About the Playwright: Bertolt Brecht
The poet, screenwriter, social activist, and playwright of THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 5 through October 13, 2019, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is the story of a gangster who rises to power in early 20th century Chicago. Playwright Bertolt Brecht took inspiration from gangster films, Al Capone, and the events on the world stage to tell this brilliant story of greed, corruption, and violence.
Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, an historic and industrial city in the south of modern-day Germany. Despite his comfortable, middle-class upbringing, Brecht turned toward Marxism in his 20s; a pro-worker, anti-bourgeois belief system marked his life and his work.
Brecht achieved artistic success early and in a number of genres: poetry, criticism, and dramatic writing. His first poems were published at age 16. During World War I, Brecht, who had studied medicine, was drafted as an orderly and worked in an army hospital. Over the next several years, he wrote his early plays and film scripts.
In 1928, when Brecht turned 30, The Threepenny Opera premiered in Germany. With his libretto and Kurt Weill’s score, The Threepenny Opera was an immediate success and became one of his most enduring and famous pieces.
Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and his rise to power had enormous consequences for Brecht’s life and work. He fled Germany for Denmark in 1933 and was stripped of his German citizenship two years later. In 1941 he fled again, eventually settling in California with his family.
In exile, Brecht experienced a burst of artistic productivity, completing several of his most important plays: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Woman of Szechwan, Galileo, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. From 1941 to 1947 he lived and worked in the United States, but his Marxism eventually made him a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee, before which he testified in 1947. He wrote to his friend and artistic collaborator, composer Hanns Eisler: “Not being a citizen either, I could no more refuse to testify than you could.” Brecht testified that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, then left America to return to Europe. Just a year later, he repatriated to Germany. In 1949, Brecht and his partner, actress Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble.
Founded as a theatrical troupe to perform Brecht’s plays in the unique style they demanded, the Berliner Ensemble achieved early and sustained success. Many of the techniques now considered “Brechtian” both in the rehearsal room and onstage were developed there.
The most famous of these Brechtian theatrical innovations and ideals were the concepts of epic theater and Verfremdungseffekt. Brecht’s epic theater took inspiration from agitprop theater, cabaret, Elizabethan plays, and others; in Brecht’s epic theater, audiences are asked to hear the story, find pleasure and astonishment in it, but not become emotionally lost in the events. For Brecht, this was key: audiences must always be able to retain their capacity for reason rather than surrendering to the sense of destiny that a well-made play provokes.
Verfremdungseffekt, or the V-effect, often (not quite correctly) translated as “alienation effect,” describes how to achieve this desired response from his audience: how to help an audience remember that this is a play, that these are actors, and that what is happening in the plot is not inevitable. For this is the crux of Brecht’s plays: he sought to provoke a will to change the world in his audience. By using projections, harsh lighting, a distant acting affect, songs, episodic structures, and other theatrical touches, Brecht constantly distanced his audience from his play, letting them observe rather than sympathize with the characters and the action.
This does not mean, however, that dispassion was the goal — it was quite the opposite. Brecht wanted his audience to be distant enough to evaluate the characters’ choices, to wish they made different or better ones, and to find themselves astonished at the ways in which the world is made. But he believed emotion was an essential part of that. He wanted an audience to leave feeling not that the suffering of his characters and the events of their lives were inevitable, but that their circumstances and experiences could always be changed and to wish they had been. If his characters might have reached different ends by making different choices, society at large could change as well. To Brecht, an audience lost to sympathy for the characters was also lost to political and social action, as the story ended once they exited the theater doors. An audience made to question and evaluate the events depicted onstage, though, might be more inclined to do so in their real lives, which could lead to a reworking of the social order by allowing people to see the possibility for something different.
Brecht’s work with the Berliner Ensemble occupied the remainder of his life and artistic career, refining these ideals and producing both his existing work and new plays. Brecht died suddenly in 1956 at the age of 58, two years before the world premiere of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written more than a decade earlier.
Bertolt Brecht’s varied and prolific output onstage and in print is responsible for a great deal of theatrical touches that would be recognizable to an audience today but were innovative and novel for his original audiences. “Brechtian” has entered the lexicon to describe anything that exposes the workings of the theatrical art, including projections, visible set and costume changes, and actors speaking directly to audiences to comment on events. But for Brecht, this would simply mean that new tools are required to jolt an audience out of complacency; “Brechtian” theater was not meant to be a fixed set of artistic tools and choices, but a guiding principle for helping an audience see beyond the illusion onstage and off.
Brecht’s career spanned those of his contemporaries George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, and Federico García Lorca. Like theirs, his work endures, as does our need for it. The world has not become perfect in the intervening years; Brecht’s plays help us see how and why the world can be improved — and lead us to make new choices for ourselves and our society.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is onstage at the Lantern September 5 through October 13, 2019. Visit our website for tickets and information.
