Brecht Upon Brecht
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Brecht Upon Brecht After 36 years, we have finally managed to catch up with Bertolt Brecht's equivalent of Titus Andronicus. Or have we? For the really pertinent...
...While neither of the two productions emerges as a clear-cut winner, Brecht himself may have quietly lost the decision...
...For the really pertinent question about the two rival productions of Mann 1st Mann currently scuffling for supremacy off-Broadway (Man Is Man, more or less faithfully translated by Gerhard Nellhaus, at the Living Theater...
...In the Masque production, Cliff James communicates a bloated monster of a Polly and Harvey Solin an icily sadistic Uriah, the two ringleaders of the squad effecting the transformation, but they don't belong in the same squad...
...Mann 1st Mann is actually one of the most remarkable plays of the modern theater...
...The victim happens to be Galy Gay, a simple innocent handy man from the docks of Kilkoa, India, somewhere back in the 1920s-though the time does not really matter: Queen Victoria still reigns...
...painted masks grotesque in their clownwhite, crimson and green, yet startingly and painfully human...
...It is about as "naive" as a drawing by Saul Steinberg or Ludwig Bemelmans...
...Galy Gay should be played by a master comedian who can also terrify (Peter Lorre was the original...
...Brecht's play is one of his most primitive moral parables, a ferocious, many-faceted cartoon chronicling in bold strokes the transformation of one kind of human being into another kind more suited to the rigors of his environment...
...Nor does the normal mode of conventionally realistic acting, with or without masks, suffice-any more than does conventional surrealismfor Brecht's blend of the Marx Brothers and Kafka...
...Neither John Heffernan (Masque) nor Joseph Chaikin comes close to making the character believable and his transformation horrifying, though Heffernan's use of himself as a warmachine at the end is technically skillful and gets the laughs...
...Sublety and variety are sacrificed to plain stage space...
...Most of the daily reviewers favored the Masque's more conventionally unconventional approach over the Living Theater's obvious curlicues...
...In the course of some most inhuman and yet quite understandable events, Galy Gay not too innocently changes before our very eyes into leriah Jip, "the human fighting-machine" of Her Majesty's army in old Injya...
...In neither production is the pivotal and outsize part of Sergeant Fairchild, "Bloody Five," ever properly defined...
...But both productions are far from a definitive or even first-class rendering of the play...
...and a framework device of treating the entire evening not only as vaudeville but as a recruiting poster...
...several found the play outdated or "old hat," and chided Brecht for being "naive," didactic, repetitious, as well as needlessly simple and/or complicated...
...As for being "old hat," it is still far ahead in its understanding and treatment of the dehumanization of man by man, brainwashing, corruption of identity, submergence of individuality, and other themes endemic to our times, theatrical and political...
...But what puts a plague on both houses are undersized stages and inadequate acting and stagecraft...
...Such bluntness is more compelling than Julian Beck's overly mannered and meandering production at the Living Theater...
...and A Man's A Man, somewhat freely adapted by Eric Bentley, at the Masque Theater) is not which one is better, which one to see or which one will win the battle of the blurbs, but how each version represents the intention and texture of the author...
...it almost crys out for Lotte Lenya...
...I agree that Bentley and his associates, notably director John Hancock, displayed superior theatricality and flair...
...At the Masque, it is true, there has been a deliberate attempt to stage Brecht's material (and Bentley's interpolations) with characteristic corrosiveness: dead-pan, honky-tonk rhythms (excellently derived from Kurt Weill by composer Joseph Raposo...
...scene-titles ironically telegraphing their messages ahead of each sardonic step in the great transformation...
...Brecht demands breadth, size and scope...
...in the two productions he remains cramped, his meanings and relationships confused...
...The small stages pose a formidable obstacle...
...And the shadowy but significant role of the Widow Begbick is similarly out of focus...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 21
