The Theater of Farce and Horror

New York, 2018. 

We just returned from the theater after enjoying another play by Bertolt Brecht at the Classic Stage Company – The resistible rise of Arturo Ui.  

The play is a satirical allegory of Hitler’s rise to power, and of course, it’s not only about Hitler per se – Brecht clarified this in the play’s Epilogue:

Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard
the bitch that bore him is in heat again.

Brecht, who declared himself a Marxist, left Germany in 1933, a few days after the infamous Reichstag fire in Berlin, in anticipation of the Nazis’ coming to power and the repression that would soon follow. After bouncing around Europe for several years, he came to the US, where ironically, he was questioned by McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and, as a result immigrated back to post-war Soviet-style East Germany.  

While waiting for an American visa in 1941, Brecht converted his unfinished story about Adolf Hitler into a play. In that story, he presented Hitler as a corrupt Italian politician, Giacomo Ui. Keeping American audiences in mind, Brecht moved the plot from Italy to Chicago, adding a little flavor of the infamous gangster Al Capone to the protagonist, and titled the play “The resistible rise of Arturo Ui”.

Throughout his life, Brecht was enchanted by experimental and, sometimes, highly politicized theater that flourished in Germany in the 1920s. His friend, agitprop theater director, Asja Lazis, introduced him to the works of Russsian avant-garde writers – Meyerhold and Mayakovski, whose performances Brecht attended during Meyerhold’s tour of Europe.  

Brecht developed his own aesthetic principles rooted in epic theater philosophy and named his system Dialectical Theater. He, undoubtedly, was one of the most innovative playwrights, stage directors, and theater theorists of the first half of the 20th century.

In his plays, Brecht combined acute social drama and “kitchen satire” as his friend and collaborator, Asja Lazis, called it. Brecht interrupted the flow of dramatic action with bursts of sounds and lights, rearranged the set in full view, and “broke the fourth wall”, by actively and directly interacting with the audience, while also requiring comprehension from the spectators .

The Classic Stage Company, with its open space stage, where “all walls are broken”, is the perfect place to perform Brecht, and its Artistic Director, John Doyle, used his minimalist style to successfully implement the signature principles of Epic Theater in the current production of “The resistible rise of Arturo Ui”.

It was, certainly, not a “static bourgeois theater” performance that Brecht opposed with all his works, a performance that matched the lines in the play’s Epilogue:

If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce.

The cast contributed to the success of the CSC performance, to say the least.

Standout acting by Raul Esparza (Ui) with dynamic character development and transformation was a good illustration for one of the reasons why Brecht called his theater Dialectical.

Unlike Konstantin Stanislavsky’s “psychological realism”, where actors are supposed to make the audience be totally absorbed by the world of the play, Brecht, using his epic theater style, allows actors to play without becoming the characters, especially when one actor plays multiple roles. There are thirty roles and only eight actors in “The resistible rise of Arturo Ui”, not counting the loudly clucking fenced door that, in this production, became a character in itself.  

Thank you, Classic Stage Company, we spent a very pleasant night with you, as always.

On our way home after the play, we talked about Bertolt Brecht and that time in our youth, when we first learned about his life and his art.  

In Soviet Russia, where our roots come from, Brecht was introduced by Anatoliy Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik Secretary of Culture and the Arts, who saw his plays in Berlin. Lunacharsky was an admirer and a supporter of avant-garde arts – we already mentioned his role in our story about Marc Chagall.

Unfortunately, after a short “love affair” with Brecht – “The Three pence Opera” was staged at Tairov’s theater in Moscow in 1930s – Brecht’s plays and poems were not translated into Russian, and the few which had been, were never allowed to be performed. Brecht’s theatrical ideas appeared to be a little too radical for Stalin’s taste.

There was concern that plays by Brecht – and Mayakovsky as well – were too far removed from the accepted “socialist realism” in Soviet Russia, and that could have diminished the philosophy of Stanislavsky’s method approved by Stalin.

There was also concern that Brecht’s art would stimulate too much questioning in the audience – that was the core of the epic theater – instead of promoting a sense of happiness in the clueless masses. It was not only Brecht – all political and avant-garde theaters in Soviet Russia were destroyed and most of their leaders lost the ability to work. Some were sent to the GULAG, took their own life, like Mayakovsky, or tortured and killed, like Vsevolod Meyerhold.

After the death of Stalin, the ostracism of Brecht was slowly reversed to the shower of awards and publications. It was hard for Bolsheviks to acknowledge that they fought against a soul fellow, the author who had long been praised by the Western leftist intelligentsia as one of the greatest theatrical figures. True acceptance of Brecht’s art in Soviet Russia took place only after his death.

But, the staging of his plays in Soviet theaters, was yet another issue.

As we walked home, we remembered a story about one Brecht’s productions, directly related to our family. Tanya’s step-father, Konstantin Chernyadev, an Honored Art Worker of Russia, was the Artistic Director in Novosibirsk’s leading drama theater “Red Torch” (Красный Факел) at that time.

For years it was his dream to produce Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children”, but it seemed that there would be no chance for him to do it. When those wheels of fortune began to turn a little bit, he fought – or should we say, begged? – the Soviet Department of Culture for the permission to add that play to his theater’s repertoire.

It took months of negotiations at different levels of the Party’s bureaucratic machine, countless meetings and letters, as well as a great deal of his own health, until finally a compromise was reached. In the end, Party ideologists might have assumed that a popular drama theater in the largest Siberian city, thousands miles away from Moscow, would be a relatively safe place to promote Brecht.

Konstantin Chernyadev did get permission to direct “Mother Courage” in exchange for adding two propaganda plays by “ideologically correct” writers about fake socialist accomplishments in the Siberian village, the plays that he initially categorically rejected. For the honor to be the first to stage “Mother Courage” in Soviet Russia he would have, perhaps, agreed to even harsher conditions.

Later in his life, Konstantin Chernyadev produced several of Brecht’s plays, but whenever he spoke about his fight for “Mother Courage”, he always got emotional …

We have a lot more to say about the life and work of Konstantin Chernyadev… but that will be another story.