Brecht's alienation effect in Broadway musicals?- Page 2

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 12/6/11 at 4:33pm

Did Brecht translate to musical theater? Brecht WROTE one of the most successful musicals in history, THE THREEPENNY OPERA. (No, it's not an opera.)

"Estrangement" (which is the English word I find most helpful in teaching Brecht, since "alienation" and even "distancing" have unfortunate connotations in English) wasn't invented by Brecht. It was first defined by the Romantic poets of the early 1800s and even then, they were describing something that existed before them.

The point of estrangement is to take something familiar, then change it or give it a new context so that the viewer or reader sees it in a new light.

E.g., Edgar Allan Poe's famous "Raven." A raven is a cousin to a crow; it's a trash bird as common as a pigeon and a plague to farmers' crops. (That's not entirely fair. Crows/ravens/etc. are among the smartest of animals, but the point is they aren't rare or exotic.)

In his poem, Poe estranges the raven so that it becomes a solitary figure of mystery and melancholy and isolation.

Brecht put a political spin on the same effect, hoping that theater would estrange the things we take for granted in everyday life. So that instead of thinking that political corruption, say, is inevitable, we might think of it as something that can be changed.

As paljoey has already noted (thank you, joey), Brecht found the effect already operable in Broadway musicals. Since Brecht was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, he no doubt had already found the effect there as well.

Meanwhile, Hammerstein was making the musical increasingly representational. But a long-running off-Broadway production of THE THREEPENNY OPERA in the 1950s served to re-introduce American theater artists to Brechtian styles and his influence on American musicals became more apparent in the decades that followed. In CABARET, of course, Prince is quite literally quoting from Brecht's direction, but that's only the most obvious example.

Technically, it isn't the viewer who is estranged, alienated or distanced, it is the object (including characters) on stage. But the net goal is a new critical attitude in the viewer's mind, so the viewer is encouraged to engage with the work intellectually rather than just surrender to emotional manipulation. But it's a grave distortion of Brecht's theory to think he wanted the theater to be cold and unemotional. (Nobody here has claimed this, but it's a common way of teaching Brecht.) Rather, he wanted theater to be like a "boxing match" (his metaphor) with rabid crowds rooting for and against the characters on stage.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 12/6/11 at 8:45pm

In 1979, Christopher Durang and Sigourney Weaver performed in a 2-character satiric revue off Broadway called Das Lusitania Songspeil, which they had started writing while they were graduate students at the Yale Drama School.

In it, Sigourney Weaver did an "imitation" of Helene Weigel's Silent Scream so funny that I still laugh just thinking about it. She came out, very deadpan, with elbow-length white gloves and a tiara and described the importance in theater history of the Brecht and Weigel and Mother Courage and then announced, "And now, although I am not as homely as Miss Weigel, I shall recreate for you that milestone in theatrical history.”

She then contorted her face for about 45 seconds and then let out a little squeak and had to start all over again.

This is Sigorney Weaver, attempting the Silent Scream:

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 12/7/11 at 5:11pm

I've heard of that show, joey, but know nothing of what it contained.

The "silent scream" bit is hysterical just in your telling of it; I can't begin to imagine how funny it was to actually see it.

(BTW, I think MOTHER COURAGE is the best of all Brecht's plays for demonstrating what he was trying to accomplish. SPOILER ALERT: a mother who loses her children one by one, including, finally, the deaf girl, should put an end to all nonsense about Brecht wanting theater to be unemotional. He just wants us to feel our own emotions and not pretend we can feel those of Oedipus, Hamlet or even Courage herself.) Updated On: 12/7/11 at 05:11 PM