Kad said: "I, personally, have no affinity for Robert Wilson. His work is maddeningly opaque to me, often interminable to sit through and laden with intriguing imagery that seems to exist simply because it's cool. To paraphrase The Simpsons' definition of post-modernism: it's weird for the sake of weird. While he embraces some of Brecht aesthetically, Brecht wanted to distance audiences from emotional engagement in order to make a very clear social point. Wilson distances the audience and leaves them wondering why they watched a white-faced actor walk slowly across the stage for so long.
Kushner falls in line with Brecht's embrace of obvious theatricality and theatre as a platform for social change. Unlike Brecht, Kushner embraces the emotional connection of the audience to characters. That's the tricky thing about Brecht- he really didn't want the audience to invest emotionally in what was going on. That's why characters explain themselves directly to the audience, why the emotions are superficial, why they make irrational decisions without any buildup, why we learn so little about them.
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Oh, Kad, I'm sorry, and I know that's how Brecht is taught in almost every Theater class, but it's a serious misreading of Brecht, caused in part by reading his didactic early remarks and then assuming he never refined those ideas over 30+ years of theatrical practice. In other words, yeah, he said something about alienating the audience when he was in his mid-20s; but he drops the notion in later, more thoughtful works.
Brecht wrote that the theater should be like a boxing match, with spectators taking sides as passionately as those who place bets on fighters. Does that sound like "emotional detachment" to you? Does killing off Mother Courage's children--even the deaf-mute daughter--one by one sound like an attempt to achieve emotional detachment?
Charley is right: Brecht's early theory is a rebellion against Realism (including Stanislavsky) and the well-made play. Brecht thought the very seamlessness of such efforts had a sort of hypnotic effect on spectators as they engaged in the "willing suspension of disbelief" (first defined by Coleridge and the Romantic poets). That "suspension" was akin to voodoo in Brecht's eyes and the very seamlessness made it appear that the action of the play all took place in the past, where it was also "resolved". Since it was all over and done with at the final curtain (and, in fact, over before it began), it could not possibly inspire action on the part of the spectator. What was left for them to do?
Instead, Brecht thought theater should enrage, inspire and motivate us to take action. Yes, he thought that required a critical view of the events of the play, but one can view critically without retreating into cold, intellectual isolation. Unfortunately, the young Brecht so overstated his case that hundreds of academics have used him as an excuse for their boring productions, claiming they were "distancing" the audience. (I'm not suggesting all or even most academic productions are boring, not at all. I'm just saying Brecht makes a handy excuse when they are.)
In fact, it is not the audience which is estranged, it is the symbols on stage. And it is certainly not a Brechtian invention. Again, it was Romantic critics who first defined the process:
1. The spectator is shown something that looks familiar.
2. The familiar is made strange, causing the spectator to wonder what is wrong with it.
3. The spectator comes to see what was once familiar in a new light.
(I didn't invent the above schema. Some early 20th-century Russian did; his name escapes me at the moment.) This process can be done with props, plot events, characters, really anything on stage. And it is central to Brecht's aims. And by the time of A SHORT ORGANUM, he is referring to V-effects (A-affects, or alienation effects in English) only in the plural; so it's clear he not talking about the singular attitude of the audience itself. Every production has many V-effects!
Example: MOTHER COURAGE contains what may be the single most harrowing line in Western dramatic literature when, having tried to negotiate a lower ransom for her favorite son, she realizes, "I have haggled too much." And she has: her favorite son is dead, murdered by his kidnappers. If this doesn't tug at our heart strings, what does?
BUT IN THE VERY NEXT SCENE, Courage waits in line to demand justice from the captain of the regiment that killed her son, but leaves before airing her grievance because she just isn't angry enough to risk the consequences. As spectators, we are shocked by this! Enraged, even! We've just been reduced to sobbing by Courage's loss; now she herself tells us it isn't worth the trouble to protest. We feel a lot of things: confusion, anger at the cowardice of Courage, betrayal by play itself, rage at the apparent attack on the sacred concept of Motherhood, perhaps. What we don't feel is cool and detached. (And what do we conclude from all those feelings? This is a matter of interpretation, of course, but I think the play is saying a sense of individual injustice isn't enough; to truly effect social change, we need a sense of the ingrained injustice of the entire system and a sense of solidarity with others who are also mistreated.)
As for Kushner, yes, he writes emotional scenes. In ANGELS, however, he also specifies that the actors end each scene and begin each new scene by changing the set and moving furniture themselves. So whatever we are feeling about Prior, we are also reminded Prior is a creation of playwright and actor for some purpose. What might that be?
Updated On: 1/24/16 at 08:11 PM
would have caused nothing but eye-rolling among true Expressionists. Was CHICAGO's view of the justice system disturbing in pre-O.J. days? Yes, to an extent that probably kept it from a longer run at the time. But not in the "Let's tear everything down and start over" sense of expressionist nihilism.
