Posts Tagged ‘Bertolt Brecht’

Audrey Dundee Hannah and Jack Halton explore the Old Mint.

I received a note from actor-director Florentina Mocanu-Schendel a week or so ago, inviting me to the Collected Work’s new production of Jean Genet‘s The Balcony. It promises to be an unusual production. Here’s one reason why: it’s performed at the gloomy Old Mint in San Francisco – also known as the City’s “Granite Lady,” with its dark stone corridors and vaults. You can see at the two bottom photos exactly what I  mean, if the other photos don’t give you a feel for the place. (All photos, by the way, taken by Jamie Lyons, who co-directs the play with Michael Hunter.) The Granite Lady is a survivor, the only financial institution open for business after the 1906 earthquake. They thought it was an apt setting for a play about the struggle for institutional power.

San Francisco’s cheery landmark.

The Balcony is about a revolutionary uprising in the streets of an unnamed city. While armed rebels fight to take control of the city’s power structures, most of the action takes place in a brothel or “house of illusions,” where clients act out their fantasies of institutional power: they play judges, biships, and generals as their counterparts in the “real” world struggle to maintain their authority.

Important voices had lots to say about the controversial classic: Genet’s biographer, the critic Edmund White, wrote that, with the foregrounding of illusion and meta-theatricality i creating contemporary power and desire, Genet invented modern theater.  The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the play as the rebirth of the spirit of Aristophanes, while the philosopher Lucien Goldmann called it “the first great Brechtian play in French literature.” Martin Esslin has called The Balcony “one of the masterpieces of our time.”

Collected Works was founded in 2012 by a a group of theater directors, actors, and designers, mostly from the PhD program in drama at Stanford, where they had worked under the enlightened guidance of Carl Weber, who in turn had been the assistant director to Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. The San Francisco Weekly said the group is “hell-bent on bringing exceptional, experimental performance to the West Coast theater scene” – and in offbeat venues, too. Go here for more information.

We’ve written about Collected Works before, here, for it’s earlier production of Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona. This one definitely sounds like it’s worth checking out. Go here for times and tickets.

Right to left: Ryan Tacata (facing the wall) Scott Baker, Val Sinckler, and Florentina herself. (Photo: Jamie Lyons)

Ryan Tacata has a nightcap, with Valerie Fachman.

Val Sinckler ponders the script.

Ryan Tacata finds a lot to ponder, too.

Light-seeking missile

One of the joys of having office space in a major university library is that, well, you never have to go to the library.  You are already there.

On my way to the stairs I passed a book I had seen footnoted or recommended, somewhere – Hannah Arendt‘s Men in Dark Times.  It seemed to jump out at me from the shelves – so I grabbed the volume and continued on my way.

To posterity

Arendt lived in the long afterglow of the German Enlightenment, so it’s no surprise that this collection of essays, written from about 1955 to 1968 for various publications and occasions, should favor Germans – Lessing, Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht.  But there are some surprises, too – her friend Randall Jarrell, Isak Dineson, and Pope John XXIII, among others.

Why the title with its reference to “dark times”? She explains:

“I borrow the term from Brecht’s famous poem ‘To Posterity,’ which mentions the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair ‘when there was only wrong and no outrage,’ the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse. All this was real enough as it took place in public; there was nothing secret or mysterious about it. And still, it was by no means visible to all, nor was it at all easy to perceive it; for until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns.

No surprise.

When we think of dark times and of people living and moving in them, we have to take this camouflage, emanating from and spread by ‘the establishment’ – or ‘the system,’ as it was then called – also into account. If it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished by ‘credibility gaps’ and ‘invisible government,’ by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.

Let there be light.

…even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth – this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn.  Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter or secondary importance which can be safely left to posterity.”

Jane Horrocks as Shen Teh in 2008

What, exactly, is the title of the play? In the dark years between 1939 and 1941,  Bertolt Brecht wrote  The Good Woman of Szechuan – or sometimes its Szechwan. More commonly nowadays, the play is called The Good Person of Szechwan – or Szechuan. I’ve even found the occasional The Good Soul of Szechuan.

The original is “mensch” – a word that has more slangy connotations today. Elena Danielson, who said it’s one of her favorite plays, agrees that “person” doesn’t quite work, “a bit too sterile for ‘der gute Mensch.'”

On the other hand, without de-gendering the noun, how else would you keep the link to Genesis, where God promises to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if Abraham can find a handful of good men?  I also felt unexpected Job-like resonances in the play, when the gods come down to test the prostitute Shen Teh, known for her love for her neighbors, and someone who (again like Abraham) entertains angels unawares. Despite the gods’ insistence, Shen Teh says she’s not good, and learns after many trials, “To be good and to live splits me in two like lightning.”

Carl Weber with Florentina Mocanu (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

The three gods who visit the impoverished Szechuan claim,  “Many, even among the gods, doubted that there were any good people here.” Is it true, the gods wonder, that “good deeds destroy the doer”?

In any case, last week I finally got a chance to watch last year’s Trinity University production directed by Carl Weber, a protégé of Brecht and a veteran of the Berliner Ensemble. Carl loaned me the DVD after his return from Austen.

Charles Spencer, writing in The Telegraph about a production at the Young Vic in 2008, called the play “an utter stinker” with “glib Marxist sermonising.” Obviously, I don’t agree, though I think Brecht sets up a straw man of goodness – a “Saint Never-to-Be,” as one of one of the characters sings.  Goodness is more than being a patsy.

Tony Kushner's translation of Brecht

Nevertheless, only a few minutes into the DVD, I found myself scrawling down lines from the play.  No surprise – the translator is Carl’s former student and protégé, Tony Kushner, of Angels in America fame (he’s interviewed in my article on Carl here).

According to the gods, “This world can be redeemed if one person can be found who has over come this world – just one.”

The human characters in the play protest, “The world is too cold!” to sustain human charity, to which the gods offer their intransigent reply, “Because people are too weak!”

As for the Sodom-and-Gomorrah link – aha! I’m on to something.  According to an obscure footnote in Wikipedia:

Mallika Sarabhai in Indian adaptation

In Munich in 1924 Brecht had begun referring to some of the stranger aspects of life in post-putsch Bavaria under the codename ‘Mahagonny’. The Amerikanismus imagery appears in his first three ‘Mahagonny Songs’, with their Wild West references. With that, however, the project stalled for two and a half years. With Hauptmann, who wrote the two English-language ‘Mahagonny Songs’, Brecht had begun work on an opera to be called  Sodom and Gomorrah or The Man from Manhattan and a radio play called The Flood or ‘The Collapse of Miami, the Paradise City’, both of which came to underlie the new scheme with [Kurt] Weill.

I was prepared for didacticism, and I got it.  But I threaded through  Helen M. Whall‘s online “The Case is Altered: Brecht’s Use of Shakespeare” and found this: “In many ways the story of Szechwan is a parodic version of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Within that frame Brecht mocks many other Old and New Testament parables, including Elijah’s visit to a poor woman and Christ’s miracle at Cana.”

Well, call me thick – but I didn’t see it as parody or snark. Perhaps it was Tony Kushner’s luminous translation, or perhaps it was Carl’s skilled direction, even with amateur performers, that gave the play a sense of the miraculous as the gods come down among us, looking for a good man – or in this case, woman. Or maybe it was Brecht’s searching for new answers to very old questions:  What is goodness?  And can it survive uncorrupted in a world where “the hand you extend to the poor is torn from you,” as Shen Teh says? “The world cannot go on as it is.  No one can stay good here.”

I may have come up with different answers, but Brecht’s play, in Carl’s direction, for a few hours renewed my sense of wonder at this strange and tragic world.