Session 2, Part 1: Bertolt Brecht

Played Red Ball, A/B shaping, and Move on Exhale.
Explained target stories and I was chomping at the bit to take suggestions, but we were only explaining the concept today. Next time, I’ll be ready though.

Read Brecht and Open Theater. I think Gweth will post about Open Theater later, but I presented Brecht.

Bertolt Brecht
Brecht was influenced by a wide variety of sources including Chinese, Japanese, and Indian theatre, Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, fair-ground entertainments, and Bavarian folk plays. Brecht had the uncanny ability to take elements from these seemingly incompatible sources, combine them, and make them his own. In his early plays, Brecht experimented with dada and expressionism, but in his later work, he developed a style more suited his own unique vision. He detested the “Aristotelian” drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a kind of trance-like state, a total identification with the hero to the point of complete self-oblivion, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and, ultimately, an emotional catharsis. He didn’t want his audience to feel emotions–he wanted them to think–and towards this end, he determined to destroy the theatrical illusion, and, thus, that dull trance-like state he so despised. The result of Brecht’s research was a technique known as verfremdungseffekt or the “alienation effect”. It was designed to encourage the audience to retain their critical detachment. He didn’t succeed in his ideal, inevitable the audience would feel empathetic towards at least one of his characters.

The plays we read were two of Brecht’s Lehrstücke. Der Jasager/Der Neinsager (One who said yes/One who said no) are two short plays written in 1929.  They are adaptations of Taniko, from The Nō Plays of Japan (translations by Arthur Waley). The two plays, consisting of ten scenes, have identical parts with contrasting conclusions.

In Der Jasager, the boy crosses the mountains with the other characters in order to fetch medicine for his sick mother from the city. He does not accomplish the feat and falls ill on the way. The students and teacher must continue their journey and so agree to leave him, but the custom is that they must ask for his permission to be left on the mountain to die. The sick boy does not consent to being left on the mountain, but rather demands that his body be thrown into the valley below as it is a quicker death, and he does not wish to be alone. The students are horrified at first but then conform to the boy’s wishes and they hurl him in the the valley “none more guilty than the other” and throw stones and dirt after the body.

In Der Neinsager, a boy again falls ill on the journey to the mountains seeking medicine for his sick mother, but the custom of throwing anyone who falls ill into the valley is now the custom (as opposed to consenting to be left alone on the mountain). The boy refuses to conform to the custom on the grounds that new situations require new actions (‘customs’). The students agree to carry him back to his mother, and in this they succeed.

Moral of the Story: It is not disgraceful to defy traditional laws, if it is reasonable to do so in a given situation.

There are multiple ways of interpreting these plays, and the kids ferreted many of these possibilities out (so smart). My favorite is that Der Jasager is the birth of a tradition, specifically the tradition of throwing failed adventurers into the valley to die; and that Der Neinsager is the death of that tradition. Thus the whole things is brought full circle nice and tidy like.