Ecstasies & Agonies

Brecht on Brecht. The phone is a coiled snake, and the woman (Viveca Lindfors) picks it up fatalistically, as if she had already been poisoned by its venom. Her manner is calm, but her voice is brittle with inner hysteria. She cancels a bridge date, calls off a movie date. The talk is bright and chatty, but these are not social calls. The woman is foreclosing her life.

She is Jewish. Her husband is an important German surgeon, and in Hitler's Germany, things have become "too difficult." She has decided to leave him "for a couple of weeks." Animatedly, she enacts a hypothetical farewell of heartbreaking reasonableness. All at once her mood tears soundlessly, and she sobs: "I love you." At the horrifying unfairness of it all she screams: "You are monsters. or bootlickers to monsters." Her husband (George Voskovec) appears. He is a bootlicker, an intellectual full of soothing self deceit. With shameful secret relief, he hustles his wife off to the waiting train and the dark night of the soul.

This scene from a full-length play, The Private Life of the Master Race, is a tessera in a jeweled mosaic arranged from the poems, songs, plays, letters and aphorisms of one of the 20th century's most remarkable playwrights, the late Bertolt Brecht. Put together with artful concern by George Tabori, perceptively directed by Gene Frankel, and acted with selfless intensity by a cast of six, Brecht on Brecht is an arresting example of offbeat off-Broadway. Close to stage rear, a portrait of Brecht peers out at the audience, eyes wily and skeptical, lips sealed in a self-mocking smile, peasant fingers clenched around a cigar--a complex blend of irony and passion. Brecht aimed his irony at the rich, the powerful, the complacent--and himself. He spent his passion on human suffering. Though he ended his days as an East German showpiece, Brecht's economic philosophy was little more than an emotional assent to Proudhon's "Property is theft."

Brecht is exciting because he found his own voice and knew how to use it. He loved reality more than realism. He could define the ecstasies and agonies of love, work, exile, hope, life and death in images of savage bite and lyrical beauty. Among the vivid images in Brecht on Brecht: Anne Jackson miming the simple glories of the world for her unborn son; Dane Clark doing an amusing Method depth-probe of which hat to wear for a four-minute part: Lotte Lenya conjuring up the ghostly, ghastly Berlin of the '20s and '30s in a raspy voice of tuneless authority. The Brecht on Brecht company of six actors is consistently bold, often astonishing, rarely commonplace. And doing Brecht at all is a salient rebuke to Broadway's timorous titans of trivia.

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