Dinner Theatre/Admission price

I was thinking that we could charge, say, 8 bucks for admission, and then the theatre-goers could decide if they wanted dinner or not, and then we would charge them an extra.....10 bucks? 5 bucks? What do y'all think bout that?

We need Plebians!

Just wanted to remind everyone (including myself) to try and recruit someone, it works best when we do it so talk to a friend about it. It is much more difficult when Eddy has to interfere and is yanking peoples legs trying to get them to join. People are more likely to join when you ask rather than Eddy, no offense Eddy. Also, I love pumpkin pie!

Rebuild the Wall

Walls Walls and More Walls....


A West German police officer, front center, looks at a woman following the activities through the barbed wire fence between the French and Soviet sector in the Schoenholz district in Berlin, Germany, September 25, 1961. A family, left background, is forced to leave their home close to the sector's border and loads their belongings up a van. In the background are three East German soldiers of the border guard. (AP Photo/Ede Reichart)









West Berliners, at right, talk with East Berlin policemen through the barbed wire fence at the border in Germany in Sept. 1961. Other Communist officers bring new posts to reinforce the barrier in East Berlin's Wildenbruchstrasse. A cement block wall and additional barbed wire fence mark the border in the background, cutting a tragic dividing line through the heart of the city. (AP Photo)












An armed East Berlin policeman watches as East Berliners load furniture inside a moving van during evacuation by Communist authorities of residents whose homes are near the East-West border. They are at the French-Russian border sector near the Schoenholz section of the divided city on Sept. 26, 1961. (AP Photo/Kreusch)

Alienation Nation

So what's this Alienation thing that Brecht is known for? Do we have to learn to act alienated for the play? How do you act alienation?

Here's some tips and hints.... Taken from here.

-Brecht was in favour of, ‘Epic Theatre’, which he developed using the idea of, Alienation effects or, ‘A Effects’ as they are also known. The term itself is a translation of the German word, Verfremdungseffekt.

-Epic Theatre

Turns the spectator into an observer, yet arouses his/her capacity for action and forces them to make decisions.

Presented with a picture of the world and made to face it.

Argument brought to the point of recognition.

The human being is the object of inquiry and evaluation and can be altered.

Each scene is representative of itself. {Montage, jumps etc}.

Social being determines thought and reason. (cf. Marx in The German Ideology and The Preface to Political Economy)

Critical distance, savoir, symbolic order and knowledge.

The Epic poet/playwright presents the events as past, while the dramatic poet/playwright represents them as present.

Epic invites calm, detached contemplation and judgement.

Brecht encourages his audience to think rather than becoming over concerned with the plot. Brecht invites his audience to identify with the issues faced by the characters and not the characters themselves. The play is a form of debate rather than an illusion. Brecht’s concept of Alienation involved the idea of, ‘making strange’. He aimed to take emotion out of the production and persuade the audience to distance themselves from the make believe. He also encouraged the actors to disassociate themselves from their roles; all of this would make the political truth easier to comprehend.

Brecht formulated his literary theories as a reaction to those of George Lukacs who was a Hungarian philosopher and also a follower of Marxist literary theory. Brecht disagreed with Lukacs’ attempt to distinguish between good realism and bad naturalism. Brecht considered the narrative form used by Balzac and Tolstoy to be restricted and he rebuffed Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, as well as the simplicity of a plot with a beginning, middle and an end. Brecht was totally against naturalism and melodrama, which included the works of Shakespeare, Goethe and Stanislavski.

A reaction against the above began in the 1920’s as new types of theatre were introduced such as: poetic drama, expressionism, satire and political theatre.

Quote by Brecht in 1931:

‘Today when human character must be understood as the totality of all social conditions the epic form is the only one that can comprehend all the processes, which could serve the drama as materials for a fully representative picture of the world’.

In order to detach and alienate his audiences from the story and force them to concentrate on the issue or argument, Brecht used a series of techniques to make the action strange.

Setting stories in unfamiliar locations, in different times.

Use of a chorus to sing the story, as well as narrators who were completely outside of the action.

Unrealistic speech, masks.

Diagetic and non-diagetic music.

Visible stage machinery.

Scene by scene summary of the action often using large signs.

Acting in the third person as well as actors sitting in the audience when not in a scene.

Most importantly Brecht used a technique called, ‘Breaking down the fourth wall’. This meant that the audience was not simply a spectator, but instead became mentally involved in the issues presented {Stephen Berkoff}.

Stage/mis-en-scène

Brightly lit at all times, no need for mood lighting.

No elaborate props, use of placards with instructions written on them.

Musicians on stage and often announced before playing.

Use of non-naturalistic techniques such as montage {series of still images}.

Brecht believed that epic theatre enables the audience to see things differently to how they had originally perceived them. Therefore by seeing the ‘truth’ they can begin to change things in the real world. Furthermore, he believed that by showing the suffering of those on stage, audiences could avoid it. The suffering he portrays is political. Brecht’s ideology is consistent with Marxism in that all human evil is a result of unjust social institutions.

Brecht no longer wanted audiences to be reduced to passivity but instead to be awakened to the truth of what he believed to be a highly formulated and constructed society.

Examples of Brecht’s Alienation.

‘The Life of Galileo’. A long speech by the protagonist, followed by the anticlimactically remark, ‘now I must eat’.

‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’. When Grusche ponders whether or not to rescue the abandoned baby, her thoughts are voiced by a chorus whilst she acts in silence. {distancing}

Other People's Productions...

I've been looking for other groups that have done this play. Here's a couple with some pictures..

Arcola Theatre - London
5th June - 23rd June 2001

Translated by Ralph Manheim Director Mehmet Ergen Designer Michalis Kokkoliadis
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is set in East Germany in 1953. It shows the dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, rehearsing his adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, while, outside the theatre, the workers rise in revolt against oppressive measures. When a workers' delegation asks Brecht to support their demand, he is unable to resolve his dilemma and becomes guilty of betraying both workers and his own self.

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A Review from Time Magazine reviewing an early production in London gives the performace a thumbs down, but has this to say, "Nevertheless, even a misfire like The Plebeians can serve as a reminder of what is largely missing from the London stage nowadays. After all, the play touches fundamental issues. Its opening scenes crackle with intellectual energy. Its rehearsal framework and plays-with-in-plays probe fresh possibilities of form. "
Read the Review HERE


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A guy named David wrote a blog about finding the play at a book sale and gives a good review.....
.......
Used book shopping is one of my favorite things, as evidenced by my bookshelves. Today I picked up a couple pretty interesting seeming books.

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprisng: a German Tragedy by Gunter Grass
This includes an introductory essay by the author delivered to the Academy of Arts and Letters, Berlin, April 23, 1964, the quartercentenary of Shakespeare's birth. It deals with one of Shakespeare's lesser known and almost never performed works Coriolanus, and Bertolt Brecht's never completed adaptation of it. The play is essentially about Coriolanus, a Roman general and nobleman, and his contempt for revolting plebians. Blah blah, he does some stuff and comes to a tragic end. It is one of the unknown Shakespeare's play because it is profoundly anti-commoner and anti-democratic. Grass claims it is also fairly dull and lacks the art of other plays by Shakespeare. So The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprisng, is about a workers uprising in East Berlin, that takes place while Brecht is rehearsing Coriolan, his version of Coriolanus. This play is based on actual events, although during the uprising Brecht was actually rehearsing Strittmatter's Zatzgraben. In any case striking workers really did come to Brecht for support and also to get him to help them draft a call for a general strike. He really was ambivalent, with his position as director of an important theatre in East Berlin and position of privalege. The book finishes with a short essay about the June 17, 1953 uprising. Short but rich in detail, about a revolt I'd never heard of. I read the two essays on the train today but haven't looked at the play. As someone interested in Brecht and revolutions this was quite the find.


And finally on the question of what Brecht's brand of theatre looked like, here's a picture of his production of Mother Courage ...

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Here we go....

This is to be the class Blog for the YIHS Spring 2008 production of "The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising" by Gunter Grass.
Take it away.

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