Bert Brecht at the Top of His Game

The Big Musicals, 1927 – 1933 (Music and video links throughout)

The Brecht Collective—group of friends who help with work allow Brecht to be spectacularly prolific during these years.

"It was easier to go to him than to any other friend if you were depressed. Simply a look at his clever, unlachrymose, attentive face was sufficient to make you feel confident. I believe that this is what made him able to do so much. He attracted people, and with him they forgot their small or large personal worries; one of the reasons was that with him they found work waiting, which he let them take part in before they had fully realized it. He won people as his friends by making them his assistants…. Brecht also sometimes became the assistant of his friends. He was very interested in the activities of other people, and spent many hours giving a hand with their work."

—Wieland Herzfeld

"Brecht Collective" collaborators include

Neher—set design

Lorre—actor

Dessau, Hindemith, Eisler, Weill (“the enfant terrible of atonal music”)—composers

Lenya—actor

Weigel—actor

The main three writing collaborators—Grete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Elisabeth Hauptmann

Elisabeth Hauptmann is hired by Brecht's publisher to help copy-edit his book of poems. When he leaves the publisher, EH stays with him. She speaks English and translates from English to German for him as well as writing treatments (and sometimes much more) for most the big shows of this period.

Brecht and Music

Wants to create a different style of music, to be used differently

"Misuc"

"Plays with songs"

"Zonks"

What is a Zonk?

•Lyric that is being interrupted by dialogue

•Lyrics as core of play

•Message more important than tunefulness: act them, don’t sing them too beautifully—listen to difference between two versions of "Surabaya Johnny" from Happy End

•Zonks often feature contradictions—delivery may contradict words

•Form continuity between plays (some songs work well in more than one play or for more than one singer) because Brecht is writing about the same big themes throughout his life

•Were big hits for a lot of American singers

Little Mahagonny or Mahagonny Songspiel—sungthrough short opera with Weill

Mahagonny is set in a fictional American frontier town and draws on the mythology of the Wild West and on the biblical story of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The piece was intended as an allegory of exploitation and hedonism..

Boxing ring

Projected paintings by Neher

“snooty Baden Baden Festival”

Whistled off, but BB gave performers whistles to answer back and half audience loved it

Later expanded to full length operetta

Famous songs from Mahagonny: Alabama Song (The Doors' version), Benares Song, Mandalay Song (too pretty, this one, but the only one in English)
Here's a scene from a production (opera singers, not actors, so the singing's good but they aren't really acting)

Threepenny Opera

Commissioned for opening of new theater: Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (later to be Berliner Ensember, Brecht's own company)

John Gay’s Beggars Opera huge hit in London. EH translates it and Brecht loves it, fiddles with it changes it.

In Beggar’s Opera, Macheath was a Robin Hood character, a “noble villain” but he becomes out and out bad in 3Penny. In 3Penny Macheath marries the daughter of the “respectable” family, who are cheats as well—they run a fake begging operation. the robbers represent government, corporations—they are always bailed out. Hence as Mackie is about to be hanged, a messenger from Queen Victoria comes and pardons him, gives him a title and a huge annual pension.

“The dress rehearsal… lasted until 5 in the morning. … We were all shouting and swearing at one another. Only KW remained calm…. Well-known Berlin theatre-prophets… told all who cared to listen that Brecht and Weill intended to insult the audience with a wild mixture, neither opera nor operetta, neither cabaret nor drama, but a bit of each, with the whole thing bathed in an exotic jazz sauce…. They suggested that the most sensible thing would be to cancel the play before the first night.” (Lotte Lenya)

Lead actor Macheath demanded a song of his own to start the show. Brecht wrote one for Weill to orchestrate, but gave it to a “Moritaten sänger” Mor = deadly; tat = deed. Moritaten sung by singers  at street fairs, detailing the hideous crimes of notorious arch-fiends. Give song to a character if a street singer makes the frame for the show, since play is about an arch villain.

Peachum not pious, but using bible to justify the evil he is doing.

“Up to the second scene, the audience remained cool and non-committal, They gave the impression that they were convinced in advance that the play would be a flop. Then came the Cannon Song. An unbelieveable storm of applause. The audience was beside itself. From this moment on nothing could go wrong. The audience was enthusiastically with us. We could not believe our eyes or ears.” (Lenya)

3Penny songs I played in class:

1. Ballad of Mack the Knife (Moritat von Mackie Messer)—which has been recorded by popular singers Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt, Nick Cave, Lyle Lovett, Sting, Michael Buble...
The original German movie version: here
Armstrong's version
Sinatra
Fitzgerald

2. Morning Anthem (the song Peachum sings as he kicks awake the "beggars" who work for him)

3. Cannon Song (also known as The Army Song)—this song would work in A Man's a Man or Drums in the Night too.

4. Wedding Song

5. Ballad of the Easy Life

6. Two versions of How to Survive (also known as What Keeps Mankind Alive)

Original film (with subtitles)
Tom Waits

7. Finale

Happy End

Follow-up to wildly popular 3Penny

Brecht writes long letter to Hauptmann with idea and details: American gangsters/Salvation Army workers. Very similar to Guys and Dolls but written earlier. 

Brecht loses interest so Hauptmann has to finish it and it's kind of a mess (later adaptation by Michael Feingold turns it into a pretty good piece)

Famous songs: Mandalay Song, Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao Song, Sailor Song (The Sea is Blue)

Here are about 2 minutes of Scenes from Happy End

Here is a longer set of Happy End scenes, almost 10 minutes, including a little singing

Other songs/performances:

Baal's Hymn (music by David Bowie, performed by David Bowie)

Supply and Demand (music by Hanns Eisler, performed by Dagmar Krause): no video available

Ballad of the Soldier's Wife (music by Kurt Weill, performed by Marianne Faithfull)

Some people really don't get how to perform Brecht's lyrics—they get too, ahem, lyrical. When listening to his work, my favorite performers are:
Dagmar Krause—anything. Here's Surabaya Johnny
Ute Lemper—Alabama Song
Joanna Rueffer doing Mandelay Song
Milva
Marianne Faithfull doing Pirate Jenny
Tom Waits
Julia Migenes Opening of The Seven Deadly Sins (a Brecht/Weill opera-ballet)

Here are a few more video links:

Lotte Lenya singing "Pirate Jenny" (this one's better)

Julia Migenes singing "Pirate Jenny" (this is way overproduced bc it's a movie, but her performance isn't bad)

PJ Harvey singing "Soldier's Wife" (not as good as Marianne Faithfull, but kind of compelling anyway)

Bertolt Brecht—The Early Years (1898 - 1926)

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YOUTH

Born into bourgeois (middle class family), but from young age dressed like a proletariat—before he had political leanings of any sort—just a bohemian by nature. 

Sickly child. Possibly has rheumatic fever—later has heart attack. 

FIRST WRITING

First poems published age 14: regular column in local newspaper, including theater reviews.  He also wrote for the school newspaper. Heroes include playwrights Buchner and Wedekind’ – the latter especially (his line “Morality is the best business in the world”) and poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Villon.

WWI breaks out when he’s 16, too young to go to war. Wrote patriotic, pro-war poetry first, then almost kicked out of school at 16 for questioning in a poem why people would want to die for their country instead of live for it. Many friends, including Neher, fight in the war—BB finally drafted 1918 but doesn’t have to fight. Works in medical ward and sees the soldiers coming home with all their injuries and VD (STDs).

…there was almost no literary form at which Brecht did not try his hand. There were wonderful ballads… rude moralities, short and mainy very erotic novels, brilliant aphorisms, magnificent diary entries…

Not only did Brecht create ceaselessly; we, his friends, were encouraged to artistic activity… For his part, Brecht willingly accepted from us ideas and suggestions for changes in his own work…  Even at this early stage there were the first signs of co-operative work, in which of course Brecht took the undisputed lead.”

—Hanns Otto Münsterer

“He shies away neither from crudity nor from extreme realism. He is an odd mixture of tenderness and ruthlessness; of clumsiness and elegance; of crankiness and logic; of wild cries and sensitive musicality. He repels many people, but anyone who has once understood his tones finds it hard to drop him. He is disagreeable and charming, a very bad writer and a great poet, and amongst the younger Germans undoubtedly the one showing the clearest signs of genius.”

—Lion Feuchtwanger

Ballad of the Dead Soldier—early Brecht poem shows up later in Drums in the Night.

Young bard playing guitar in bars:

“Bert sings his songs, which never fail to make you feel better. Power, power, incredible power. Without any of that romantic nonsense, but tremendously evocative.” Caspar Neher

‘He loved the way that popular songs tacked cursorily from one subject to another or reduced a major natural disaster to a rhythmic couplet…discontinuity appealed to Brecht more than the idea of a single form which is ‘right’… Interruptions served as a reminder that there was no such thing as inevitability. The course of history could have run quite differently if events had been interrupted in different ways’. (Ronald Heyman)

FIRST PLAYS

Baal

Written from 1918 to 1919. 

Based on The Lonely One (Hanns Johst, who later wrote plays for the Nazis), about self-sacrificing artist. Brecht's first draft is a scene-by-scene rebuttal to Lonely One.

He based the main character Baal after François Villon.

“I’m working on a comedy:  ‘Baal eats! Baal dances!! Baal is transfigured!!!” There’s a bandit in it, a monstrous hedonist, a dumpling, a May-crazed man with immoral bowels!” Letter to Neher, May 1918

“Brecht loads his lines with the bestial imagery of feeding, sex and evacuating, and his poet without a conscience meets a fitting end in a dirty world.” —he is the real lonely one

JL Styan Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Expressionism and Epic Theatre - Page 144 P

Episodic scenes as with Johst, and poetic, expressionistic language but utterly earthy, visceral, vital, unlike most expressionist work. “Love rips the clothes from the body like a whirlpool and then, after a glimpse of heaven, one is buried naked under dead leaves.”

Ended up taking out almost all of the Lonely One references and even sent it to Johst, who apparently was kind about it. Johst later became a Nazi.

Instead of expressionistic “telegraphic” utterances—"Brecht wrote in a realistic mixture of dialect and slang, with every line composed with its delivery in mind, capturing in tone and rhythm the exact quality of vitality intended in the speaker. Brecht’s sense of the stage emerged particularly in his growing ability to write gestiche Sprache, ‘gestic language,’ which made the lines physically actable and conveyed the basic posture and attitude of the speaker as well."

Here's the full video of David Bowie as Baal in a BBC movie. It's a little silly, but... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhMQtbA9R0k&feature=related

Drums in the Night

Written in response to Spartacists Uprising

Appears to be an expressionist play—working in the expressionist idiom, but with different outcome

Placards, moon turns out to be a Japanese lantern—anti-illusionistic

 Much more prosaic, both in language and in plot

The audience "…was totally unprepared for the downbeat ending. Expressionist plays usually end with ecstatic defiance, and it looked as though Brecht’s sympathies were with the rebels: no one was expecting Kragler to lose interest in them and reach out shamelessly for the pleasures his pregnant girlfriend could provide." (Ronald Hayman)

1919 Meets Lion Feuchtwanger, who helps him get his first two plays produced and later collaborates

Several of Brecht's works were written in close collaboration with me, from his early times until his latest. Brecht believed in collective effort, and working with him was one of my happiest experiences. This does not mean that it was easy to work with him. On the contrary, he demanded lots of patience. But he gave more than he asked for.

Brecht was passionately fond of debating. He especially like to debate about which method and approach would be the most fertile one for creating good literature. In the course of our intimate collaboration, I realized more and more clearly that the origin of his creations were the gestures and the word. Story, plot, continuity did not matter to him: what mattered to him, was the right situation, the right gesture, the right word. He visualized the gesture, out from the gesture grew the word, and out of the word grew the character.

He search frantically for the right word to fit the gesture. Not only had the meaning of the word to be to the point; beyond that, its sound had to fit the situation and the character, and beyond that, the word had to be light and elegant. "Elegant" was a favorite adjective of his. Sometimes it happened that, after weeks of hard work, he concluded from our failure in finding a particular word that the whole work was a failure, and he insisted that we should tear it up, and start from scratch.

He spared not effort to find the right word. 'le mot juste,' our word, his word. Once, in Munich, while we were working on the Life of Edward the Second and, all day long, had looked in vain for a certain right word, he came running to my house in the middle of the night, whistled under my window, and shouted triumphantly: "I found it."

He was unhappy that the German language had become so cheap and threadbare in the course of the two World Wars and the Hitler time. The pre-war German language had become obsolete, the contemporary language was intolerably vulgar. Occasionally, he would lament: "When Horace expresses the most commonplace thought and the most trivial feeling, it sounds magnificent. This is because he worked with marble. We German writers of today have to work with mud." Brecht used a much coarser term.

1920 or so working with Karl Valentin’s cabaret act

In 1922 while still living in Munich, Brecht came to the attention of an influential Berlin critic, Herbert Jhering: "At 24 the writer Bert Brecht has changed Germany's literary complexion overnight...[he] has given our time a new tone, a new melody, a new vision. [...] It is a language you can feel on your tongue, in your gums, your ear, your spinal column.^"

In the Jungle (of Cities)

Brecht read Sinclair's The Jungle and liked the image of a city as a jungle, so wrote a play exploring that notion. Brecht realized no one had previously compared a city to a jungle and began to wonder who is who on the food chain in the Jungle that is a city. Didn’t use The Jungle’s plot at all, but pitted two men against each other, inspired by Verlaine and Rimbaud, former lovers whose relationship ended when the former shot at the latter. Employed two main distancing methods: note to audience to ignore “motives” (he deliberately included none) and watch the stakes, bc to be human is to fight, on some level, and we often don’t even know the motives we have to fight. Second distancing method: 11 scene play is 10 rounds of a boxing match + the “winner’s” speech. is important that the "outcome" in this Chicago fight ring really has no winners. One combatant is vanquished, but we learn that his ultimate desire is to be defeated. The victor, a younger man whose sacrifices of family and freedom allow him to win, survives but realizes he misses the emotional high of the duel. Though Brecht later tried to talk about the play in terms of classes, this one is really about the fear that men, in particular have that they can not express deep emotion with each other except through anger and competition, as well as an underlying fear that life is meaningless. They fight  in order to give their lives meaning.

Talking of In the Jungle and Baal

“I’ve kept my distance and ensured that the realization of my (poetical and philosophical) effects remains within bounds. The spectator’s “splendid isolation” is kept intact; it is not sua res quae agitur; he is not fobbed off with an invitation to feel sympathetically, to fuse with the hero and seem significant and indestructible as he watches himself in two different versions. A higher type of interest can be got from making comparisons, from whatever is different, amazing, impossible to overlook.” (BB, 2/10/22)

Edward II with Lion Feuchtwanger—first collaborative writing, adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II, then takes Asst dramaturg position at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

When Valentin observed soldiers should be afraid before a battle, “as white as cheese”, "…they were given white make-up to wear, which made them indistinguishable from each other…it was one of Brecht’s first alienation effects." (Heyman) Additionally, Asja Lacis, the assistant director who’d studied with Meyerhold, picking up the idea of making ‘actors puppet-like’: “I tried to choreograph the extras to a strong rhythm. Their faces should be immobile and expressionless. They knew neither why they were shooting nor where they were going.” (Brecht)

Reckoning with Marlowe’s verse and what to emphasize. Deemphasize tragedy, which is personal. Also adds narrator/ballad singer (like the Moritaten-sänger) to pre-figure what will happen in scene. Ending in Marlowe sends Edward into sewers, and Brecht takes us there to see him become self-sufficient there.

“Upon me here, for seven hours, the dung

Of London drips. But now this filth is hardening

My limbs. Now they are hard

As cedar wood. The stink of filth is making

My greatness measureless.

1923 Nazi Putsch

1924 G.F. Hartlaub "Die Neue Sachlichkeit"—The New Objectivity, which is about

Man is Man

Anti-war play

Stars Peter Lorre & Helene Weigel

Frankly didactic

Circus, cabaret, music hall styles

Premise that personality/individualism is unimportant—but

The “NEW HUMAN TYPE” who is mendacious, optimistic, adaptable—life is short, so don’t waste time suffering. Nothing matters more than staying alive. Also—people’s personalities change depending on the clothes/costumes/uniforms they are wearing (we’ll see this again in Galileo near end of career)

Elements of Chinese drama in way characters present selves to audience.

Charlie Chaplin films—slapstick and poetry work together

There’s a farce of a trial in the play, which was written during Hitler’s trail for Beer Hall Putsch (he should have been deported and after 5 yr sentence, got out in 9 months, this was typical of right wing crime)

“I was aware of huge inconsistencies in people’s social life, and I didn’t think it my task formerly to iron out all the discordances and interferences of which I was strongly conscious. I caught them up in the incidents of my plays and in the verses of my poems; and did so long before I had recognized their real character and causes. As can be seen from the texts it was a matter not just of a formal ‘kicking against the pricks’—of a protest against the smoothness and harmony of conventional poetry—but already of an attempt to show human dealings as contradictory, fiercely fought over, full of violence.”

—Brecht, “Of Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhymes”

Germany 1900 - 1919: "I felt the world shifting beneath my feet"

NOTES from 9/7/2012 Brecht lecture, part I

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (later changed it to Bertolt Brecht)

Born: February 10, 1898

Died: August 14, 1956

The artist to be known as Bertolt Brecht was born in 1898, the tail end of 19^th century, and he was deeply influenced by massive world changes, personal frailties, two world wars, the rich and tense life between the wars, as well as the cross-cultural currents in the most vibrant art period since the Renaissance. Munich and Berlin, the two cities where he spent his youth and early adulthood, were cultural crossroads, allowing the young Brecht to soak up a wide range of experiences and influences.

In few years from 19^th – 20^th century the whole world changes:

• Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (written 1898/published 1900) revolutionizes thinking about the mind
• Einstein's Theory of Relativity (1905) revolutionizes thinking about science, time and space
• Advances in theatrical lighting (electric lighting, focusable lights) revolutionize how cultural events can be presented
• Film becomes the entertainment medium of choice—extreme realism and episodic scenes steal thunder from traditional naturalistic theater styles
• Cars speed up life and make it more dangerous
• Airplanes mean human beings are no longer earth-bound but can inhabit the sky as well

These are all life-changing developments, and they all happen within a very short period of time, meaning that life in 1898 and life in 1905 are radically different

The rise of industrialization is also the rise of the machine age, and the dream of peace and ease due to mechanization of labor gives way to horror on a wide scale in WWI's mass mechanized warfare.

No longer “shoot when you see the whites of their eyes” of 18^th c, nor even Ironclad ships and accurate-to-900ft guns of Civil War.

Now:

• tanks,
• poison gas,
• hand and rifle grenades,
• airplanes and zeppelins dropping bombs

make war less personal face-to-face and more overwhelmingly terrifying.

German soldiers at the front said:

 “When I joined the army in the spring of 1916, I carried presumptions that the war would be fought like the 1870 War between Germany and France. Man-to-man combat, for instance. But in the trenches friend and foe alike suffer from the effects of invisible machinery. It is not enough to conquer the enemy. He has to be utterly destroyed.”

—Reinhold Spengler, 1^st Bavarian Infantry Regiment

“During the early hours of 15^th September [1916], a forest of guns opened up in a ceaseless rolling thunder of fire…. It was like a crushing machine, mechanical, without feelings, snuffing out the last resistance with a thousand hammers.”

—Reserve Leutnant Herman Kohl, 17^th Bavarian Infantry Reg.

“After only ten minutes, the battle of the Somme was working away like a giant machine. Everything operated with a terrible rhythm… Splinters clattered against our steel helmets but we took no notice. An attack absorbs all the senses…. “

—Unteroffizier Feuge, 6^th Company, 68^th Infantry Regiment

“Whose heart was not in his mouth at times during this appalling storm of steel. All were seized by a deep bitterness at the inhuman machine of destruction which hammered endlessly.”

—Landwehr Leutnant M. Gerster

“Life is one hell, death is a mere trifle; we are all screws in a machine that wallows forward, nobody knows where to.”

—Ernst Toller, 1916

Even responses to new technologies made it more scary—the face of a gas mask looks like the stuff of nightmares.

In addition to the dehumanization of the war machine itself,  medical techniques mean more soldiers survive more serious injuries and return home looking like robots or Frankenstein monsters to their loved ones.

End of war:

In Russia, Russian revolution—Germany had attempted revolutions as well, as had Ireland.

Tough times in Germany—they lose the war and come home tails between their legs to a destroyed country. Demoralized. Economic crash—they’ve lost everything. Open to change.

Major swing towards political extremes: liberalism, socialism, communism and what would become fascism: Horrors, fear injected with idealism, possibility for change, hope, willingness to experiment. Lots of people become Marxist, Communist, Socialist because it seems like a reasonable alternative to having these dynasties continue to rule from high above.

Brecht's Weimar, 1919 - 1926

 Notes from 9/7/12 Brecht lecture, part  2 of 2

Rise of Weimar culture—

Kaiser steps down in favor of nominally representative government, but there is hyper-inflation, devastation, vast income disparity.

Response in art: all across Europe, formal naturalism in fine and performing arts giving way to new modernist and avant-garde styles (including first German-specific innovations)

Expressionism (in art and performance):

·     rejects naturalism,

·     embrace “telegraphese” and

·     subjectivity of experience

·     Abstract vs. Primitive:

Definition of

1.           Nietzschean “rausch”

2.           Kant autonomy of art

PRIMITIVE EXPRESSIONISM

Nietzchean “rausch”

“Schrei”

Hot

Immediacy

Primitive art: Fauvism

Expression

Distortion

Chaos

Intensity

Ritual

Ecstatic lyricism

Color energy

Painted sets

Lighting defines mood

Leads to... Artaud, Living Theater

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Kantian autonomy of work of art

Voice

Cool

Distance

Cubism

Form

Symmetry

Geometry

Clarity

Confrontation

Debate

Color symbolism

Architectural sets

Lighting defines spaces

Leads to... Beckett, Brecht

“This Expressionism is horrible. All feeling for the beautifully rounded or splendidly crude human body languishes like the hope of peace. The intellect crushes vitality all along the line. Mystical, clever, consumptive, ecstatic pretentiousness runs rampant, and it all stinks of garlic. … I am starting to work with very old material that’s been tested a thousand times over, and I’m doing what I want, even if what I want is bad. I’m a materialist and a lout and a proletarian and a conservative anarchist, and I don't write for the press but for myself and you and the Japanese.”

—Brecht, letter to Caspar Neher, 18 June, 1918

The Artist as Magpie 

Brecht collects concepts and techniques from a wide range of POPULAR, ROUGH theater styles that already exist.

No single thing he does is “New” but the pastiche he creates from the parts is both totally original and totally of its time. This is what makes him a master and is the reason we study him.

“The popular theatre, freed of unity of style, actually speaks a very sophisticated and stylish language: a popular audience usually has no difficulty in accepting inconsistencies of accent and dress, or in darting between mime and dialogue, realism and suggestion.”

—Peter Brook

“It is always the Popular Theatre that saves the day. Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in common—a roughness. ...theatre that is not in a theatre, ...on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, ... joining in, answering back.”

—Peter Brook

Brecht's influences are wide-ranging, but are all popular, rough theater sources:

Shakespeare

• No original texts—all “lifted” from known sources
• Primacy of text over sets/costumes, etc.
• Direct address of audience
• Speaks to audiences of all classes—physical, bawdy
• Inconsistencies/improbabilities

 

Street Theater

• Moritaten-Sänger
• Grab and keep people’s attention
• Narrate rather than impersonate
• Overt moral purpose
• Music important and visible
• No “illusion of the theatre”
• Attractive to the masses

Clowning
(Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt)


Cabaret/Vaudeville

• Collage nature of performance
• Emcee
• Political commentary mixed with pure entertainment
• Attractive to wide range of classes
• Audience comfort: can move around and eat/drink

Russian Constructivism 

• Art
• Theater: political, scientific (Biomechanics)

 

"Orientalism" and puppet theater

• Economy of action & character
• Clarity of focus
• Exaggeration
• People playing different genders

Amerikanismus

Sport

• Appeals to all classes
• Actively involved audience that is not “hypnotized” but analytical
• View from all sides
• Freedom of movement for audience
• You can smoke and drink
• Fun

Political Theater

“We came out of the filth of the war (WWI), we saw a people that was half-starved and tormented to death. We saw how their leaders were ruthlessly murdered, we saw, wherever we looked, injustice, exploitation, torture, blood… Our art was created from a knowledge of reality and inspired by the will to replace this reality. We founded political theatre.”

—Erwin Piscator

My view is that all theater is political—all theater has a world view that it is trying to discuss with and demonstrate to  the audience. "Political theater" is different because it is open about that fact.