Table Of ContentBRECHT SOURCEBOOK
Bertolt Brecht’s career intersects a wide range of political and cultural practices
and history including German folk culture, vaudeville, jazz, the rise of Hollywood
and mass culture, two World Wars, Nazi Germany, the emergence of
international travel, and the beginnings of global culture. As one of the most
prolific and influential writers, directors, and theorists of the twentieth centuty,
Brecht is mandatory reading for anyone interested in cultural and political life.
This anthology brings together an indispensable collection of articles, plays and
interviews portraying the development and the complexity of Brecht’s ideas.
Included are two plays not easily available in English: The Beggar or The Dead Dog
and Baden Lehrstück.
The collection covers:
(cid:127) the development of Brecht’s aesthetic theories
(cid:127) Brecht’s aesthetic theories in practice
(cid:127) Brecht’s collaborations with Kurt Weill, Paul Dessau and others
(cid:127) the adoption and adaptation of Brecht’s ideas in England, Japan, Russia, the
United States, and Latin America.
This book is an ideal companion to Brecht’s plays, and provides an invaluable
reconsideration of his work.
Contributors include: Lee Baxandall, Eric Bentley, Hans-Joachim Bunge, Paul
Dessau, Martin Esslin, Henry Glade, Barclay Goldsmith, Mordecai Gorelik, Karen
Laughlin, W.Stuart McDowell, Erica Munk, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Schumacher,
Diana Taylor, Tadashi Uchino, Kurt Weill, Carl Weber.
Carol Martin is Associate Professor of Drama at New York University, the co-
editor of Studies in Dance History, the book review editor of The Drama Review
and the author of Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and
1930s.
Henry Bial is Instructor of Drama at New York University. He is currently
completing his dissertation on Jewish-American popular performance.
Worlds of Performance
General Editor: Richard Schechner
WORLDS OF PERFORMANCE
What is a “performance”? Where does it take place? Who are the participants?
Not so long ago these were settled questions, but today such orthodox answers
are unsatisfactory, misleading, and limiting. “Performance” as a theoretical
category and as a practice has expanded explosively. It now comprises a panoply of
genres ranging from play, to popular entertainments, to theatre, dance, and
music, to secular and religious rituals, to “performance in everyday life”, to
intercultural experiments, and more.
For nearly forty years, The Drama Review (TDR), the journal of performance
studies, has been at the cutting edge of exploring these questions. The Worlds of
Performance Series is designed to mine the extraordinary riches and diversity of
TDR’s decades of excellence, bringing back into print important essays, interviews,
artists’ notes, and photographs. New materials and introductions bring the
volumes up to date. Each World of Performance book is a complete anthology,
arranged around a specific theme or topic. Each World of Performance book is an
indispensable resource for the scholar, a textbook for the student, and an exciting
eye-opener for the general reader.
Richard Schechner
Editor, TDR
Series Editor
Other titles in the series:
Acting (Re)Considered edited by Phillip B.Zarrilli
Happenings and other Acts edited by Mariellen R.Sandford
A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the stage edited by
Carol Martin
The Grotowski Sourcebook edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford
A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements edited by
Annemarie Bean
BRECHT SOURCEBOOK
Edited by Carol Martin and Henry Bial
London and New York
First published 2000 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2000 Editorial and selection Carol Martin and Henry Bial; individual contributions,
the contributors
The right of Carol Martin and Henry Bial to be identified as the Authors of this Work
has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bertolt Brecht: a critical anthology/Carol Martin and Henry Bial.
p. cm.—(Worlds of performance)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Brecht, Bertolt, 1898–1956–Criticism and interpretation.
I. Martin, Carol, 1952–. II. Bial, Henry, 1970–
III. Series.
PT2603.R397Z56325 1999
832c.912–dc21 99–41388
CIP
ISBN 0-203-97955-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-20042-3 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-20043-1 (pbk)
To
Sophia and Sam
and to
Ernest and Martha Bial
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Contributors xii
Introduction 1
Carol Martin and Henry Bial
Part I: Brecht’s Aesthetic Theories
1 On Chinese Acting 13
Bertolt Brecht
translated by Eric Bentley
2 Theatre for Learning 21
Bertolt Brecht
translated by Edith Anderson
3 An Epic Theatre Catechism 29
Mordecai Gorelik
4 Are Stanislavsky and Brecht Commensurable? 35
Eric Bentley
5 Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance 41
Tradition
Carl Weber
6 Beyond Bourgeois Theatre 47
Jean-Paul Sartre
translated by Rima Dell Reck
Part II: Brecht’s Theories in Practice
7 Gestus in Music 57
Kurt Weill
translated by Erich Albrecht
vii
8 Composing for BB: Some Comments 61
Paul Dessau
translated by Hella Freud Bemays
9 Actors on Brecht: The Munich Years 67
W.Stuart McDowell
10 Bertolt Brecht’s J.B. 81
Lee Baxandall
11 Baden Lehrstück 87
Bertolt Brecht
translated by Lee Baxandall
12 The Beggar or The Dead Dog 105
Bertolt Brecht
translated by Michael Hamburger
13 The Dialectics of Galileo 111
Ernst Schumacher
translated by Joachim Neugroschel
14 The Dispute Over the Valley: An Essay on Bertolt Brecht’s 123
Play The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Hans-Joachim Bunge
translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
15 Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle 137
Bertolt Brecht
translated by Eric Bentley
Part III: Brecht Interpreted Abroad
16 Brecht and the English Theatre 145
Martin Esslin
17 The Death of Mother Courage 155
Henry Glade
18 Brecht and Chicano Theatre 163
Barclay Goldsmith
19 Brecht and Latin America’s “Theatre of Revolution” 173
Diana Taylor
viii
20 Political Displacements: Toward Historicizing Brecht in 185
Japan, 1932–1998
Tadashi Uchino
21 The Actor’s Involvement: Notes on Brecht— An Interview 205
with Joseph Chaikin
Erika Munk
22 Brechtian Theory and American Feminist Theatre 213
Karen Laughlin
23 Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese Theatre 227
Carol Martin
Index 237
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When we began this project, we knew that the pages of TDR over the past 40
years would provide an incredible range of information on Brecht and how he
was introduced in the U.S. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, TDR (then the
Tulane Drama Review) was instrumental in making work by and about Brecht
available to an English-speaking audience. Under the editorship of the late
Robert W.Corrigan, the journal frequently published such work, including a
special issue (T13) devoted exclusively to Brecht in 1961. Erika Munk, Managing
Editor of TDR in 1967 and 1968, helped compile two additional special issues on
Brecht (T37 and T38), which subsequently became the anthology Brecht
(Bantam, New York, 1972). Many of the articles in this volume originally
appeared in one of these three special issues, and we gratefully acknowledge the
work of the editors of TDR.
We regret that the Brecht Sourcebook cannot include all the work by and about
Brecht which has appeared in the pages of TDR. Given the rich source of
material, we had to make many hard choices. We thank Talia Rodgers and her
staff at Routledge and Suzanne Winnacker, among others too numerous to name,
for their helpful suggestions on this book. We also thank those authors who
contributed new work, or granted permission to reprint material published
elsewhere to help us bring this collection up to date.
We gratefully acknowledge the many authors, editors, and publishers who
assisted us as we navigated the murky waters of copyright information. Jerold
Couture, attorney for the Brecht Estate, was especially helpful in enabling us to
secure reprint permissions for the five Brecht-authored pieces in this collection.
Our colleagues in the Departments of Drama and Performance Studies at New
York University have provided invaluable support. Two people deserve special
thanks for their practical assistance: Cindy Brizzell (now at Yale) and Aitor
Baraibar. The editorial staff of TDR, including Mariellen Sandford, Marta
Ulvaeus, Julia Whitworth, Sara Brady, and Jennifer Chan, were also very helpful.
A special thanks to Katherine Hui-ling Chou, whose comments on “Brecht,
Feminism, and Chinese Theatre” were most insightful and generous.
Finally, without the support of Richard Schechner and Christine Dotterweich
Bial, this project could not have come to fruition.
