shen Te struggling to maintain her decency as a series of greedy relatives and neighbors descend

upon her tobacco shop taking advantage of her basic goodness and trust. Greed, deception and fraud drive

Shen Te to invent a male cousin, Shui Ta (also played by Michaela Petro) who is a tough capitalist businessman

devoid of morality and conscious.

Through a series of actions by Shui Ta allows Brecht to explore whether in order to do good we, at times, must

do evil. Brecht‟s world is filled with immorality, especially in a capitalist system. He demonstrates that pure

goodness may not be possible in a world filled with want and poverty.

The Strawdog Theatre production features terrific ensemble work and a fine understanding of Brecht‟s

dialectical theatre techniques. Mike Przygoda and Mikail Fiksel‟s songs underscore the mood of the story deftly

despite much of the lyrics being unintelligible. Among the top flight performances are Michaela Petro‟s

empathetic depiction of goodness as Shen Te that changes into a cold-heatred Shu Ta. Carmine Grisolis‟s Wang

and John Henry Robert‟s Yang Sun were particularly strong.

If you love Bertolt Brecht‟s plays and powerful ensemble theatre, than Strawdog‟s The Good Soul of Szechuan is

for you. Keep in mind that is unconventional theatre devoid of naturalistic elements. Epic theatre makes its

own rules. In this production, they work to explore the morality and nature of human goodness. A provocative

theatrical experience awaits.

Recommended

Tom Williams

Talk Theatre in Chicago podcast

Date Reviewed: May 2, 2010

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Time Out Chicago - Review

The Good Soul of Szechuan By Kris Vire

SOUL SURVIVOR Petro talks Roberts down from the ledge.

Photo: Chris Ocken

Playful is perhaps one of the less common adjectives used to describe Brecht’s work. In Strawdog’s hands, though, the German dramatist’s 1943 parable, about a woman struggling to live up to the goodness the gods have seen in her, comes across like the thinking person’s Sarah Ruhl. Shen Te (Michaela Petro), a prostitute, is the only citizen in Szechuan willing to provide hospitality to three traveling gods on the hunt for virtuous mortals. Her reward is her own tobacco shop, but her generosity soon has her set upon by freeloaders; she’s forced to adopt an alter ego, male “cousin” Shui Ta, to play bad cop and protect Shen Te’s interests. When a self-interested suitor (John Henry Roberts) breaks Shen Te’s heart, Shui Ta threatens to take over for good. Director Murray uses the 2008 translation by British playwright David Harrower (Blackbird,Knives in Hens), which accounts in part for this production’s contemporary feel. But the Strawdog touch has a lot to do with it as well. Murray addresses Brecht’s anti-artifice stance with a concertlike staging. The actors double as musicians for Mikhail Fiksel and Mike Przygoda’s Weill-punk-rock numbers and change clothes in full view; costume designers Aly Renee Greaves and Joanna Melville wittily outfit the cast in modern thrift-store chic. But style doesn’t outweigh substance: Brecht’s poke at the irrationality of charity in an economic system that rewards selfishness remains potent. Leading an engaging, creatively cast 18-member ensemble, Petro shines.

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Context

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Historical

The Good Woman of Szechwan was one of three, now considered to be great plays which Bertolt

Brecht wrote while in exile. This period began in 1933, and prior to then Brecht enjoyed a very

comfortable existence where he could focus all his time and energy on writing and directing for

the theater. He was a walking contradiction in terms of the cause he was fighting for, but

nevertheless his heart was set on creating a theater that thrived on the goal of inducing social

awareness and an opportunity for dialogue.

Germany did not become a country until the unification of the principalities was established in

1871 as the German Empire. At the close of World War I, four previous, imperial powers - the

German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires - were defeated. The German and

Russian Empires were not entirely lost, but their territories were to be divided into a smaller plot,

and the other two Empires ceased to exist entirely. This meant that the map of Central Europe

was reestablished into several smaller countries, and the League of Nations had been established

in hopes of avoiding another conflict of this magnitude in the future. Conflicts developed

concerning Germany‘s defeat, in addition to issues with settling the Treaty of Versailles are

believed to be factors leading up to World War II. While affected by the Great Depression, the

Third Reich managed to take control of the state in 1933, which led to a mass exodus by many

leftist supporters. This was a period defined by a Fascist regime lead by Adolf Hitler and the

Nazi party, a party which Brecht took great measures to evade in his years of exile. It was

jokingly stated that he changed countries more often than he changed his shoes. This political

leadership brought the country into World War II and after 1945 became a divided country based

on occupation by the Allied forces.

When Berlin began to lose its balance socially, economically, and politically, Brecht was right

there observing the destruction. Upon visiting the apartment of his friend, economist Fritz

Sternberg, he witnessed a horrific event which pushed his independently thinking mind further in

a communist direction. It was May Day 1929, and outside the third-floor apartment window both

men could view an illegal demonstration underway in front of the German Communist Party

headquarters located in the Karl-Liebknecht Building. They watched in absolute shock when a

confrontation between the Communist demonstrators and the Berlin police escalated into a fatal

event. Sternberg recalls:

As far as we could tell the people were unarmed. The police shot repeatedly. At first we

believed that these were simply warning shots. Then we saw demonstrators collapse and saw

them carried away later on stretchers. As I recall there were more than twenty deathts among

the demonstrators in Berlin. As Brecht heard the shots and saw that people were hit, he got

whiter in the face than I had ever seen him before in my life. I believe it was this experience

among others that drove him ever more strongly towards the Communists. (pg 67 Bertolt Brecht:

Chaos According to Plan)

55

Fuegi continues to write that Sternberg made commentary in regard to the Communist Party and

the very strong Social Democratic party leaving most people with no choice but to decide

between one or the other. The downfall to this, which Brecht eventually realized, was that the

strength and ability for action would be greater if both parties worked together. They could have

potentially been very effective as a single force against the Nazi party. Sternberg commented that

the problem with working together lay in that Communist Party couldn‘t take part in an alliance

without the ability to control and direct it. (Ironically, that is how Brecht felt about working in

the theater.) So it doesn‘t come as a surprise that he ultimately chose to support the German

Communist Party. He never actually joined ranks though, choosing instead to retain his rights as

an individual. This was the way he felt about all aspects of his life - he wanted plenty of room to

make his own decisions.

It seems that Brecht and many of his colleagues were concentrating on the wrong cause when

Hitler was gaining momentum as a political figure, but of course that‘s in viewing the situation

retrospectively. While Brecht was busy pointing out the ill-fated facts of life in a capitalist

society using Marxism as the answer to the problem, an even bigger elephant was in the room,

and had discovered a platform for reform that was more effective, but detrimental to more people

than capitalism in a democratic state ever could be. In later decades Brecht said of the period,

―All one saw were a few islands even as they were being eaten away by the waves.‖ Leon

Feuchtwanger, the producer and playwright who opened doors for Brecht early on, is reported to

have met Hitler in Munich just following the first world war, prior to Hitler‘s entry into politics.

The young man was a painter and interested in entering the field. This was apparently not his

calling, as he found no support or means of breaking into the trade. It‘s interesting to think about

what impact Adolf Hitler would have had on the development of theater, had he been given a

chance in Munich. Even more provocative to ponder whether that would have changed the

course of his rise to power within the Nazi Party.

56

Contemporary

In contemporary application of epic theater it is good to remember that at the height of its use as

a platform for social and political agency, Brecht‘s utilization of certain slogans or devices was a

cool response to heated party issues at the time in which any given piece was performed. It

would not be appropriate to expel commentary that had been readily applied as fuel towards the

Nazi party, unless of course our sights were set on an equally fascist regime existing in America

today. I do recall previous comparisons made of former President Bush to the head of the

Gestapo, but no sense in bring back either of those beasts. Brecht was an advocate of Marxism

and supporter of the German Communist Party, but never officially signed up. This was because

while he cared about the issues, he still enjoyed the ability to independently conduct his

professional, social, and personal affairs. I think a lot of people can relate to that position where

politics are concerned. Up to the present time a vast array of things have been determined in our

society, leading to continued development and even more change which is sometimes hard to

keep up - and so you just want to pay your way, and go about your business without having to

hear from ―the Man,‖ or woman or child or whomever else might be demanding your time and

money.

The story in Good Soul is a fair representation of how social systems do eventually work

themselves out to resolution - whether that resolution is in the black or red is debatable, but

either way, no matter how much you try to find the good, or be the good or desire the good to

exist in the world - people will be what they are. When individuals try to lead the masses to a

certain political or social destination, with perseverance and drive the herd may follow the

leader. Granted, those with aspirations for leadership should take into consideration what the

masses have been through up to that point. This will help determine your rate of success. It‘s not

very likely that a community can be led towards the idea of prosperity through an entirely

different social model without assurance of a favorable outcome. Furthermore , does a truly good

soul actually exist? That one individual who can keep going and going like the Energizer Bunny

on Prozac. Oh wait, they wouldn‘t need Prozac - they‘re that good! But if in fact they aren‘t

found - how long is it before the world will end? There has been some talk in contemporary

society of the world ending for various reasons - but what does that really mean to us as a

collective? And who is really the expert - religious leaders, scientists? Economists? Just kidding.

Seriously though - have you ever had a semi-conscious moment going deep into the recesses of

your mind - where you actually glimpse the idea of not existing? I have. It‘s as if I‘m realizing

my own mortality in that single instance - it always makes me jump into action. I might dwell for

a minute, but then it‘s on to the next thing. That‘s the beauty of human existence - we‘re

resilient! We deal with life on a daily basis just like that - making a choice to dwell or find a

means of survival. However, what would happen if we spent less time being introspective about

our existence - and more time being present enough to experience it - would that improve our

quality of life? Perhaps - you tell me.

57

Pertinent Socio-Economic Ideologies

Following in the footsteps of Edwin Piscator, Brecht sought a form or means that would allow

him to bring complicated subjects of the time to the stage, so that he could engage society in

social dialogue. He searched at length for the connections, settling his focus on discovering a

suitable dramatic form. If he could find a form that would unlock the door to a world of

connections with socio-economic issues, he would have a platform for inducing social change.

John Fuegi writes in Chaos According to Plan that this search was ―reflected in his work of the

mid and even late twenties. Project after project in this period is started and then dropped. There

were no Brecht productions in 1925.‖ This is because he had immersed himself in studying

Marxism. By December 1926 he was sure that this theory and its material could serve as a

foundation for his development of a dramatic form that would service his cause. Going forward

whenever he could would name Marxism as an ideology of ―reason and of order‖ whereas

capitalism was deemed ―chaotic and irrational.‖ (p48)

Socialism - defined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means

of production.

Capitalism - An economic system where investment and ownership of production means,

distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained, for the most part, by private

individuals or corporations.

Communism - A theory or system of social organization where the holding of all property in

common, actual ownership has been ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state. It is an

offset of socialism early on linked to dictatorship and take over through means of violent force as

has been previously the case under the rule of Vladimir Lenin and successively Joseph Stalin in

Russia and Mao Zedong in China. There are a multitude of variations on the philosophy

generally dependent on who is leading the ―revolution‖ towards a communist state.

Marxism - a system of economic and political thought developed by Karl Marx and Fredrich

Engels, especially the doctrine that the state throughout history has been a device for the

exploitation of the masses by a dominant class, and that class has been the main agency of

historical change. It also states that the capitalist system containing the first seeds of its own

decay will inevitably, after a period of dictatorship of the proletariat will be replaced by a

socialist order or classless society. His theory encompasses all three of the systems briefly

defined above in a stage of developments that, as he analyzed Western European economic

development, any society would inevitably go through.

Primitive Communism Slave society Feudalism Capitalism

Socialism Communism

58

It is good to remember that the cognitive use of these economic terms in society all started

around the mid-19th

century when the Industrial Revolution was taking effect, and by the time

Brecht had any notion of paying attention, the ideologies were in full force in select countries

surrounding Germany. However, Fascism, another ideology in practice in the early 20th

century,

was not included in Marx‘s theory, but certainly occurred in the course of social development as

nationalistic divisions developed following World War I. Its development was fostered most

notoriously by the right-wing parties in Germany, Italy, and Japan. In terms of its vulnerability to

combatant force, its machine of development was subtle enough that those like Brecht were not

readily aware of just what was at stake as it gained momentum. At least not until exile was the

only option for survival. Then it was too late to fight back.

59

Socialism

by Robert Heilbroner

Socialism—defined as a centrally planned economy in which the

government controls all means of production—was the tragic failure of the

twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral

defects of CAPITALISM, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic

malfunction and moral cruelty. Yet the idea and the ideal of socialism linger

on. Whether socialism in some form will eventually return as a major

organizing force in human affairs is unknown, but no one can accurately

appraise its prospects who has not taken into account the dramatic story of

its rise and fall.

The Birth of Socialist Planning

It is often thought that the idea of socialism derives from the work of KARL MARX.

In fact, Marx wrote only a few pages about socialism, as either a moral or a

practical blueprint for society. The true architect of a socialist order was Lenin, who

first faced the practical difficulties of organizing an economic system without the

driving incentives of profit seeking or the self-generating constraints

of COMPETITION. Lenin began from the long-standing delusion that economic

organization would become less complex once the profit drive and the market

mechanism had been dispensed with—―as self-evident,‖ he wrote, as ―the

extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts,

within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules

of arithmetic.‖

In fact, economic life pursued under these first four rules rapidly became so

disorganized that within four years of the 1917 revolution, Soviet production had

fallen to 14 percent of its prerevolutionary level. By 1921 Lenin was forced to

institute the New Economic Policy (NEP), a partial return to the market incentives of

capitalism. This brief mixture of socialism and capitalism came to an end in 1927

after Stalin instituted the process of forced collectivization that was to mobilize

Russian resources for its leap into industrial power.

The system that evolved under Stalin and his successors took the form of a

pyramid of command. At its apex was Gosplan, the highest state planning agency,

60

which established such general directives for the economy as the target rate of

growth and the allocation of effort between military and civilian outputs, between

heavy and light industry, and among various regions. Gosplan transmitted the

general directives to successive ministries of industrial and regional planning,

whose technical advisers broke down the overall national plan into directives

assigned to particular factories, industrial power centers, collective farms, and so

on. These thousands of individual subplans were finally scrutinized by the factory

managers and engineers who would eventually have to implement them.

Thereafter, the blueprint for production reascended the pyramid, together with the

suggestions, emendations, and pleas of those who had seen it. Ultimately, a

completed plan would be reached by negotiation, voted on by the Supreme Soviet,

and passed into law.

Thus, the final plan resembled an immense order book, specifying the nuts and

bolts, steel girders, grain outputs, tractors, cotton, cardboard, and coal that, in

their entirety, constituted the national output. In theory such an order book should

enable planners to reconstitute a working economy each year—provided, of course,

that the nuts fitted the bolts; the girders were of the right dimensions; the grain

output was properly stored; the tractors were operable; and the cotton, cardboard,

and coal were of the kinds needed for their manifold uses. But there was a vast and

widening gap between theory and practice.

Problems Emerge

The gap did not appear immediately. In retrospect, we can see that the task facing

Lenin and Stalin in the early years was not so much economic as quasi military—

mobilizing a peasantry into a workforce to build roads and rail lines, dams and

electric grids, steel complexes and tractor factories. This was a formidable

assignment, but far less formidable than what would confront socialism fifty years

later, when the task was not so much to create enormous undertakings as to create

relatively self-contained ones, and to fit all the outputs into a dovetailing whole.

Through the 1960s the Soviet economy continued to report strong overall growth—

roughly twice that of the United States—but observers began to spot signs of

impending trouble. One was the difficulty of specifying outputs in terms that would

maximize the well-being of everyone in the economy, not merely the bonuses

61

earned by individual factory managers for ―overfulfilling‖ their assigned objectives.

The problem was that the plan specified outputs in physical terms. One

consequence was that managers maximized yardages or tonnages of output, not its

quality. A famous cartoon in the satirical magazine Krokodil showed a factory

manager proudly displaying his record output, a single gigantic nail suspended from

a crane.

As the economic flow became increasingly clogged and clotted, production took the

form of ―stormings‖ at the end of each quarter or year, when every resource was

pressed into use to meet pre-assigned targets. The same rigid system soon

produced expediters, or tolkachi, to arrange shipments to harassed managers who

needed unplanned—and therefore unobtainable—inputs to achieve their production

goals. Worse, lacking the right to buy their own supplies or to hire or fire their own

workers, factories set up fabricating shops, then commissaries, and finally their own

worker HOUSING to maintain control over their own small bailiwicks.

It is not surprising that this increasingly Byzantine system began to create serious

dysfunctions beneath the overall statistics of growth. During the 1960s the Soviet

Union became the first industrial country in history to suffer a prolonged peacetime

fall in average life expectancy, a symptom of its disastrous misallocation of

resources. Military research facilities could get whatever they needed, but hospitals

were low on the priority list. By the 1970s the figures clearly indicated a slowing of

overall production. By the 1980s the Soviet Union officially acknowledged a near

end to growth that was, in reality, an unofficial decline. In 1987 the first official law

embodying perestroika—restructuring—was put into effect. President Mikhail

Gorbachev announced his intention to revamp the economy from top to bottom by

introducing the market, reestablishing private ownership, and opening the system

to free economic interchange with the West. Seventy years of socialist rise had

come to an end.

Socialist Planning in Western Eyes

Understanding of the difficulties of central planning was slow to emerge. In the

mid-1930s, while the Russian industrialization drive was at full tilt, few raised their

voices about its problems. Among those few were LUDWIG VON MISES, an articulate

and exceedingly argumentative free-market economist, and FRIEDRICH HAYEK, of

62

much more contemplative temperament, later to be awarded a Nobel Prize for his

work in monetary theory. Together, Mises and Hayek launched an attack on the

feasibility of socialism that seemed at the time unconvincing in its argument as to

the functional problems of a planned economy. Mises in particular contended that a

socialist system was impossible because there was no way for the planners to

acquire the information (see INFORMATION AND PRICES)—―produce this, not that‖—

needed for a coherent economy. This information, Hayek emphasized, emerged

spontaneously in a market system from the rise and fall of prices. A planning

system was bound to fail precisely because it lacked such a signaling mechanism.

The Mises-Hayek argument met its most formidable counterargument in two

brilliant articles by OSKAR LANGE, a young economist who would become Poland‘s

first ambassador to the United States after World War II. Lange set out to show

that the planners would, in fact, have precisely the same information as that which

guided a market economy. The information would be revealed as inventories of

goods rose and fell, signaling either that SUPPLY was greater than DEMAND or

demand was greater than supply. Thus, as planners watched inventory levels, they

were also learning which of their administered (i.e., state-dictated) prices were too

high and which too low. It only remained, therefore, to adjust prices so that supply

and demand balanced, exactly as in the marketplace.

Lange‘s answer was so simple and clear that many believed the Mises-Hayek

argument had been demolished. In fact, we now know that their argument was all

too prescient. Ironically, though, Mises and Hayek were right for a reason they did

not foresee as clearly as Lange himself. “The real danger of socialism,” Lange

wrote, in italics, “is that of a bureaucratization of economic life.” But he took away

the force of the remark by adding, without italics, ―Unfortunately, we do not see

how the same or even greater danger can be averted under monopolistic

capitalism‖ (Lange and Taylor 1938, pp. 109–110).

The effects of the ―bureaucratization of economic life‖ are dramatically related

in The Turning Point, a scathing attack on the realities of socialist economic

planning by two Soviet economists, Nikolai Smelev and Vladimir Popov, that gives

examples of the planning process in actual operation. In 1982, to stimulate the

production of gloves from moleskins, the Soviet government raised the price it was

63

willing to pay for moleskins from twenty to fifty kopecks per pelt. Smelev and

Popov noted:

State purchases increased, and now all the distribution centers are filled with these pelts.

Industry is unable to use them all, and they often rot in warehouses before they can be

processed. The Ministry of Light Industry has already requested Goskomtsen [the State

Committee on Prices] twice to lower prices, but “the question has not been decided” yet. This is

not surprising. Its members are too busy to decide. They have no time: besides setting prices on

these pelts, they have to keep track of another 24 million prices. And how can they possibly

know how much to lower the price today, so they won‟t have to raise it tomorrow?

This story speaks volumes about the problem of a centrally planned system. The

crucial missing element is not so much ―information,‖ as Mises and Hayek argued,

as it is the motivation to act on information. After all, the inventories of moleskins

did tell the planners that their production was at first too low and then too high.

What was missing was the willingness—better yet, the necessity—to respond to the

signals of changing inventories. A capitalist firm responds to changing prices

because failure to do so will cause it to lose money. A socialist ministry ignores

changing inventories because bureaucrats learn that doing something is more likely

to get them in trouble than doing nothing, unless doing nothing results in absolute

disaster.

In the late 1980s, absolute economic disaster arrived in the Soviet Union and its

Eastern former satellites, and those countries are still trying to construct some form

of economic structure that will no longer display the deadly inertia and indifference

that have come to be the hallmarks of socialism. It is too early to predict whether

these efforts will succeed. The main obstacle to real perestroika is the impossibility

of creating a working market system without a firm basis of private ownership, and

it is clear that the creation of such a basis encounters the opposition of the former

state bureaucracy and the hostility of ordinary people who have long been trained

to be suspicious of the pursuit of wealth. In the face of such uncertainties, all

predictions are foolhardy save one: no quick or easy transition from socialism to

some form of nonsocialism is possible. Transformations of such magnitude are

historic convulsions, not mere changes in policy. Their completion must be

measured in decades or generations, not years.

64

Heilbroner on Who Predicted Socialism’s Demise

But what spokesman of the present generation has anticipated the demise of

socialism or the ―triumph of capitalism‖? Not a single writer in the Marxian

tradition!Are there any in the left centrist group? None I can think of, including

myself. As for the center itself—the Samuelsons, Solows, Glazers, Lipsets, Bells,

and so on—I believe that many have expected capitalism to experience serious and

mounting, if not fatal, problems and have anticipated some form of socialism to be

the organizing force of the twenty-first century.

... Here is the part hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, von

Miseses, e tutti quanti who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that

socialism would develop incurable ailments. Mises called socialism ―impossible‖

because it has no means of establishing a rational pricing system; Hayek added

additional reasons of a sociological kind (―the worst rise on top‖). All three have

regarded capitalism as the ―natural‖ system of free men; all have maintained that

left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully

than any other system.

From Robert Heilbroner.

―The World After Communism.‖

Dissent (Fall 1990): 429–430.

About the Author

Robert Heilbroner, a socialist for most of his adult life, was the Norman Thomas Professor of

Economics (emeritus) at the New School for Social Research and author of the best-seller The

Worldly Philosophers. He died in 2005. The editor of this volume, David R. Henderson, edited this

article slightly, but only to adjust it for developments in the formerly socialist countries, not to

change any of its other substantive content.

Reproduced from http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Socialism.html

65

Capitalism

by Robert Hessen

―Capitalism,‖ a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-

nineteenth century, is a misnomer for ―economic individualism,‖ which ADAM

SMITHearlier called ―the obvious and simple system of natural liberty‖

(Wealth of Nations). Economic individualism‘s basic premise is that the

pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally

defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists

to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone

or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell,

and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their

efforts in terms of assets, sales, and PROFITS; or the number of customers,

employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional,

national, or international markets.

The emergence of capitalism is often mistakenly linked to a Puritan work ethic.

German sociologist MAX WEBER, writing in 1903, stated that the catalyst for

capitalism was in seventeenth-century England, where members of a religious sect,

the Puritans, under the sway of John Calvin‘s doctrine of predestination, channeled

their energies into hard work, reinvestment, and modest living, and then carried

these attitudes to New England. Weber‘s thesis breaks down, however. The same

attitudes toward work and SAVINGs are exhibited by Jews and Japanese, whose

value systems contain no Calvinist component. Moreover, Scotland in the

seventeenth century was simultaneously orthodox Calvinist and economically

stagnant.

A better explanation of the Puritans‘ diligence is that by refusing to swear allegiance

to the established Church of England, they were barred from activities and

professions to which they otherwise might have been drawn—landownership, law,

the military, civil service, universities— and so they focused on trade and

commerce. A similar pattern of exclusion or ostracism explains why Jews and other

racial and religious minorities in other countries and later centuries tended to

concentrate on retail businesses and money lending.

66

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the

textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert

Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and

described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if

they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible

in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavorably

with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on

ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began

earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish

poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for

backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and

prostitutes. The pre-capitalist ―good old days‖ simply never existed (see

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE STANDARD OF LIVING).

Nonetheless, by the 1820s and 1830s the growing specter of child labor and ―dark

Satanic mills‖ (poet William Blake‘s memorable phrase) generated vocal opposition

to these unbridled examples of self-interest and the pursuit of profit. Some critics

urged legislative REGULATION of wages and hours, compulsory EDUCATION, and

minimum age limits for laborers. Others offered more radical alternatives. The most

vociferous were the socialists, who aimed to eradicate individualism, the name that

preceded capitalism.

Socialist theorists repudiated individualism‘s leading tenets: that individuals possess

inalienable rights, that government should not restrain individuals from pursuing

their own happiness, and that economic activity should not be regulated by

government. Instead, they proclaimed an organic conception of society. They

stressed ideals such as brotherhood, community, and social solidarity and set forth

detailed blueprints for model utopian colonies in which collectivist values would be

institutionalized.

The short life span of these utopian societies acted as a brake on the appeal

of SOCIALISM. But its ranks swelled after KARL MARX offered a new ―scientific‖

version, proclaiming that he had discovered the laws of history and that socialism

inevitably would replace capitalism. Beyond offering sweeping promises that

socialism would create economic equality, eradicate poverty, end specialization, and

67

abolish money, Marx supplied no details at all about how a future socialist society

would be structured or would operate.

Even nineteenth-century economists—in England, America, and Western Europe—

who were supposedly capitalism‘s defenders did not defend capitalism effectively

because they did not understand it. They came to believe that the most defensible

economic system was one of ―perfect‖ or ―pure‖COMPETITION. Under perfect

competition all firms are small scale, products in each industry are homogeneous,

consumers are perfectly informed about what is for sale and at what price, and all

sellers are what economists call price takers (i.e., they have to ―take‖ the market

price and cannot charge a higher one for their goods).

Clearly, these assumptions were at odds with both common sense and the reality of

market conditions. Under real competition, which is what capitalism delivered,

companies are rivals for sales and profits. This rivalry leads them to innovate in

product design and performance, to introduce cost-cutting technology, and to use

packaging to make products more attractive or convenient for customers. Unbridled

rivalry encourages companies to offer assurances of security to imperfectly

informed consumers, by means such as money-back guarantees or product

warranties and by building customer loyalty through investing in their brand names

and reputations (see ADVERTISING, BRAND NAMES, and CONSUMER PROTECTION).

Companies that successfully adopted these techniques of rivalry were the ones that

grew, and some came to dominate their industries, though usually only for a few

years until other firms found superior methods of satisfying consumer demands.

Neither rivalry nor product differentiation occurs under perfect competition, but

they happen constantly under real flesh-and-blood capitalism.

The leading American industrialists of the late nineteenth century were aggressive

competitors and innovators. To cut costs and thereby reduce prices and win a

larger market share, Andrew Carnegie eagerly scrapped his huge investment in

Bessemer furnaces and adopted the open-hearth system for making steel rails. In

the oil-refining industry, John D. Rockefeller embraced cost cutting by building his

own pipeline network; manufacturing his own barrels; and hiring chemists to

remove the vile odor from abundant, low-cost crude oil. Gustavus Swift challenged

the existing network of local butchers when he created assembly-line meatpacking

68

facilities in Chicago and built his own fleet of refrigerated railroad cars to deliver

low-price beef to distant markets. Local merchants also were challenged by

Chicago-based Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, which pioneered mail-order

sales on a money-back, satisfaction-guaranteed basis.

Small-scale producers denounced these innovators as ―robber barons,‖ accused

them of monopolistic practices, and appealed to Congress for relief from relentless

competition. Beginning with the Sherman Act (1890), Congress enacted antitrust

laws that were often used to suppress cost cutting and price slashing, based on

acceptance of the idea that an economy of numerous small-scale firms was superior

to one dominated by a few large, highly efficient companies operating in national

markets (see ANTITRUST).

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the

benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into

necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white

bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments;

then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then

telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently,

TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones.

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause

capitalism‘s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed

themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of

capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic

mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars

and household appliances, which he called ―tools of enslavement.‖1 Some critics

reject capitalism by extolling ―the simple life‖ and labeling prosperity mindless

materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH and Vance

Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had

to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human

needs.2 They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and

crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and

complained that the ―public sector‖ is starved while frivolous private desires are

being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of

intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed

69

equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and

inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also

internationally.3

Capitalism is not a cure for every defect in human affairs or for eradicating all

inequalities, but who ever said it was? It holds out the promise of what Adam Smith

called ―universal opulence.‖ Those who demand more are likely to be using higher

expectations as a weapon of criticism. For example, British economist Richard

Layard recently attracted headlines and airtime with a startling revelation: money

cannot buy happiness (a cliché of song lyrics and church sermons).4 He laments

that economic individualism fails to ensure the emotional satisfactions that are

essential to life, including family ties, financial security, meaningful work,

friendship, and good health. Instead, a capitalist society supplies new gadgets,

appliances, and luxuries that arouse envy in those who cannot afford them and that

inspire a ceaseless obsession with securing more among those who already own too

much. Layard‘s long-range solutions include a revival of religion to topple the

secularism that capitalism fosters, altruism to obliterate selfishness, and

communitarianism to supersede individualism. He stresses the need, near-term, for

robust governmental efforts to promote happiness instead of the minimalist night-

watchman state that libertarian defenders of capitalism favor. He argues that low

taxes are harmful to the poor because they give government inadequate revenue to

provide essential services to the poor. Higher taxes really would not harm the well-

to-do, he says, because money and material possessions are subject to diminishing

marginal utility. If such claims have a familiar ring, it is because Galbraith made the

same points fifty years ago.

Virtually all the new criticisms of capitalism are old ones repackaged as stunning

new insights. One example is the attack on ―globalization‖ (the outsourcing of

service, manufacturing, and assembly jobs to foreign sites where costs are

cheaper). It has been denounced as union busting, exploitative, and destructive of

foreign cultures, and is damned for the loss of domestic jobs and the resulting

erosion of local tax revenues. Identical complaints were voiced two generations ago

when jobs began flowing from unionized New England textile factories to

nonunionized southern textile mills, and then to offshore sites such as Puerto Rico.

70

Another ―new‖ line of attack on capitalism has been launched by law professors

Cass Sunstein and Liam Murphy and philosophers Stephen Holmes, Thomas Nagel,

and Peter Singer.5 They lament that in societies based on self-interest and private

property, wealth earners oppose rising taxes, preferring to spend their money on

themselves and leave inheritances for their children. This selfish bias leads to an

impoverished public sector and to inadequate tax revenues. To justify governmental

claims for higher taxes, these writers have revived an argument—attacking the

legitimacy of private property and inheritance—that was advanced by

institutionalized economists during the New Deal era. Government, they assert, is

the ultimate source of all wealth, and so it should have first claim on wealth and

earnings. ―Is it really your money?‖ Singer asks, citing economist HERBERT SIMON‘s

estimate that a flat income tax of 90 percent would be reasonable because

individuals derive most of their income from the ―social capital‖ provided by

technology and by protections such as patents and copyrights, and by the physical

security afforded by police, courts, and armies rather than from anything they

personally do. If the ―fruits of capitalism‖ are merely a gift of government, it is an

argument that proves too much. By the same logic, individuals might be enslaved if

they were not protected by government, so CONSCRIPTION (servitude for a brief

period) would be entirely unobjectionable, as would the seizure of privately owned

land to turn it over to new owners if their uses would yield higher tax revenues—

exactly the basis of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling on ―eminent domain.‖

Another persistent criticism of capitalism—the attack on corporations—harkens back

to the 1930s. Critics like Ralph Nader, Mark Green, Charles Lindblom, and Robert

Dahl focus their fire on giant corporations, charging that they are illegitimate

institutions because they do not conform to the model of small-scale, owner-

managed firms that Adam Smith extolled in 1776.6 In fact, giant corporations are

fully consistent with capitalism, which does not imply any particular configuration of

firms in terms of size or legal form. They attract capital from thousands (sometimes

millions) of investors who are strangers to each other and who entrust their savings

to the managerial expertise of others in exchange for a share of the resulting

profits.

In an influential 1932 book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A.

Berle Jr. coined the phrase ―splitting of the atom of ownership‖ to lament the fact

that investment and management had become two distinct elements. In fact, the

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process is merely an example of the specialization of function or division of labor

that occurs so often under capitalism. Far from being an abuse or defect, giant

corporations are an eloquent testimonial to the ability of individuals to engage in

large-scale, long-range cooperation for their mutual benefit and enrichment

(see CORPORATIONS).

As noted earlier, the freedoms to invest, to decide what to produce, and to decide

what to charge have always been restricted. A fully free economy, true laissez-

faire, never has existed, but governmental authority over economic activity has

sharply increased since the eighteenth century, and especially since the GREAT

DEPRESSION. Originally, local authorities fixed the prices of necessities such as

bread and ale, bridge and ferry tolls, or fees at inns and mills, but most products

and services were unregulated. By the late nineteenth century governments were

setting railroad freight rates and the prices charged by grain elevator operators,

because these businesses had become ―affected with a public purpose.‖ By the

1930s the same criterion was invoked to justify PRICE CONTROLS over milk, ice, and

theater tickets. One piece of good news, though, is that a spate of deregulation in

the late 1970s and the 1980s eliminated price controls on airline travel, trucking,

railroad freight rates, natural gas, oil, and some TELECOMMUNICATIONS rates.

Simultaneously, from the eighteenth century on, government began to play a more

active, interventionist role in offering benefits to business, such as tax exemptions,

bounties or subsidies to grow certain crops, and tariff protection so domestic firms

would devote capital to manufacturing goods that otherwise had to be imported.

Special favors became entrenched and hard to repeal because the recipients were

organized while consumers, who bore the burden of higher prices, were not.

Once safe from foreign competition behind these barriers toFREE TRADE, some U.S.

producers—steel and auto manufacturers, for example—stagnated. They failed to

adopt new technologies or to cut costs until low-cost, low-price overseas rivals—the

Japanese, especially—challenged them for their customers. They responded initially

by asking Congress for new favors—higher tariffs, import quotas, and loan

guarantees—and pleading with consumers to ―buy American‖ and thereby save

domestic jobs. Slowly, but inevitably, they began the expensive process of catching

up with foreign companies so they could try to recapture their domestic customers.

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Today, the United States, once the citadel of capitalism, is a ―mixed economy‖ in

which government bestows favors and imposes restrictions with no clear or

consistent principles in mind. As the formerly communist countries of Eastern

Europe struggle to embrace free-market ideas and institutions, they can learn from

the American (and British) experience about not only the benefits that flowed from

economic individualism, but also the burden of regulations that became impossible

to repeal and trade barriers that were hard to dismantle. If the history of capitalism

proves one thing, it is that the process of competition does not stop at national

borders. As long as individuals anywhere perceive a potential for profits, they will

amass the capital, produce the product, and circumvent the cultural and political

barriers that interfere with their objectives.

About the Author

Robert Hessen, a specialist in business and economic history, is a senior research fellow at

Stanford University‘s Hoover Institution.

Reproduced from http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Capitalism.html

73

Communism

by Bryan Caplan

Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, ―SOCIALISM‖ and ―communism‖

were synonyms. Both referred to economic systems in which the

government owns the means of production. The two terms diverged in

meaning largely as a result of the political theory and practice of Vladimir

Lenin (1870–1924).

Like most contemporary socialists, Lenin believed that socialism could not be

attained without violent revolution. But no one pursued the logic of revolution as

rigorously as he. After deciding that violent revolution would not happen

spontaneously, Lenin concluded that it must be engineered by a quasi-military

party of professional revolutionaries, which he began and led. After realizing that

the revolution would have many opponents, Lenin determined that the best way to

quell resistance was with what he frankly called ―terror‖—mass executions, slave

labor, and starvation. After seeing that the majority of his countrymen opposed

communism even after his military triumph, Lenin concluded that one-party

dictatorship must continue until it enjoyed unshakeable popular support. In the

chaos of the last years of World War I, Lenin‘s tactics proved an effective way to

seize and hold power in the former Russian Empire. Socialists who embraced

Lenin‘s methods became known as ―communists‖ and eventually came to power in

China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Indo-China, and elsewhere.

The most important fact to understand about the economics of communism is that

communist revolutions triumphed only in heavily agricultural

societies.1 Government ownership of the means of production could not, therefore,

be achieved by expropriating a few industrialists. Lenin recognized that the

government would have to seize the land of tens of millions of peasants, who surely

would resist. He tried during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920), but retreated in

the face of chaos and five million famine deaths. Lenin‘s successor, Joseph Stalin,

finished the job a decade later, sending millions of the more affluent peasants

(―kulaks‖) to Siberian slave labor camps to forestall organized resistance and

starving the rest into submission.

74

The mechanism of Stalin‘s ―terror famine‖ was simple. Collectivization reduced total

food production. The exiled kulaks had been the most advanced farmers, and after

becoming state employees, the remaining peasants had little incentive to produce.

But the government‘s quotas drastically increased. The shortage came out of the

peasants‘ bellies. Robert Conquest explains:

Agricultural production had been drastically reduced, and the peasants driven off by the

millions to death and exile, with those who stayed reduced, in their own view, to serfs. But the

State now controlled grain production, however reduced in quantity. And collective farming had

prevailed.2

In the capitalist West, industrialization was a by-product of rising

agricultural PRODUCTIVITY. As output per farmer increased, fewer farmers were

needed to feed the POPULATION. Those no longer needed in agriculture moved to

cities and became industrial workers. Modernization and rising food production went

hand in hand. Under communism, in contrast, industrialization

accompanied falling agricultural productivity. The government used the food it

wrenched from the peasants to feed industrial workers and pay for exports. The

new industrial workers were, of course, former peasants who had fled the wretched

conditions of the collective farms.3

One of the most basic concepts in economics is the production possibilities frontier

(PPF), which shows feasible combinations of, for example, wheat and steel. If the

frontier remains fixed, more steel means less wheat. In the noncommunist world,

industrialization was a continuous outward shift of the PPF driven by technological

change (Figure 1). In the communist world, industrialization was a painful

movement along the PPF; or, to be more precise, it moved along the PPF as it

shifted in (Figure 2).

The other distinctive feature of Soviet industrialization was that few manufactured

products ever reached consumers. The emphasis was on ―heavy industry‖ such as

steel and coal. This is puzzling until one realizes that the term ―industrialization‖ is

a misnomer. What happened in the Soviet Union during the 1930s was not

industrialization, but militarization, an arms build-up greater than that by any other

nation in the world, including Nazi Germany.4 Martin Malia explains:

75

Contrary to the declared goals of the regime, it was the opposite of a system of production to

create abundance for the eventual satisfaction of the needs of the population; it was a system of

general squeeze of the population to produce capital goods for the creation of industrial power,

in order to produce ever more capital goods with which to produce still further industrial might,

and ultimately to produce armaments.5

Stalin‘s apologists argue that Germany forced militarization on him. In truth, Stalin

not only began World War II as Hitler‘s active ally against Poland, but also saw the

war as a golden opportunity for communist expansion: ―[T]he Soviet government

made clear in its Comintern circular of September 1939 that stimulation of the

‗second imperialist war‘ was in the interests of the Soviet Union and of world

revolution, while maintaining the peace was not.‖6

Foolish as he looked after Hitler‘s double-cross in 1941, Stalin‘s assessment was

correct. After World War II, the USSR installed communist regimes throughout

Eastern Europe. More significantly, JAPAN‘s defeat created a power vacuum in Asia,

allowing Mao Zedong to establish a Leninist dictatorship in mainland China. The

European puppets closely followed the Soviet model, but their greater prewar level

of development made the transition less deadly. Mao, in contrast, pursued even

more radical economic policies than Stalin, culminating in the Great Leap Forward

(1958–1960). Thirty million Chinese starved to death in a rerun of Soviet

collectivization.

After Stalin‘s death in 1953, the economic policies of the Soviet Union and its

European satellites moderated. Most slave laborers were released, and the camps

became prisons for dissidents instead of enterprises for the cheap harvest of

remote resources. Communist regimes put more emphasis on consumer goods and

food production, and less on the military. But their economic pedigree remained

obvious. Military strength was the priority, and consumer goods and food were an

afterthought.

The most common economic criticism of the Soviet bloc has long been its failure to

use incentives. This is a half-truth.7 As Hedrick Smith explained in The Russians, the

party leadership used incentives in the sectors where it really wanted results:

76

Not only do defense and space efforts get top national priority and funding, but they also

operate on a different system from the rest of the economy. Samuel Pisar, an American lawyer,

writer, and consultant on East-West trade, made the shrewd observation to me that the military

sector is “the only sector of the Soviet economy which operates like a market economy, in the

sense that the customers pull out of the economic mechanism the kinds of weaponry they want..

. . The military, like customers in the West . . . can say, „No, no, no, that isn‟t what we want.‟”8

In a sense, the collapse of communism would not have surprised Lenin. Lenin knew

that the party needed terror until it had solid popular support. When Mikhail

Gorbachev assumed power, popular support had not materialized even in the USSR,

much less in its European satellites. Gorbachev dismantled the apparatus of terror

with blinding speed, undoing seven decades of intimidation in a few years. The

result was the rapid end of communism in the satellites in 1989, followed by the

disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. A patchwork quilt of nationalisms proved

far more popular than MARXISM-Leninism ever was.

Figure 1 Normal Industrialization and the PPF

Figure 2 Communist Industrialization and the PPF

77

Much, but not all, of the former Soviet bloc now has markedly more economic and

political freedom—changes visible respectively in the Economic Freedom of the

World (EFW) study and Freedom House (FH) country rankings (Table 1). In 1988,

the republics of the Soviet Union had ECONOMIC FREEDOMscores below 1.9 In the

same year, Freedom House classified the entire Soviet bloc as ―not free,‖ except for

―partly free‖ Poland and Hungary.

Free-market reforms have been harshly criticized, especially the drastic reforms

derided as ―shock therapy.‖ But the countries that reformed the most have seen the

greatest rise in their standard of living, and those that resist change continue to do

poorly.10 Critics lament large measured declines in output, but much of the ―lost

output‖ consists in products for which there was little consumer demand in the first

place. Many former communist nations suffered HYPERINFLATION, but only

because—ignoring all sensible economic advice—they printed money to cover

massive budget deficits. The ―shock therapy‖ prescription would have been to slash

government spending and/or sell more state assets.

Table 1 The Rise in Economic Freedom (EFW) and Political Freedom (FH)

Country 2002 Economic Freedom Score 2002 Political Freedom Classification

Bulgaria 6.0 F

Czech Republic 6.9 F

Estonia 7.7 F

Hungary 7.3 F

Latvia 7.0 F

Lithuania 6.8 F

Poland 6.4 F

Romania 5.4 F

Russia 5.0 PF

Slovak Republic 6.6 F

Ukraine 5.3 PF

Sources: http://www.freetheworld.com/2004/2004dataset.xls;http://www.freedomhouse.org/ratings/allscor

e04.xls.

Notes: EFW scores range, 0–10, 10 being freest; Freedom House classifies countries as free (F), partly free

(PF), or not free (NF).

78

China followed a different path away from communism. After the death of Mao in

1976, his successors essentially privatized agriculture, allowing relatively normal

development to begin. Economic freedom increased significantly, but China remains

a one-party dictatorship. Some attribute its impressive ECONOMIC GROWTH to this

combination of moderate economic freedom and authoritarian rule. In large part,

however, the growth reflects the abject poverty of Maoist China; it is easy to double

production if you start near zero.

During the twentieth century, avowed socialists came to power around the world,

but only the followers of Lenin approximated the original goal of abolishing private

property in the means of production. Dictatorship and terror were the necessary

means, and few noncommunist politicians wholeheartedly embraced them. The

communists‘ willingness to wage total war on their own people sets them apart.

About the Author

Bryan Caplan is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. His Web page

is www.bcaplan.com.

Reproduced from http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Communism.html

79

Marxism

by David L. Prychitko

More than a century after his death, KARL MARX remains one of the most

controversial figures in the Western world. His relentless criticism

of CAPITALISM and his corresponding promise of an inevitable, harmonious

socialist future inspired a revolution of global proportions. It seemed that—

with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the spread

of COMMUNISM throughout Eastern Europe—the Marxist dream had firmly

taken root during the first half of the twentieth century.

That dream collapsed before the century had ended. The people of Poland,

Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania,

and the USSR rejected Marxist ideology and entered a remarkable transition toward

private PROPERTY RIGHTS and the market-exchange system, one that is still

occurring. Which aspects of Marxism created such a powerful revolutionary force?

And what explains its eventual demise? The answers lie in some general

characteristics of Marxism—its economics, social theory, and overall vision.

Labor Theory of Value

The labor theory of value is a major pillar of traditional Marxian economics, which is

evident in Marx‘s masterpiece, Capital (1867). The theory‘s basic claim is simple:

the value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average number of

labor hours required to produce that commodity.

If a pair of shoes usually takes twice as long to produce as a pair of pants, for

example, then shoes are twice as valuable as pants. In the long run, the

competitive price of shoes will be twice the price of pants, regardless of the value of

the physical inputs.

Although the labor theory of value is demonstrably false, it prevailed among

classical economists through the mid-nineteenth century. ADAM SMITH, for

instance, flirted with a labor theory of value in his classic defense of capitalism, The

Wealth of Nations (1776), and DAVID RICARDO later systematized it in

his Principles of Political Economy(1817), a text studied by generations of free-

market economists.

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So the labor theory of value was not unique to Marxism. Marx did attempt,

however, to turn the theory against the champions of capitalism, pushing the

theory in a direction that most classical economists hesitated to follow. Marx argued

that the theory could explain the value of all commodities, including the commodity

that workers sell to capitalists for a wage. Marx called this commodity ―labor

power.‖

Labor power is the worker‘s capacity to produce goods and services. Marx, using

principles of classical economics, explained that the value of labor power must

depend on the number of labor hours it takes society, on average, to feed, clothe,

and shelter a worker so that he or she has the capacity to work. In other words, the

long-run wage workers receive will depend on the number of labor hours it takes to

produce a person who is fit for work. Suppose five hours of labor are needed to

feed, clothe, and protect a worker each day so that the worker is fit for work the

following morning. If one labor hour equaled one dollar, the correct wage would be

five dollars per day.

Marx then asked an apparently devastating question: if all goods and services in a

capitalist society tend to be sold at prices (and wages) that reflect their true value

(measured by labor hours), how can it be that capitalists enjoy PROFITS—even if

only in the short run? How do capitalists manage to squeeze out a residual between

total revenue and total costs?

Capitalists, Marx answered, must enjoy a privileged and powerful position as

owners of the means of production and are therefore able to ruthlessly exploit

workers. Although the capitalist pays workers the correct wage, somehow—Marx

was terribly vague here—the capitalist makes workers work more hours than are

needed to create the worker‘s labor power. If the capitalist pays each worker five

dollars per day, he can require workers to work, say, twelve hours per day—a not

uncommon workday during Marx‘s time. Hence, if one labor hour equals one dollar,

workers produce twelve dollars‘ worth of products for the capitalist but are paid

only five. The bottom line: capitalists extract ―surplus value‖ from the workers and

enjoy monetary profits.

Although Marx tried to use the labor theory of value against capitalism by

stretching it to its limits, he unintentionally demonstrated the weakness of the

81

theory‘s logic and underlying assumptions. Marx was correct when he claimed that

classical economists failed to adequately explain capitalist profits. But Marx failed as

well. By the late nineteenth century, the economics profession rejected the labor

theory of value. Mainstream economists now believe that capitalists do not earn

profits by exploiting workers (see PROFITS). Instead, they believe, entrepreneurial

capitalists earn profits by forgoing current consumption, by taking risks, and by

organizing production.

Alienation

There is more to Marxism, however, than the labor theory of value and Marx‘s

criticism of profit seeking. Marx wove economics and philosophy together to

construct a grand theory of human history and social change. His concept of

alienation, for example, first articulated in his Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844, plays a key role in his criticism of capitalism.

Marx believed that people, by nature, are free, creative beings who have the

potential to totally transform the world. But he observed that the modern,

technologically developed world is apparently beyond our full control. Marx

condemned the FREE MARKET, for instance, as being ―anarchic,‖ or ungoverned. He

maintained that the way the market economy is coordinated—through the

spontaneous purchase and sale of private property dictated by the laws

of SUPPLY and DEMAND—blocks our ability to take control of our individual and

collective destinies.

Marx condemned capitalism as a system that alienates the masses. His reasoning

was as follows: although workers produce things for the market, market forces, not

workers, control things. People are required to work for capitalists who have full

control over the means of production and maintain power in the workplace. Work,

he said, becomes degrading, monotonous, and suitable for machines rather than for

free, creative people. In the end, people themselves become objects—robot-like

mechanisms that have lost touch with human nature, that make decisions based on

cold profit-and-loss considerations, with little concern for human worth and need.

Marx concluded that capitalism blocks our capacity to create our own humane

society.

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Marx‘s notion of alienation rests on a crucial but shaky assumption. It assumes that

people can successfully abolish an advanced, market-based society and replace it

with a democratic, comprehensively planned society. Marx claimed that we are

alienated not only because many of us toil in tedious, perhaps even degrading,

jobs, or because by competing in the marketplace we tend to place profitability

above human need. The issue is not about toil versus happiness. We are alienated,

he maintained, because we have not yet designed a society that is fully planned

and controlled, a society without COMPETITION, profits and losses, money, private

property, and so on—a society that, Marx predicted, must inevitably appear as the

world advances through history.

Here is the greatest problem with Marx‘s theory of alienation: even with the latest

developments in computer technology, we cannot create a comprehensively

planned system that puts an end to scarcity and uncertainty. But for Marxists to

speak of alienation under capitalism, they must assume that a successfully planned

world is possible. That is, Marx believed that under capitalism we are ―alienated‖ or

―separated‖ from our potential to creatively plan and control our collective fate. But

if comprehensive socialist planning fails to work in practice—if, indeed, it is an

impossibility, as we have learned from MISES and Hayek—then we cannot be

―alienated‖ in Marx‘s use of the term. We cannot really be ―separated‖ from our

―potential‖ to comprehensively plan the economy if comprehensive planning is

impossible.

Scientific Socialism

A staunch anti-utopian, Marx claimed that his criticism of capitalism was based on

the latest developments in science. He called his theory ―scientific socialism‖ to

clearly distinguish his approach from that of other socialists (Henri de Saint-Simon

and Charles Fourier, for instance), who seemed more content to dream about some

future ideal society without comprehending how existing society really worked (see

SOCIALISM).

Marx‘s scientific socialism combined his economics and philosophy—including his

theory of value and the concept of alienation—to demonstrate that throughout the

course of human history, a profound struggle has developed between the ―haves‖

and the ―have-nots.‖ Specifically, Marx claimed that capitalism has ruptured into a

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war between two classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class that owns the means

of production) and the proletariat (the working class, which is at the mercy of the

capitalists). Marx claimed that he had discovered the laws of history, laws that

expose the contradictions of capitalism and the necessity of the class struggle.

Marx predicted that competition among capitalists would grow so fierce that,

eventually, most capitalists would go bankrupt, leaving only a handful of

monopolists controlling nearly all production. This, to Marx, was one of the

contradictions of capitalism: competition, instead of creating better products at

lower prices for consumers, in the long run creates MONOPOLY, which exploits

workers and consumers alike. What happens to the former capitalists? They fall into

the ranks of the proletariat, creating a greater supply of labor, a fall in wages, and

what Marx called a growing reserve army of the unemployed. Also, thought Marx,

the anarchic, unplanned nature of a complex market economy is prone to economic

crises as supplies and demands become mismatched, causing huge swings in

business activity and, ultimately, severe economic depressions.

The more advanced the capitalist economy becomes, Marx argued, the greater

these contradictions and conflicts. The more capitalism creates wealth, the more it

sows the seeds of its own destruction. Ultimately, the proletariat will realize that it

has the collective power to overthrow the few remaining capitalists and, with them,

the whole system.

The entire capitalist system—with its private property, money, market exchange,

profit-and-loss accounting, labor markets, and so on—must be abolished, thought

Marx, and replaced with a fully planned, self-managed economic system that brings

a complete and utter end to exploitation and alienation. A socialist revolution,

argued Marx, is inevitable.

An Appraisal

Marx was surely a profound thinker who won legions of supporters around the

world. But his predictions have not withstood the test of time. Although capitalist

markets have changed over the past 150 years, competition has not devolved into

monopoly. Real wages have risen and profit rates have not declined. Nor has a

reserve army of the unemployed developed. We do have bouts with the business

cycle, but more and more economists believe that significant recessions and

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depressions may be more the unintended result of state intervention

(through MONETARY POLICY carried out by central banks and government policies

on TAXATION and spending) than an inherent feature of markets as such.

Socialist revolutions, to be sure, have occurred throughout the world, but never

where Marx‘s theory had predicted—in the most advanced capitalist countries. On

the contrary, socialism was forced on poor, so-called Third World countries. And

those revolutions unwittingly condemned the masses to systemic poverty and

political dictatorship. In practice, socialism absolutely failed to create the non-

alienated, self-managed, and fully planned society. It failed to emancipate the

masses and instead crushed them with statism, domination, and the terrifying

abuse of state power.

Nations that have allowed for private property rights and full-blown market

exchange, in contrast to those ―democratic socialist republics‖ of the twentieth

century, have enjoyed remarkable levels of long-term ECONOMIC GROWTH. Free-

market economies lift the masses from poverty and create the necessary

institutional conditions for overall political freedom.

Marx just didn‘t get it. Nor did his followers. Marx‘s theory of value, his philosophy

of human nature, and his claims to have uncovered the laws of history fit together

to offer a complex and grand vision of a new world order. If the first three-quarters

of the twentieth century provided a testing ground for that vision, the end of the

century demonstrates its truly utopian nature and ultimate un-workability.

In the wake of communism‘s collapse, traditional Marxism, which so many

mainstream economists criticized relentlessly for decades, is now seriously

questioned by a growing number of disillusioned radicals and former Marxists.

Today there is a vibrant post-Marxism, associated with the efforts of those active in

the scholarly journal Rethinking Marxism, for instance. Rather than trying to solve

esoteric puzzles about the labor theory of value or offering new theoretical models

of a planned economy, many of today‘s sharpest post-Marxists appreciate marginal

analysis and the knowledge and incentive problems of collective action. In this new

literature, FRIEDRICH HAYEK seems to be getting a more positive reception than

Marx himself. Exactly what will come out of these developments is hard to predict,

but it is unlikely to look like the Marxism of the past.

85

About the Author

David L. Prychitko is an economics professor at Northern Michigan University.

Reproduced from http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marxism.html

86

Theatrical

As outlined in a manifesto written in 1927 by Victor Hugo featured in the preface to his play

Cromwell, Romanticism was a response to Neo-Classicism. He first states that the Neo-classical

laws of dramatic unity are useless. The only laws that should be adhered to in artistic creation are

those of nature. Additionally, the stage should claim its natural freedom of time and place

allowing for that which is inspiring as well as detestable to exist together as they do in life. Hugo

was objecting to the exclusion of that duality on the stage. At the premier of Hernani at the

Theatre Francais, he applied these ideas and the production caused a riot, which was the first of

many instances where violence was inspired.

The characteristics of drama produced in this era (19th

Century) featured sensational story-lines

meant to stir up an emotional response, in addition to unmatched moral sentimentality. This

period also featured the development of domestic drama or melodrama in American and British

theater featuring stock characters and a simple formula for story-telling that is still in use by

popular media today.

It featured the matter of vice over virtue where virtue would always overcome. The style of

acting also contributed to the simplicity of the formula with bold, confident gestures often

reinforced by a rhetorical speech.

What became known best about this time was the creation of the ―well-made play‖ which

categorized any mechanically written play that placed emphasis on creating an efficient plot. The

detail of adding a moral point came as a later innovation by the French.

When realism eventually made an appearance on the scene the result was not altogether

pleasant. In fact the response was generally one of shock and unpleasantness. The realists of the

time were in rebellion against romantic situations, because people were eventually coming to

their senses and not requiring an escape. Instead, a need to see on stage what could be verified by

observing ordinary life began to take priority. Dialogue was created with the goal of avoiding

poetic flights or excessive sentiment.

Naturalism was another route being introduced as well with plays and stories that represented

the instinctive behavior of men and women. The characters and situations had to appear to be

like their class or age group, sex or economic group which would also unfortunately include the

loss of individuality. The effort was in trying to show that powerful forces govern human lives,

which we might not be aware or have little control of, such as heredity or the environment. This

movement began with novelist and eventual playwright Emile Zola. He first used literature to

make his outline for this theory, conceding that theater had specific conventions which were

harder to alter without popular involvement. He did turn some of his novels into plays and

created situations of study where he could scientifically explore the repercussions for his

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characters when faced with issues related to their environment or background. In most cases he

came to the conclusion that they were victims of society.

In Germany, when in 1866 Georg II became the Duke of Sax Meiningen he continued the trend

of theatrical practice with realism as the guiding theory. He was very devoted to the theater, and

on an intellectual level far superior to many that had come before him. His involvement paved

the way for the role of the artistic director within a theater company. He also established the

importance of an ensemble in the process of putting on a production by hiring specific members

of the cast to perform these roles exclusively. In the overall aesthetic appeal of a production, he

avoided symmetry in staging, always tried to create a sense of motion on stage, and made sure

that every detail was arranged so that the illusion of real life was achieved.

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Expressionism

Theatrical practice emerged in 20th

Century Germany as a response to industrialization and

mechanization of the masses which eventually led up to World War I. The most common

element achieved in expressionism was anti-realism. The term was first applied to painting and

used to convey the inner idea or vision that relates to what is being perceived, rather than an

impression. There was no specific aesthetic to follow, just a definite rejection of reality.

In most cases the category of expressionism was applied to dramatic work after the fact - for

instance in the plays of Georg Büchner. Although he died at a very young age, his work was not

performed in his lifetime. It wasn‘t for almost half a century following his death that society

seemed ready to experience it. Woyzek was first published in 1879. Once the trend caught on,

other playwrights took to the experience of writing in this form.

In Germany specifically, it was known as the drama of protest with content written in direct

reaction to pre-war authority, the rigid lines of the social order, and eventually in response to

industrialization of society and the mechanization of life. This school of thought glorified the

individual and idealized creativity. Also, with the advent of Freud and Jung in the early part of

the 20th

Century, playwrights began to unearth secret, hidden states of mind.

The impact of the World War I and the mass slaughter that came with newly implemented trench

warfare began to undermine the personal and subjective content. This led instead to a concern for

man and society - bringing expressionist drama into the realm of influence by Marxist theory and

political radicalism.

This genre featured episodic, dreamlike story-lines, but only in terms of deconstructing the idea

of the well-made play. It did not go into a surrealistic realm - just dream-like enough to reveal

the true, inner identity of the characters featured.

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Characteristics of Expressionism

Atmosphere - Vividly dreamlike and nightmarish, with a shadowy, unrealistic mood.

Sometimes lighting is utilized to visually distort the physical environment.

Settings - Abstract and not specific to a location; they regularly appeared angular or

distorted; properties utilized were few, but generally symbolic.

Plot Structure - Episodic, and sequentially significant to whomever the play was focused on.

Characters - Individuality and psychology is lost. These are often referred to as nameless

entities, such as The Mother or The Child. Sometimes grotesquely depicted

such as having large shifty eyes, or bird-like hands

Crowds - If they were featured, they were usually impersonalized - moving as a mass,

and often very mechanically and to an underlying rhythm.

Acting Style - Performed with deliberate departure from realism. Sometimes mechanical,

puppet-like movements might be taken up - with broad execution. intense,

violent, ecstatic, expressing emotions of torment- speech rapid and

breathless - staccato with gestured movement that was urgent and infused with

the same energy

Dialogue - Clipped, telegraphic, fragmentary, not realistic. The alternative is very

expressive and rhapsodic - and this could vary throughout a piece from one

extreme to the next.

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Forerunners of Expressionism

Georg Buchner (1813-1837)

Woyzek (1913)

Danton’s Death (1902)

Frank Wedekind (1864-1918)

Spring’s Awakening (1906)

The Lulu Plays (1898, 1905)

August Strindberg

A Dream Play (1902)

The Ghost Sonata (1907)

To Damascus (1898)

Georg Kaiser (1878-1945)

The Burghers of Calais

From Morn to Midnight

Gas

Brecht greatly admired him

Famous quote - ―To write a play is to think a thought through to the end.‖

His plays were banned in 1933 with the advent of Hitler‘s reign

Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980)

Murderer, The Hope of Women

Ernst Toller (1893-1939)

Masses and Man

Die Wand Lung (The Transformation) (1919)

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Epic Theater

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Introduction

Generally synonymous with Bertolt Brecht, the dawn of epic theater actually occurred in the

work of Marxist director Erwin Piscator who, with assistance from Brecht in the early 20s,

developed a plan that would create a platform for encouraging public discussion of political and

social issues. They coined the style ―epische theatre‖ (epic theater). Brecht eventually parted

ways with Piscator on the basis of practice methods, but together they developed the theory.

The idea was to provide the existing forms with a new clarity so that social and moral purposes

were introduced to the medium. Furthermore, the stage was to become a political agency. In

Brecht‘s view, this idea would transform the work of both playwright and the actor by breaking

down all previously conceived conventions, and additionally the audience became a focal point,

as Piscator‘s philosophy was that no theater could exist without a spectator. The difference from

previous methods is that the spectators were expected to be an active participant, rather than a

passive presence. So the actor‘s focus in performance shifted from not acknowledging the

audience at all, to engaging in active conversation with them throughout a performance.

Epic playing was to be a rational report on social and political themes, rather than inspiring

empathy. It needed to be free of realism in order to open its content for inspection by the

audience. Therefore, in theory Brecht demanded that all theater artists involved in the process of

its creation - from writer to designer should be fostering the alienation effect by introducing each

artist‘s contribution as a separate entity.

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Characteristics of Epic Theater

The Actor - The style required the actor to show rather than imitate. Brecht sometimes went so

far as to have his actors speak in the third-person or even read the stage directions in order to

achieve this application. This new kind of technique provided that actors were not improvising

their emotions, but instead offering commentary on them. However, in order to provide

commentary the actors did have to undergo a process of identification with the role. The catch is

that Brecht then asked each performer to go a step further, to play the result of any given

situation, but also play the thought which lead to the creation of the result. Brecht was further

following his trend of contradictions by incorporating this mixture of styles. In this process, he

unlocked the inconsistencies and contradictions of the moments within the play, which laid a

foundation for verfremdungseffekt to occur.

Set Designer - Did away with any sort of illusion or symbolism, constructing a set only to the

needs of the actor. There was definitely no suggestion of a fourth wall, and aside from props the

stage would be bare. Any changes to the set would happen in full view of the audience, and any

sort of curtain that was necessary would just be strung up. This encouraged a lack of separation

from the audience so that speaking to them was readily accessible.

Playwright - The play was structured episodically so that the montage effect could occur. The

pieces were written so that each episode was preceded b y a title which would stay in view of the

audience throughout the entire scene, to be replaced by a new one at the top of the new scene.

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These should offer the action of the scene as though it were being presented as an historical

account.

Director - They were to arrange the visual aspects of the stage - actors, setting, etc. as a means

of clarifying the social structure, instead of creating some beautiful composition. All elements

were activated as a means of furthering the platform for social/political commentary.

Lighting Designer - They illuminated the action on stage and without hiding the source. They‘d

light the stage with a plain white light so that the actors appeared to be in the same environment

as the audience.

Composer - This individual utilized music to express their own perspective on the themes of the

material, and when put with the action of the piece it would sometimes convey a contradiction

with what the characters are actually doing. This further reinforced the separation effect, and is

yet another element potentially keeping the audience aware they are watching theater rather than

getting lost in the experience of it.

Any method that would continue to keep the audience conscious of their time in the theater and

in tune to the social/political message being conveyed was employed.

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Initially Brecht‘s material was created for shock value, but as he matured his means of story-

telling expanded to become more coherent and understandable to audiences allowing for his later

plays to achieve the ―great‖ status. The Good Woman (Person/Soul) of Szechuan written during

his period of exile with the assistance of Ruther Berlau and Margarete Steffin falls into that

category. It has been noted that with the need to leave his home land, and without the resources

to develop his material as usual in rehearsals, he was forced to find new methods and inspiration

for creativity. This led to a series of unsuccessful theatrical experiences, but in the meantime his

writing kept on in the form of original and adapted pieces. It wasn‘t until he returned to Berlin

and began management of his Berliner Ensemble that he found success again. The transition was

easier, given that he had a space and company of actors to work with. They are still in practice

today, as Helen Weigel and others kept his legacy alive following his death in 1956.

Web site of the Berliner Ensemble

http://www.berliner-ensemble.de/

THEATER AM SCHIFFBAUERDAMM Photos reproduced from http://www.berliner-ensemble.de/

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Epic Theater Terminology

Verfremdungseffekt - Attempts at translation have coined this as the ―alienation effect‖ - the

practice promotes introducing details of a show in a way that the familiar seems strange, or what

we know to be true is now contradicted. This tactic was supposed to engage the mind, and when

applied at liberty within any aspect of presenting a production would hopefully induce constant

awareness and rationale among an audience, rather than emotional involvement.

Gestus - Everything an actor does (in terms of gesture, stance, what we now refer to as ―body-

language‖, also vocal intonation) in order to show the significance of a scene. Brecht believed

that it might be possible eventually to develop a form of dialogue compelling the actor to display

the correct ―Gestus‖. However, the process as it was practiced maintained that the director was

responsible for achieving this with the actors, and it was accomplished by keeping detailed

records of experimentation in rehearsals.

Modellbuch - Brecht‘s rehearsal process included daily experimentation until satisfaction with

finding the best possible combination of elements for telling the story was achieved. Throughout

this process, the designer would create sketches of key moments which, upon reaching a clear

narrative, would be officially photographed while in production and compiled as a history of the

practiced methods. This document was not meant to dictate how a piece should be staged in

future productions, but it was a representation of how it had worked best, and was then available

for any subsequent productions. Brecht felt that it was important to have some visual

representation for future directors and designers to reference, because if provided only the script,

it was merely the language of the piece -a single element. This is turn was not a complete

representation of all the elements that went into producing the material. For epic theater practice

to be effective, emphasis was placed on the synthesis of all separately applied components.

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Brecht’s Collective

Brecht formed a writing collective which became prolific and very influential in the development

of material and theoretical processes attributed to him. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin,

Emil Burri, Ruth Berlau and others worked with Brecht to produce multiple works in the mid-

20s and early 30s leading to his period of exile. Into his period of exile, Margarete Steffin and

Ruth Berlau accompanied the Brecht clan to the various locations in Europe where they sought

refuge.

Over the years, especially since he passed away, much of the dramatic material credited solely to

Brecht as the author was actually written with the help of one or more collaborators - with those

various other parties being responsible for much of the narrative content.

Another aspect of this reality to note is that in his negotiations with his publisher Propyläen,

which garnered a very nice stipend upon the successful publication of Brecht‘s literary and

dramatic works, a loophole was discovered. The firm could not collect royalties on works in

collaboration, as their contract excluded plays that were ―written with others.‖ So Brecht then

continued to write almost all of his plays with other collaborators. He was a very advantageous

and shrewd businessman. Never thinking twice about taking ideas and using them for his own

means - incidentally never apologizing when he crossed the line in the process. People were

always willing to take the worst in order to work with him, and with any bridges burned, there

were always new admirers willing to ride the wave of his tumultuous, but creative artistic genius.

If not completely innovative in his theatrical practice, he certainly knew how to accomplish

results and did so with charisma and chutzpa. According to John Fuegi, Brecht was, ―Chutzpa

personified.‖ (p 42 Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan)

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Lehrstücke and Didactic Theater

Following his introduction to Marxist theory and literature in the early 1920s, Brecht, with the

help of Marxist philosopher, Walter Benjamin, was able to articulate the sensibilities of his

theatrical instincts. At least in terms of something that presently satisfied his desire for theatrical

creation. Coupled with a newfound formulaic focus and an introduction by Elisabeth Hauptmann

to English translations of Japanese Noh drama, Brecht developed a series of small-scale, but

socially dense plays known as Lehrstücke, or learning plays.

The intention behind Brecht‘s creation of these pieces was so they could be toured around at

schools and factories offering an educational experience to certain demographics about socio-

political issues. He was greatly interested in developing a means of offering audiences an

opportunity to actively participate in social awareness and action. This was a direct result of his

previous work with Marxist director Erwin Piscator in the early part of the 20th

century.

The Flight Of Lindbergh (Written 1928; first production 1929)

Written for the Baden-Baden music festival it is based on Charles Lindbergh‘s 1927

account of his flight across the Atlantic.

It had music by both Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill

Brecht removed Lindbergh‘s name from the project with a production presented in 1950,

because of his affiliations during the war as a Nazis supporter as well as bomb

technology interests.

The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (Written 1929; first production 1929)

"product of various theories of a musical, dramatic and political nature aiming at the

collective practice of the arts practice of the arts".

This short piece included multi-media aspects of performance such as clowning, choral

singing, and even a short film

He Who Says Yes; He Who Says No (Written 1929-30; first production 1930 - only of He

Who Says Yes

He Who Says Yes is based on the Japanese Noh drama Taniko or The Valley-Hurling as

translated by Elisabeth Hauptmann from the English version by Arthur Waley

A review of a recent staging of the production by the Berliner Ensemble can be found at

http://imomus.livejournal.com/222931.html.

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The Decision (Originally translated as The Measures Taken) (Written 1930; first

production 1930

Brecht himself described this piece as ‗not a play in the normal sense. It is an event put on by a

mass chorus and four players.‘ It takes the form of a report to the Central Committee of the

Communist Party by three agitators. From the beginning they advise the action that brought them

before the Committee - the killing of one of their comrades. The narrative unfolds when they

must provide an explanation of why this action took place, and provide a full-scale

demonstration of what led them to that action. The end of the piece comes when a verdict is

finally delivered by the Committee.

Collaborators: Slatan Dudow, Hans Eisler

Themes: The value of a human life; the individual vs. masses; Marxism; Communism

The Decision is described by several sources to have been a contentious piece. Despite its

impressive offering of sensory appeal through language and music, it poses questions

related to Marxism that are not clearly resolved and lends itself to being overshadowed

by political theories of the time that were not altogether pleasantly administered.

The Exception and the Rule (Written 1930; first production 1938)

This was a very short piece featuring a parable in regard to class structure and how one

can fall victim to it. It was of course arguing in favor of Marxism when it features a

conflict that exemplifies the rich getting away with murdering someone of a lower class.

The Mother (Written 1930-31; first production in 1938)

This piece provides a platform for commentary on what it means to be a good mother in a world

where social constructs make it hard to even exist as an individual, let alone someone with the

responsibility of caring for another individual who is rendered helpless to care for themselves.

These struggles are illustrated in a fourteen scene narrative following protagonist Pelagea

Vlassova as she deals through wit and humor with the ultimate task provided to any human

being.

Based on the novel by Maxim Gorky

Collaborators: Hanns Eisler, Slatan Dudow, Gunter Weisenborn

Themes: Capitalism, Humanism, Parental responsibility, Individuality, Nationalism

This has been noted as being the precursor to the creation of Mother Courage and Her

Children

Attached to the 1933 publication of this piece Brecht describes his aims for it:

Written in the style of the didactic pieces, but requiring actors, The Mother is a

piece of anti-metaphysical, materialistic, non-Aristotelian drama. This makes

nothing like such a free use as does the Aristotelian of the passive empathy of the

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spectator; it also relates differently to certain psychological effects, such as

catharsis. Just as it refrains from handing its hero over to the world as if it were

his inescapable fate, so it would not dream of handing the spectator over to an

inspiring theatrical experience. Anxious to teach the spectator a quite definite

practical attitude, directed towards changing the world, it must begin by making

him adopt in the theatre a quite different attitude from what he is used to. (Guide

to Plays of Bertolt Brecht pg 148-49)

Saint Joan of the Stockyards (written 1929-31; first production in 1959)

This is a version of the story of Joan of Arc in which Brecht names the girl Joan Dark, who is a

member of a Salvation Army type group located in 20th

Century Chicago. She is in social battle

with the wealthy owner of a meatpacking plant, Pierpont Mauler, and like her namesake is

doomed to be a martyr for the cause in a world where the working-class appear to stand for

equality, but in reality everyone is just trying to survive.

Collaborators: Hans Borchardt, Emil Burri, Elisabeth Hauptmann

Themes: The value of goodness in a wicked world; the contradiction between greed and

philanthropy among the wealthy; and the need for revolution if injustice and inequality

are to be ended.

Brecht attempted to tackle these themes with a new level of philosophy and analytical

objectivity, but in the end it was deemed an ambitious failure.

The Roundheads and the Peakheads (written 1931-34; first production in 1936)

This was one of the three longer learning plays

Brecht wrote it in collaboration with Margarete Steffin, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Emil

Burri - with music by Hanns Eisler.

It has been described as a satire against the Nazi party - it deals with issues of race and

superiority of

This was discussed as being Brecht‘s first attempt at a mainstream piece where

entertainment-appeal was taken into consideration; in Brecht‘s theoretical writings he

explains that it was also the first play where he consciously explored application of

verfremdungseffect, which was leading up to his period of exile where he wrote The

Good Woman of Setzuan.

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Glossary of Collaborators and Associates

Brecht collaborated with other artists throughout most of his career, and some see him as having

taken advantage of the ―intellectual property‖ of all the creative and intelligent individuals with

which he did draw inspiration and often material from. The genius that is Brecht reached beyond

mere creative prowess to the ability to attract others through charisma, and then managed to keep

them around despite ill-treatment or neglect. As much as he is documented to have exploited

those that grew to care about him within his creative social circle, very few people ever cut the

strings entirely, even when he did them wrong. This exemplifies his broad and ongoing appeal.

Not to mention that he definitely accomplished a lot when left to his own devices, with the

means and full control of producing theater. If ever he lost a collaborator, there were always

others ready and willing to work with him and share their own creative genius. The determining

factor was always in how much they were willing to give up in order to serve his creative needs.

With Brecht, in almost all cases, it was not a two-way street, and he never apologized for his

actions - no matter how badly he might have treated somebody in a moment of passion. Working

with Bertolt Brecht meant putting up with a lot, and giving up even more.

Erich Engle - Director - worked on film and theater projects with Brecht; was a senior director

with Brecht‘s Berliner ensemble. Produced the premier of The Threepenny Opera in 1928.

Erwin Faber - He was a leading actor following the First World War in Munich and other areas

of Germany - maintained that status through the 1970s. Worked with Brecht as a leading actor in

his first three stage productions - Drums In the Night, In the Jungle of the Cities, and The Life of

Edward II of England. Also worked with Brecht on film projects.

Lion Feuchtwanger - German-Jewish novelist, playwright; was able to introduce Brecht to

publishers and contacts enabling him to make a career for himself in Munich and Germany.

Around the same time he met Brecht, young Adolf Hitler had also approached him for aid, but

Feuchtwanger did not open doors for him like he did for Brecht. This anecdote is often written

with a perspective of, ―What would have happened if he had?‖ since Hitler obviously went in

another direction in pursuit of ―greatness.‖ In any case, he was the single contact that gave

Brecht‘s writing career a start.

Therese Giehse - Distinguished German actress who became a famous performer at the Munich

Kammerspiele. While in exile in Zurich she played the title role of Mother Courage in the world

premier production. She was a member of the Berliner Ensemble following World War II, and

life-long friend of Brecht‘s.

Elisabeth Hauptmann - Actress, collaborator/lover of Brecht‘s beginning in 1924. Provided the

German translation of John Gay‘s The Beggar’s Opera, for which The Threepenny Opera is

based. She was married to composer Paul Dessau in 1943 - following Brecht‘s death she worked

as a dramaturg for the Berliner Ensemble. Her relationship with Brecht was complicated and

tenuous at times, but she never completely stopped being involved with him.

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Paul Hindemith - German composer, musician, and conductor. Composed music for some of

Brecht‘s productions.

Oskar Homolka - Austrian film and theater actor - The Life of Edward II of England

Angelika Hurwicz - German actress, worked with the Berliner ensemble until 1958.

Herbert Ihering - Theater Critic - awarded Brecht with 1922 Kleist Award which launched his

career

Fritz Kortner - Stage and film actor - theater director - knew Brecht through working with Max

Reinhardt in Berlin

Wolfgang Langhoff - German theater, film and television actor - theater director; was in the first

productions of Brecht‘s Mother Courage and Her Children and The Life of Galileo.

Charles Laughton - English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and director.

Worked with Brecht on a new English version of The Life of Galileo, playing the title role in the

American premier in Los Angeles in 1947 as well as in New York later in the year.

Lotte Lenya - Austrian singer and actress, became the wife of Kurt Weill - collaborate with

Brecht and Weill on The Threepenny Opera as the original Pirate Jenny. She also sang the lead

in his The Seven Deadly Sins in 1933. She reprised her role in the English version of Threepenny

written by Marc Blitzstein winning a 1956 Tony Award for her performance.

Peter Lorre - Lived in Berlin in late 1920s and worked with Brecht, most notoriously as an

Actor in A Man’s a Man. He was also a part of the failed production of Happy End.

Ralph Manheim - Translator - translated works by Brecht in collaboration with John Willett.

Carola Neher - German Actress, lover/collaborator/secretary of Brecht‘s early on. He wrote the

role of Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera for her, but due to the death of her husband she

was unable to perform in the premier. She took the role on in later performances as well as in the

1931 German film version

Caspar Neher - childhood friend, Austrian-born scenic designer - well-known for his friendship

and career-long relationship with Bertolt Brecht. Worked mostly with Brecht‘s productions, but

also other directors in Germany such as Max Reindhardt and Erich Engel.

G.W. Pabst - Film director - worked on the 1931 film version of The Threepenny Opera.

Erwin Piscator - Director, Playwright - Expressionist - Epic Theater visionary - collaborated

with Brecht on developing the theory. Took on Brecht as an assistant with his theater collective

in the early 20s.

Margarete Steffin - German actress and writer - one of Brecht‘s closest collaborators.

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Carl Weber - Bertolt Brecht‘s directing assistant and dramaturg, as well as an actor with the

Berliner Ensemble in 1952. He stayed with the company as a director following Brecht‘s death.

Helen Weigel - Actress, second wife, Lead Berliner Ensemble as artistic director following

Brecht‘s death in 1956. Originated the roles of Pelagea Vlassova in The Mother, Brecht‘s

Antigone, Senora Carrar in Senora Carrar’s Rifles, as well as Mother Courage in Mother

Courage and Her Children.

Kurt Weill - Composer, The Threepenny Opera, A Happy End, The Little Mahagonny, Rise and

Fall of the City of Mahagonny

John Willett - Freelance writer, editor, translator, theater director and scholar. Worked on the

English translations for Life of Galileo, The Good Person of Setzuan, The Resistible Rise of

Arturo Ui, and Mother Courage and Her Children.

Karl Von Appen - German Set Designer; worked on Brecht‘s 1954 production of The

Caucasian Chalk Circle and the 1958 production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

Walter Benjamin - German- Jewish intellectual - Introduced to Marxism by Brecht and its

integration into the development of epic theater theory.

Eric Bentley - Critic, playwright, singer, editor, translator. Met Brecht at UCLA when he was

young. Has translated his works and is considered one of the foremost experts on Brecht.

Ruth Berghaus - German choreographer, opera and theater director. From 1954-64 she worked

with the Berliner Ensemble among other companies, and is well-known for her choreography

during the slaughter scenes of Brecht‘s adaptation of Coriolanus. She married composer Paul

Dessau in 1954, another of his collaborators which led to her directorship of the company from

then until 1977.

Ruth Berlau - Danish actress, collaborator on Good Woman of Sezuan among other works, and

was also one of Brecht‘s lovers specifically during his time of exile.

Berliner Ensemble - Ensemble created by Brecht following his return to Berlin after the period

of exile.

Benno Besson - Actor and Director - worked as a director with the Berliner Ensemble in 1949.

Arnolt Bronnen - Playwright, Expressionist - Brecht‘s stage directorial debut was to be

Bronnen‘s Parricide, but he left the project following an argument with the three actors. Bronnen

admired Brecht‘s work and even suggested he be the recipient of the Kleist Award for new

drama which Herbert Ihering followed the suggestion by awarded the prize to Brecht in 1922.

Ernst Busch - Singer and actor - worked with Brecht and Erwin Piscator in Berlin in 1945

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Paul Dessau - Composer/conductor/collaborator; composed a score for The Good Woman of

Szechaun that was approved by Brecht following the premier performance, and is the more well-

known version. Also composed music for Mother Courage and Her Children.

Slatan Dudow - Film director and screenwriter - collaborated with Brecht on The Mother and

The Decision;

Hanns Eisler - Austrian composer - worked with Brecht beginning in the late 20s when both

men were turning towards Marxism. He composed music for The Decision, The Mother, and

Schweik in the Second World War. Later on he worked on the film scores for Brecht‘s Hangmen

Also Die! And None but the Lonely Heart.

105

Bertolt Brecht: Poet,

Playwright, Author, etc.

106

Brecht’s Heroes

Frank Wedekind: Brecht first learned about Wedekind when he attended seminars with Arthur

Kutscher at the University of Munich, as the professor knew Wedekind personally, and often

shared his developing work with the students. Brecht came to know and obsess over Wedekind

as a playwright and poet who performed regularly in the cabarets, and he was a familiar figure on

the streets and stages of Munich.

François Villon - French poet who specialized in glorifying the down-trodden and socially

despicable persons of society, often relying on lewd jokes and parodied humor.

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud - French poet known for his travels and accused of being a

libertine - his poetry rested in themes of escape. One of two letters explaining his poetic

philosophy at one point states, ―The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the

senses.‖ He was also familiar to Brecht for his well-known affair with Symbolist poet Paul

Verlaine.

Through the writing of these men, Brecht found ways to come to terms with his own

development and sexuality. At one point early on he claimed himself to be first and foremost, a

poet, and secondly with more work a playwright. He contended that playwrighting took much

more effort and could sense he was not yet ready for that plight. His goals as a poet were to

emulate the work of Wedekind, Villon, Rimbaud, and Rudyard Kipling - hoping to capture the

essence of their kind of work with selections featuring violence and torrid love affairs between

men, women, animals, or sometimes all three.

Brecht followed his heroes loyally, Wedekind especially, what with how accessible experiencing

his work was. The poet often played with contradiction in the underbelly of society bringing

stories to life in his poems and songs that were colored with violence and bawdiness, continually

pushing socially conventional boundaries. Of watching Wedekind in performance Brecht wrote,

There he stood, ugly, brutal, dangerous with close-cropped red hari, hands in his trouser

ockets and one felt that the devil himself could not shift him. He came before the curtain

as ringmaster in a red tailcoat, carrying a whip and a brazen faun’s head with “eyes like

a gloomy owl’ set in immobile features.

With the influence of writers such as the aforementioned three, Brecht‘s tastes leaned toward the

contradictory and unconventional, especially where morality was concerned.

Georg Büchner - This was also an author up for discussion in the seminars at the University of

Munich, and Brecht appreciated the down to earth style of language with which Büchner chose

to write. This was not necessarily realistic, every day speech, but it was an escape from the grand

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prose known in the work of Schiller and Goete. Büchner also wrote some decades earlier about a

life that Brecht could relate to. Fuegi notes the affinity the two had in terms of the tone in

Brecht‘s earlier work and the following passage from Woyzeck:

Once upon a time there was a poor little girl who had no father and no mother. Everyone

was dead, and there was no one left on the whoin the whole wide world. And the little girl

went out and looked for someone night and day. And because there was no one left on

earth she wanted to go to heaven. And the moon looked down at her in a friendly way.

And when she finally got to the moon, it was a piece of rotten wood. And so she went to

the sun. And when she had got to the sun, it was a faded sunflower. And when she got to

the stars they were very little golden flies, stuck up there as though they were caught in a

spider’s web. And when she wanted to go back to the earth, she found that the earth was

a tipped over chamber pot. And she was all alone. And she sat down there and she wept.

And she sits there to this day, all alone.

In short, the early years featured a dark and edgy view of the world - and Brecht‘s own

summation of his prospective progress in 1920 was as follows:

In future, I shall produce nothing but flaming mud pies made of shit.

His tastes evolved to feature writing (and eventually theory) that was focused much more on

politics and social issues. He meandered his way into his early twenties with the goal of

commercial success, but upon discovering Marxism, he further developed his material as a

means of expressing his views with the desire to incite action and deliver the message to the

masses. With this new focus, Brecht‘s writing changed drastically from the unconventional and

shocking, to narratives which were more structured and coherent; less like compilations of songs

and poetry.

His early ideas and coming of age, however, would not have been shaped and channeled so

succinctly without influence from the work of the aforementioned individuals.

108

Making Love, Not War

―He made love, not war and wrote plays rather than political manifestos.‖

~ John Fuegi Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan

Brecht’s Women

Elisabeth Hauptmann

Margarete Steffin

Ruth Berlau

Helen Weigel

Marianne Zoff

Bie Banholzer

Carola Neher

Hedda Kuhn

Marieluise Fleisser

“When dealing with women, always remember to bring a whip.‖

- Brecht quoting Neitzche

There was in fact a whip next to the bed in his apartment at his family home in Augsburg. This

was recalled in Brecht & Co., by one of his numerous visitors.

From an early age he was well-acquainted and interested in sexual practices. Somewhat

disturbing to his parents and teachers, Brecht was eager to explore this aspect of life with any

opportunity that presented itself. He wasn‘t just intrigued by heterosexual relations, and had what

appeared to be an insatiable appetite. The attributes given to the character Baal are not unlike

Brecht‘s own existence from adolescence into early adulthood, when he was establishing himself

as an individual in creative society. His first sexual encounter with Bi Banholzer resulted in an

illegitimate child, which was of no real consequence to Brecht. He knew it was against social

propriety, but in some respects he took pleasure in challenging social conventions. Their

relationship did not work out however, because Bie could not marry Brecht.

He developed a very charismatic and magnetic presence which attracted many young ladies (and

men) to his side throughout his life. Most of his female collaborators were also his lovers at some

point, and even when he married Helen Weigel, she supported his absolute need for a non-

monogamous existence - even going so far as to care and feed all parties, as well as telling other

men to stay away from his ―lovers‖ so as not to upset him.

109

He lived a very contradictory existence with ample double-standards - this was the status quo in

both his personal and professional life. Brecht could bag, borrow and steal from any source, and

carry on with numerous sexual liaisons, but if in any situation an attempt was made to provide

him the same treatment, it was deemed outrageous. Personally, with his lovers he was

possessive, and generally attentive when in their presence. He was also able to make the rounds

to others, but they were not to take on other partners.

Hedda Kuhn, a woman he met at the University of Munich in the seminars, was one such lady

who did not adhere to his rules of engagement. Their affair did not last very long, and her writing

suffered because of the involvement. He took up most of her time and talent to attend to fixing

his own pieces. She was, like most of his collaborators, a much better writer of prose and

narrative content, but Brecht possessed the power and charisma necessary to attract and maintain

attention, and eventually the connections to actually do something with the work. His progress

led to theatrical dictatorship, but as previously advised, many were willing to jump on board and

support the cause. Perhaps they all could sense that he was onto something.

At times he did do tacky, insensitive things such as requiring his mistresses to wear a uniform

which he had tailor-made by the same tailor who created his wardrobe. This featured a close-

fitting woolen coat that reached almost to the ankles. The coat was never to be buttoned. Instead

the women had to keep one arm across their middle holding the coat closed. This clearly made

their presence as his mistress known publically - allowing for him to cultivate further shock and

contradiction of social conventions. Nevertheless, many were steadfast and true in their

allegiance to Brecht throughout his life. Tales of animosity and bitterness have since surfaced for

some, but overall, while being a real ―piece of work,‖ he was one that many were clamoring to

work with.

110

Dramatic, Literary, and Theoretical Works

Dramatic Works

Baal (1918)

Drums in the Night (1918-20)

The Beggar (1919)

A Respectable Wedding (1919/1926)

Driving Out a Devil (1919)

The Catch (1919)

In the Jungle of Cities (1921-24)

The Life of Edward II of England (1924)

Man Equals Man (1924-26)

The Elephant Calf (1924-26)

Little Mahagonny (1927)

The Threepenny Opera (1928)

The Flight Across the Ocean (1928-29)

The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (1929)

Happy End (1929)

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927–29)

He Said Yes/He Said No (1929-30)

The Decision (1930)

Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1929-31)

The Exception and the Rule (1930)

The Mother (1930-31)

Kuhle Wampe - screenplay (1931)

The Seven Deadly Sins (1933)

Round Heads and Pointed Heads (1931-34)

The Horatians and the Curiatians (1933-34)

Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1935-38)

Senora Carrar’s Rifles (1937)

Life of Galileo (1937-39)

How Much Is Your Iron? (1939)

Dansen (1939)

Mother Courage and Her Children (1938-39)

The Trial of Lucullus (1938-39)

111

The Condemnation of Lucullus (1938-39)

Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti (1940)

The Good Person of Szechwan (1939-42)

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)

The Visions of Simone Machard (1942-43)

The Duchess of Malfi (1943)

Schweik in the Second World War (1941-43)

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1943-45)

Antigone (1947)

The Days of the Commune (1948-49)

The Tutor (1950)

Report from Hernburg (1951)

Coriolanus (1951-53)

The Trial of Joan of Arc of Proven, 1431 (1952)

Turandot (1953-54)

Don Juan (1952)

Trumpets and Drums (1955)

Literary Works

Stories of Mr. Keuner

Theoretical Works

The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theater (1930)

The Threepenny Lawsuit 1931; published 1932

The Book of Changes (written 1935–1939)

The Street Scene (written 1938; published 1950)

The Popular and the Realistic (written 1938; published 1958)

Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect (written

1940; published 1951)

A Short Organum for the Theatre (written 1948; published 1949)

The Messingkauf Dialogues (published 1963)

112

APPENDIX

113

Miscellaneous

Song of Commodity / Supply and Demand From The Decisions/The Measures Taken

Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht; Music by Hanns Eisler

Rice can be had down the river.

People in the remoter provinces need their rice.

If we can keep that rice off the market

Rice is bound to get dearer.

Then the men who pull the barges must go short of rice

And I shall get my rice for even less.

By the way, what is rice?

Don‘t ask me what rice is.

Don‘t ask me my advice.

I‘ve no idea what rice is:

All I have learned is its price.

In winter time the coolies need warm clothing.

Then you must buy cotton so that

You can keep cotton off the market.

When a cold spell comes, then clothes get more expensive.

Our cotton spinning mills pay too high wages.

And cotton‘s too plentiful in any case.

By the way, what is cotton?

Don‘t ask me what cotton is.

Don‘t ask me my advice.

I‘ve no idea what cotton is:

All I have learned is its price.

Working men need too much feeding

And this makes a man‘s work dearer.

To provide for his feeding you need women.

Our cooks can make a meal cheaper but look at

Those eaters making it dearer.

And we could use more men here in any case.

By the way, what is a man?

Don‘t ask me what a man is.

Don‘t ask me my advice.

I‘ve no idea what a man is:

All I have learned is his price.

114

Bibliography

Bartram, Graham, and Anthony Edward Waine. Brecht in Perspective. New York: Longman,

1982.

Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Person of Szechwan. Trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1965.

Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Woman of Setzuan. Rev. ed. Trans. Eric Bentley. New York: Grove

Press, 1966.

Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Soul of Szechuan. Trans. David Harrower. London:

Methuen Drama, 2008.

Fuegi, John. Bertolt Brecht: chaos, according to plan. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1987.

Fuegi, John. Brecht and company: sex, politics, and the making of the modern drama. New

York: Grove Press, 1994.

Heilbroner, Robert. "Socialism: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics." Library of

Economics and Liberty. Liberty Fund, Inc., 2008. Web. 8 August 2011.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Socialism.html

Hessen, Robert. "Capitalism: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics." Library of Economics

and Liberty. Liberty Fund, Inc., 2008. Web. 8 August 2011.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Capitalism.html

Prychitko, David L. "Marxism: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics." Library of Economics

and Liberty. Liberty Fund, Inc., 2008. Web. 8 August 2011.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marxism.html

Richman, Sheldon. "Fascism: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics." Library of Economics

and Liberty. Liberty Fund, Inc., 2008. Web. 8 August 2011.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html

Styan, J. L.. Modern drama in theory and practice. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1981.

Unwin, Stephen. A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen, 2005.

"The Influence of Brecht." Www-dev.cs.brandeis.edu. 1995. Web. Aug.-Sept. 2011.

http://pages.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_influence.html

All pictures were reproduced from Google Images unless otherwise noted.

115

Sources Cited

Fuegi, John. Bertolt Brecht: chaos, according to plan. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1987.

Fuegi, John. Brecht and company: sex, politics, and the making of the modern drama. New

York: Grove Press, 1994.

Unwin, Stephen. A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen, 2005.

116

Annotated Bibliography

Fuegi, John. Bertolt Brecht: chaos, according to plan. New York: Cambridge University Press,

1987.

Fuegi, John. Brecht and company: sex, politics, and the making of the modern drama. New

York: Grove Press, 1994.

John Fuegi is a professor of comparative Germanic and Slavic literature of the University of

Maryland, the founder of the International Brecht Society and the managing editor of fourteen

volumes of its Proceedings. He is also the author of The Essential Brecht and Bertolt Brecht:

Chaos According to Plan. He co-directed the film on Ruth Berlau, ―Red Ruth‖, that won the

Danish TV Oscar in 1993 and a silver diploma of Berlin‘s Prix Futura. His sources were utilized

in written sections throughout this portfolio. He was the winner of a 1984 Guggenheim

Fellowship for German & Scandinavian Literature.

Unwin, Stephen. A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen, 2005.

Stephen Unwin is a theater director in the UK who has directed over fifty professional theatre

Productions after completing his studies at the University of Cambridge in 1981. He has

worked at various theatrical houses such as , at the Traverse, the National Theatre, the Royal

Court, and the Almeida directing over 50 professional productions and several operas.

He directed the post-war premier of Brecht/Eisler‘s The Decision (Almeida Music Festival). He

Was previously the founding Artistic Director of the English Touring Theatre with whom he has

directed a large number of classical plays of classical plays, including Hedda Gabler (Donmar)

and King Lear (Old Vic). In 2008 he left this post to become the second Artistic Director of The

Rose Theater in Kingston, a post he holds presently. His published credits include So You Want

to Be a Direct? (1988) and A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (2005) , and co-author of three

Pocket Guides: Shakespeare, Twentieth Century Drama, and Ibsen, Chekov and Strindberg. His

source was utilized for reference in different sections throughout the portfolio.