(Download PDF) Engaging With Brecht Making Theatre in The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Bill Gelber Full Chapter PDF

Engaging with Brecht.
Making Theatre
in the Twenty-first Century 1st Edition
Bill Gelber
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/engaging-with-brecht-making-theatre-in-the-twenty-fir
st-century-1st-edition-bill-gelber/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Governing California in the Twenty-First Century

(Seventh Edition)
https://ebookmass.com/product/governing-california-in-the-twenty-
first-century-seventh-edition/
Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century 1st

ed. Edition Saul Dubow
https://ebookmass.com/product/commonwealth-history-in-the-twenty-
first-century-1st-ed-edition-saul-dubow/
Militant Aesthetics - Art Activism in the Twenty-First

Century First Edition Martin Lang
https://ebookmass.com/product/militant-aesthetics-art-activism-
in-the-twenty-first-century-first-edition-martin-lang/
Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century

Anglophone Novel 1st Edition Yvonne Liebermann
https://ebookmass.com/product/nonhuman-agencies-in-the-twenty-
first-century-anglophone-novel-1st-edition-yvonne-liebermann/
Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century
1st ed. Edition Avi Brisman
https://ebookmass.com/product/water-crime-and-security-in-the-
twenty-first-century-1st-ed-edition-avi-brisman/
History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the

Twenty-First Century 1st Edition John H. Arnold
(Editor)
https://ebookmass.com/product/history-after-hobsbawm-writing-the-
past-for-the-twenty-first-century-1st-edition-john-h-arnold-
editor/
European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century:

Discourses, Directions and Genres 1st ed. Edition
Ingrid Lewis
https://ebookmass.com/product/european-cinema-in-the-twenty-
first-century-discourses-directions-and-genres-1st-ed-edition-
ingrid-lewis/
The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-

First Century 1st ed. Edition Richard Perez
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-magical-
realism-in-the-twenty-first-century-1st-ed-edition-richard-perez/
The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and

Twenty-First-Century Perspectives 1st ed. Edition Nigel
Harris
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-thirteenth-century-animal-turn-
medieval-and-twenty-first-century-perspectives-1st-ed-edition-
nigel-harris/
Engaging
with Brecht
Making Theatre in
the 21st Century
Bill Gelber
Engaging with Brecht
Bill Gelber

Making Theatre in the Twenty-first Century
Bill Gelber
School of Theatre and Dance
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-20393-0 ISBN 978-3-031-20394-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20394-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
Many thanks go to…

David Barnett, Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, Paula Hanssen, Tom Kuhn,
Meg Mumford, Ann Shanahan, Marc Silberman, Anthony Squiers, and
David Zoob, incredible Brecht scholars and associates for their advice
about all matters Brecht—with the caveat that any mistakes found in this
book are my own.
Brian Bell, great friend, host, and advisor.
The late Dr. Carl Weber, Professor Emeritus of Directing at Stanford
University. Many years ago, when I was at a low point in my university
career, he read my work and told me I was on the right track. Like many
of his admirers, I am forever grateful for his generosity.
Angela (Friedlich) Schirmer and Andreas Schirmer, dear friends and
hosts during my development leave in Berlin: Vielen Dank für Alles!
Dean Noel Zahler and the J. T. and Margaret Talkington College of
Visual and Performing Arts for major sources of funding, including the
Dean’s Advancing Creative Research Scholarship Award that allowed me
to continue my studies overseas.
The Office of the Vice President of Research at Texas Tech University,
for a 2019 Catalyst Grant for overseas research.
Mark Charney, Director of the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas
Tech, for his constant support and guidance.
All of the amazing graduate students from my Advanced Scene Study
classes at Texas Tech University, who put my ideas into practice.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The cast, crew and production team of Texas Tech University’s Mother
Courage and Her Children (2015) for an amazing experience. Our pro-
duction lies at the heart of this book.
Kelly Parker, Bethany Crosby, and Kirk Davidson, for always being in
my corner.
Andrea Bilkey, Mrs. Hilda Hoffman, Anett Schubotz and Erdmut
Wizisla at the Brecht Archive, Silka Quintero at Granger Historical Picture
Archive, and Sherri Jackson at Bridgeman Images USA for permission to
use the images in this book.
The Director of the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, Dr. Erdmut
Wizisla, and his staff, Dorothee Anders, Anett Schubotz, Helgrid Streit,
and Iliane Theilmann. Their invaluable help and kindness during my visits
there were, for many reasons, life-changing.
My family: My sons Devon, Alex, and James: I couldn’t be prouder of you.
And always: Debbie, my guiding light.
Contents
1 Why Engage with Brecht? 1
2 F
ive Productions of Mother Courage: 1941, 1949, 1950,
1951, and 2015 25
3 Collaborative Analysis 49
4 The Design Team, Meta-theatricality, and Literarization 73
5 First Rehearsal: Tools for Actors, Status, and Haltung 97
6 Rehearsing the Actors I: Arrangement119
7 Rehearsing the Actors II: Moment to Moment143
8 Rehearsing the Actors III: Playing the Events169
9 Documenting the Work: The Model Book193
10 Responses and Future Work215
vii
viii Contents
Appendix 1: Mother Courage Fabel Spring 2015235
Appendix 2: Working on a Scene with Stanislavsky

and Brecht247
Bibliography255
Index265
List of Images
Image 2.1 Mother Courage and Her Children rehearsal with Brecht,
Helene Weigel (as Courage), Erwin Geschonneck (as
Chaplain), and Angelika Hurwitz (as Kattrin), Berliner
Ensemble 1951. (Photo: Hainer Hill) 35
Image 3.1 Collaboration in Brecht’s apartment: Paul Samson-Körner
(at piano), Brecht (standing), Edmund Meisel, Hermann
Borchardt, Hannes Küpper, and Elisabeth Hauptmann;
Berlin, Spichernstraße 16, 1927. Photo: Bilderdienst des
Deutschen Verlags51
Image 4.1 The Actors Take Positions Before Lights Rise. This happens
before Scene 5, during the Siege of Magdeburg. (Photo:
Andrea Bilkey) 78
Image 4.2 The cast of Mother Courage with Travis Clark’s paintings
flown in for the curtain call. (Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 79
Image 4.3 The setting for Scene 5 with the actors and artwork in place.
(Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 81
Image 4.4 Scene 3: Just before Swiss Cheese is executed, a rendition of
the Goya painting, “The Third of May,” is flown in. (Photo:
Andrea Bilkey) 83
Image 4.5 Scene 8: The Introduction of a painting representing Eddie
Adams’s 1968 photo, foreshadowing the death of Eilif.
Image 4.6 Scene 11: When Kattrin is shot, the painting of Käthe
Kollwitz’s woodcut Hunger falls on the roof of the barn,
covering her body. (Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 84
ix
x List of Images
Image 4.7 The Foley table is clearly visible to the audience just right of
the proscenium during the production of Mother Courage in
2015. (Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 85
Image 4.8 The crew resets for the next scene of Mother Courage in
2015. (Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 86
Image 4.9 Scene 8: The Chaplain and the Cook reminisce together
during a ceasefire much the worse for wear. (Photo: Andrea
Bilkey)87
Image 4.10 Scene 9: The band for Mother Courage in 2015, to the
right of the proscenium and clearly visible to the audience.
Image 5.1 Scene 4: Kelsey Fisher-Waits in the Haltung that defined
her Figure. (Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 114
Image 6.1 The old friends finally work together again: Brecht and
Caspar Neher in Zurich 1948. (Photograph: Ruth Berlau) 122
Image 6.2 Rehearsal Arrangement for Mother Courage 2015 at
TTU. Scene 8, in which Yvette confronts the Cook while
the Chaplain, Mother Courage, and Yvette’s servant look
on. Original Title: “Putting Pieter in His Place.”
(Rehearsal Photo: Bill Gelber) 126
Image 6.3 The same moment from Scene 8 of the 2015 TTU
production but in its final form at the final dress rehearsal.
Note that Courage is now between the Cook and Yvette,
further enjoying the confrontation. The servant doesn’t
feel it is his place to watch. (Photo: Andrea Bilkey) 126
Image 6.4 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Landscape with the Fall of
Icarus,” c. 1588 (oil on canvas) (Bridgeman Images) 128
CHAPTER 1
Why Engage with Brecht?
In a historical situation that threatens critical thinkers and devalues strategies

of critique, we need models of oppositional voices, lest we forget the neces-
sity of protest. Brecht is such a model.1
In this volume, I record a process of applying a pedagogy of engage-

ment with Bertolt Brecht, taking advantage of the most current scholar-
ship, for an empirical study of Brecht in performance at higher institutes
of learning, specifically in the School of Theatre and Dance at Texas Tech
University, with graduate and undergraduate students. Brecht still has
much to offer the theatre practitioner, particularly at a time when events
of the twenty-first century cry out for a studied means of producing the-
atre for social change, to examine our own history from the vantage of
previous histories and seek a process in which change is possible.
Practitioners of Applied Theatre, who seek change by engaging with
local communities to create works for and with them, in diverse venues
ranging from schools to prisons, continue to take up this challenge, invok-
ing Brecht’s name as their inspiration and adapting his methods to their
own, citing his “rich legacy” which “underpins much of the story-based
1
Marc Silberman, “Brecht was a Revolutionary,” Jacobin, February 4, 2019, https://
jacobinmag.com/2019/04/bertolt-brecht-marxist-culture-politics-estrangement.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
B. Gelber, Engaging with Brecht,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20394-7_1
2 B. GELBER
work of a wide variety of applied theatre practitioners.”2 While scholars in

this century continue to examine and explicate, enumerating the various
permutations of Brecht’s theory and praxis as they evolved during his life-
time, my project is a step-by-step process to realize Brecht’s ways of work-
ing in the classroom, rehearsal hall, and onstage using my own production
of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a model for exploration
with side trips into my class work.
Though Bertolt Brecht instituted practices that have viability today, I
have not strictly adhered to Brecht’s methodology but have taken his work
in new directions, recognizing the need to adapt his ideas to a pedagogical
model that further explicates his theory and praxis for students and prac-
titioners who are either unfamiliar with his intentions or have a surface
view of them. Nor have I insisted on promoting a Marxist view of the
world, the spur for Brecht’s work. What I want to stress throughout this
book is the usefulness of Brecht’s examination of control narratives influ-
encing the behaviors and thought patterns of people in society and the
way they are reflected in theatrical works of art. Whether as instructor or
director, where engagement with play texts involves a study of the envi-
ronment from which they have sprung, I question our previous beliefs
about how theatre is fashioned, sometimes rejecting and sometimes retain-
ing what we know about how to reveal meaning onstage as we engage
with the work of Bertolt Brecht.
Bertolt Brecht is undisputed as the greatest German playwright and
poet of the twentieth century, a germinal figure of theoretical and practical
views on performance. In some ways, his work on theatre is now so ubiq-
uitous as to be unattributed. Brecht was ahead of his time: his use of
multi-media, his emphasis on critical engagement by the audience, his
insistence on a form of semiotics for staging purposes, his dramaturgy of
reflection, are now basic tools of exploration, realization, and examination
of a theatre piece in process. In specific instances, he is misinterpreted, his
famous staging techniques appropriated in a mistaken view that minimizes
his contributions, relegating them to the realm of meta-theatrical means
without method, such devices as the famous half-curtain considered cliché
even in his own time, while his role as dramatist is consigned to master
storyteller, with his political intentions downplayed as relics of a bygone era.
2
Tim Prentki, “Introduction to poetics of representation,” in Tim Prentki and Nicola
Abraham, eds., The Applied Theatre Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 21.
1 WHY ENGAGE WITH BRECHT? 3
In some ways, this obscurantism is understandable. Brecht himself

admitted in 1953, “It’s my own fault. [Accounts about his work] apply
not to the theatre I practice but the theatre my critics read into my own
theoretical writing.”3 He felt it necessary to continually revise his explana-
tions as he found himself misunderstood, even by those who championed
him. In “From a Letter to an Actor,” he opined, “I then feel as a mathe-
matician would if he reads: Dear Sir, I am wholly of your opinion that two
and two make five.”4 His disappointment would continue unabated today
if he had the opportunity to read the various ways his name is still invoked
predominantly as a proponent of devices which are disconnected from the
primary goal for which those strategies were used, Brecht’s attempts to
create critical thinking in the audience by disrupting the sense of a narra-
tive which immerses them completely in the events, encouraging the spec-
tator to take a role in changing society. At the same time, he knew he
could only offer his spectators suggestions as to how to act, asking them
questions rather than providing them with answers.
To begin with, Bertolt Brecht’s work cannot be understood without
knowledge of his political views: his embrace of Marxism and his compli-
cated relationship with the Communist party. He had begun to study the
writings of Vladimir Lenin in 1926, which he admired both for Lenin’s
writing style and for his insights. The words hanging on a beam in his
house in Svendborg during his first years in exile, and constituting a driv-
ing principle behind Brecht’s work, were a saying in Lenin’s writings
adapted from Hegel, “The truth is concrete.”5
According to Carl Weber, Brecht “didn’t show any obvious interest in
Marxism and/or communist politics until 1926, when he was approach-
ing his twenty-ninth birthday.”6 This occurred as Brecht researched the
workings of the Wheat Exchange in Chicago for his play Joe Fleischhacker
3
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Performance, eds. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman,
trans. Charlotte Ryland, Romy Fursland, Steve Giles, Tom Kuhn, and John Willett (London:
Bloomsbury, 2018), 251. Hereafter BOP.
4
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre. 3rd ed., eds. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom
Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 267. Hereafter BOT.
5
In his essay, “One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back,” Vladimir Lenin is summarizing
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectics, within which we find: “There is no such thing
as abstract truth. Truth is always concrete.” Quoted in John J. White, Bertolt Brecht’s
Dramatic Theory (New York: Camden House, 2004), 219–220.
6
Carl Weber, “Brecht and Communism” from Brecht Unbound, eds. James K. Lyon and
Hans-Peter Breuer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995).19.
4 B. GELBER
and discovered an issue: “I got the impression that these processes simply
could not be explained, in other words were not rationally comprehensible.”7
He then sought the answers to his confusion in the works of Karl Marx.
Once Brecht read portions of Marx’s Capital, he not only saw the system
at work in Chicago, but he discovered a new sounding board upon which
to pitch his ideas, a powerful, albeit a conceptual one: “This man Marx
was the only spectator for my plays whom I had ever seen.”8
In particular, Brecht pointed to Karl Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach
and wrote, “I wanted to take the principle that it was not just a matter of
interpreting the world but of changing it, and apply that to theatre.”9
Brecht’s sense of how the world worked was a key to understanding his
unique contributions: theatre practice was an essential means of combat-
ing the unfortunate effects of a bourgeois society promoting its agenda as
the status quo; instead Brecht, leading an audience towards a critique of a
world they took for granted, had hopes for the creation of a socialist
society.
He believed theatre could be an agent for change, a vehicle for opening
the eyes of the spectator to the possibilities for a future society by pointing
out the flaws of the current social environment rendered by the people in
power as the natural and unchangeable order of things. This was because
he believed people’s consciousness was determined by their social exis-
tence, rather than the reverse.10 Anthony Squiers explained how Brecht
sought to “force people to conclude that humans are largely responsible
for the construction of their ideological and material reality and that they
are therefore not bound to how things are presently.”11 Brecht could apply
a specific political lens, Marxism, to encourage such a view on the part of
the spectator and use methods to produce this cognitive uncertainty or, as
will be discussed later in this chapter, create what he called the
Verfremdungseffekt.
His became a visceral response to the governmental policies of the
Weimar Republic, during a tumultuous period for politics in Germany. In
1929, Bertolt Brecht was watching the May Day demonstration in Berlin
Klaus Völker, Brecht: A Biography (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 110.
7
Völker, Brecht: A Biography, 110–111.

8
9
BOT 248.
10
See “Katzgraben Notes 1953,” in BOP 274.
11
Anthony Squiers, “Philosophizing Brecht: An Introduction for Dark Times,” in
Philosophizing Brecht: Critical Readings on Art, Consciousness, Social Theory and Performance,
eds. Norman Roessler and Anthony Squiers (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019), 5.
from the balcony of his friend Fritz Sternberg’s apartment when the police
began to fire on the crowd and killed twenty-five unarmed protesters.
Sternberg recalled, “When Brecht heard the shots and saw that people
were being hit, he turned white in the face in a way that I’d never seen
before in my life.”12 Overlooking this bloody suppression of an opposing
political party by the governing one, Brecht’s belief in revolutionary
change was strengthened. Brecht became a committed Marxist, even
though he never officially joined the Communist party.
Klaus Völker describes how Brecht found Marxism useful as a form of
investigation, “Brecht saw that Marxism was a scientific method that
would enable him to analyze the things that interested him as a dramatist
and produce them onstage.”13 This idea of marrying scientific inquiry to
artistic goals was a thread woven throughout Brecht’s explorations of the-
atre. Every work of art contained within it the societal constructs of the
time in which it was written. Brecht could not only infuse his own works
with revelations about these ideas but use various existing texts, familiar to
the theatre-going public, to upset the spectators’ notions of the underly-
ing reasons for character behavior; many of his works are adaptations or
responses to already existing plays.14
Becoming a playwright did not satisfy Brecht’s artistic and political
ends. Brecht needed to control the means whereby these works were pre-
sented to the public. Brecht always maintained a play was not completed
until it had been tested in the laboratory that was the theatre: “it [sic] is
impossible to finish a play properly without a stage.”15 Unless he himself
supervised a production, he couldn’t know if the play would be effica-
cious, since he relied on collaborators, such as the designers and the actors,
to both realize and question what was written and rehearsed. Unfortunately,
he learned this all too well when, in 1933, he lost the means of testing his
12
Stephen Parker, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama,
2014), 262.
13
Völker, Brecht: A Biography, 110.
14
As Stanley Mitchell notes in his introduction to Understanding Brecht by Walter
Benjamin, “Brecht’s ‘plagiarism,’ his rewriting of Shakespeare and Marlowe, are experiments
in whether a historical event and its literary treatment might be made to turn out differently
or at least be viewed differently, if the processes of history are revalued.” Walter Benjamin,
Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 2003), xii.
15
Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934–1955, trans. Hugh Rorrison, ed. John
Willett (London: Methuen Drama, 1993), 73. Brecht kept to lower case letters throughout
his journals, a habit he shared with his friend Arnolt Bronnen, whose name he copied to
become Bertolt rather than Berthold.
6 B. GELBER
ideas onstage. Though Brecht achieved great success, both monetarily and
culturally, with The Threepenny Opera in 1928, by 1933 Brecht found
himself in great danger when Hitler used the Reichstag Fire as a pretext to
seize power. Brecht realized that, for himself and Germany, this was a
disaster, and he left the country on February 27 knowing the Nazi party
was openly hostile to his writing and would soon arrest him.16 He was in
exile, often in countries where he did not speak the language, for fifteen
years, with few opportunities to mount his own productions in the way
he wanted.
In 1949, when he returned to his homeland and finally had the oppor-
tunity to lead his own company with his wife Helene Weigel in the Soviet
Sector of Berlin, Germany, he had only seven years to realize his ideas for
performance onstage. The heart condition of which he suffered for most
of his life finally led to his untimely death in 1956 at the age of 58.
However, at the Berliner Ensemble (hereafter also the BE), he had been
training his assistants to carry on, sending them out to various cities to
oversee productions of his plays, using them to document his work in
model books, and giving them opportunities to realize their own projects.
Brecht constantly rethought his approaches and the way in which he
referred to them. He left behind him enough writing to fill thirty volumes
of complete works: plays, prose, poetry, journals, letters, and 3000 pages
of theoretical essays. He also left behind a legacy to be realized by his
collaborators.
While his works were collected in various forms both during his lifetime
and after his death, any English translations, particularly of Brecht’s theo-
retical writings on theatre, had appeared sporadically, beginning with John
Willett’s 1964 Brecht on Theatre, a collection limited by Willett’s access to
the German material, much of which had not yet been published in any
form.17 In 2016, Brecht on Theatre received an update by Marc Silberman,
Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, through the Writing Brecht Project, and in
2014, Stephen Parker’s biography, Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a
16
His name appeared on the first Nazi blacklist compiled by Wolfgang Herrman in May of
that year. See Johannes F. Evelein, “Brecht and Exile,” in Bertolt Brecht in Context
(Cambridge: The University Press, 2021), 89.
17
At the time, according to the editors of Brecht on Theatre 3rd edition, only the Schiften
zum Theater [Writings on Theatre), a single tome of less than 300 pages, had been accessible
to Willett. See BOT 1. English-speaking Brecht scholars are indebted to the indefatigable
Willett, who translated Brecht’s letters, working journals, collected short stories, a selected
number of poems, and many of the plays.
painstakingly researched volume, did much to correct the errors of the

previous English-language biography by John Fuegi.18
With the updated scholarship available to the English-speaking public,
a further reassessment of what can be accomplished when engaging with
Brecht seems appropriate, particularly as his work can be realized in the
theatre, with living actors and a production team in a collective process of
discovery. An educational institution is the perfect venue for these
ambitions.
This book does not promote one particular political agenda. Instead, it
shows how theatre for social change can be achieved by adopting a per-
spective about society that can be effectively communicated onstage. As
will be shown, many lenses, and various goals to do with engaging the
spectator, can be treated through the same process. However, it would be
a mistake to ignore Brecht’s own views as a key to his work, principally
that he saw Marxism as the best solution to the ills affecting a capitalist
society. For example, one cannot study the history of Mother Courage and
Her Children without being aware that Brecht framed his treatment of
events as part of the history of class struggles. And it is true that capitalism
still favors those who benefit from the system and punishes those who
don’t. It is worth continuing to examine society in this way, with the
knowledge that the haves seek more and more power and profits, while
the have-nots sink further and further into poverty, becoming hopeless of
change in the process. As a dialectical materialist, Brecht was averse to
mystical or metaphysical explanations for historical catastrophes but
instead insisted on exploring contradictions that revealed social circum-
stances as concrete man-made constructions. In Brecht’s rendering of the
Thirty Years War in Mother Courage and Her Children, the war is not
primarily about the varying religious interpretations of the Bible, but a
means for the ruling classes to seize power and lands, building wealth
while exploiting the common people.
The idea of using theoretical discussion to create theatre may seem a
dry one. And in fact, though Brecht had very specific aims for the theatre,
and created theories and means to support them, more than one colleague
18
John Fuegi, Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama
(New York: Grove Press, 1994). See the essays collected as John Willett, James K. Lyon,
Siegfried Mews, H.C. Norregard, “A Brechtbuster Goes Bust: Scholarly Mistakes, Misquotes,
and Malpractices in John Fuegi’s Brecht and Company,” Brecht Yearbook 20: Brecht then and
now, eds. Marc Silberman and Maarten van Dijk (Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1995), 259–367.
8 B. GELBER
at the BE attested to Brecht’s eschewing of theory in rehearsal: “Many

actors and theatre practitioners who worked with Brecht, especially at the
Berliner Ensemble, report that he neither discussed nor asked his col-
leagues to read his theoretical writings.”19 Practice realized theory without
necessarily referring to it directly.20 Meanwhile, Brecht also believed the
pursuit of knowledge while imagining new interpretations of art works
could be an enjoyable process.
So, what are these theories, neologisms, concepts, so important to
Brecht but, at the same time, largely unnamed when he worked with his
actors in rehearsal? Since Brecht’s concepts have been translated and con-
sidered in different ways, here are definitions and applications as they have
been used throughout the process of mounting the 2015 Mother Courage,
and thus the book. Verfremdung, gestus, Haltung, “Not…but,” Fabel,
literarization, historicization, and the Separation of the Elements have all
been previously defined and adapted into readable English, while phrases
such as “over-egging,” “pre-empting is precluding,” and the “ever-thus”
appear in Manfred Wekwerth’s writings as terms Brecht used as well,
although they are not included in other translations of Brecht’s own theo-
retical essays. A brief explanation for these and other concepts is offered in
the rest of this chapter.
The Character versus the Figure

Throughout this text, roles played by actors in a Brechtian manner will be
referred to as Figures, while those offered as examples of other forms of
theatre, particularly contemporary, naturalistic, and Aristotelean, will con-
tinue to be labelled characters. The former emphasizes behavior based on
social relations, while the latter emphasizes the psychology of the role.21
19
Marc Silberman, “The Work of the Theatre,” in Stephen Brockmann, ed. Bertolt Brecht
in Context (Cambridge: The University Press, 2021), 115.
20
There are exceptions: Meg Mumford points out gestus was an important term that
appeared in the daily reports on the practical work. See Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht (New
York: Routledge, 2009), 50. I have adapted the non-italic version of the word used by the
editors of Brecht on Theatre 3rd ed., although other quoted authors do not.
21
This is a distinction offered by David Barnett in David Barnett, Brecht in Practice:
Theatre, Theory and Performance (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), 57–64.
The Epic Label

Brecht used more than one label to name the type of theatre he promoted.
In his theoretical writings, Brecht began to refer to his dramatic output
and ways of producing it as epic, a term he used to contrast the theatre
outlined by Aristotle in The Poetics and one still equated with his work. He
rejected a form of theatre that encouraged the audience to identify with
the characters onstage for cathartic purposes and proposed instead a the-
atre that exposed the workings of social systems and encouraged the audi-
ence to take a “critical stance.”22 As he developed his ideas in practice, he
began to refer to his theatre as “dialectical,”23 and, at the end of his life, as
he encouraged “naivety” in the spectator,24 he considered the term “phil-
osophical folk theatre.”25 In this volume, these labels will appear in various
quotations, but in general, we will omit them when describing the various
processes he developed.26
The Fabel
Brecht’s was a collaborative approach, and no more so than when creating
a critical framework for a production through a shared analysis of a play.
This is a version of the plot from a particular view that consciously seeks to
reveal the sociological, ideological, and/or economic implications of the
play’s environment and behaviors. Brecht called the product formed from
this analysis, a guide for the team members who could refer to it through-
out the process, as a Fabel.
In Brecht in Practice, David Barnett notes the Fabel is “an interpreted
version of events.”27 This adds a layer to the basic narrative. Rather than a
listing of the plot points, it becomes an examination of “fictional events
22
According to Manfred Wekwerth, one of Brecht’s favorite phrases. Stance here is
“Haltung” in German. See Manfred Wekwerth, Daring to Play: A Brecht Companion, ed.
Anthony Hozier (London: Routledge, 2011), 53.
23
See the sections in BOT under the subheading, “Dialectical Theatre,” 283–207.
24
By naivety, Brecht was referring to the reactions his theatre might arouse in his spectators
as they receive insights from the production, as a bridge between enjoyment and thought.
See Wekwerth, Daring to Play, 53.
25
Wekwerth, Daring to Play, 89.
26
In an essay written around 1954, “From Epic to Dialectic Theatre 2,” Brecht explicitly
states, “We may now stop using the term ‘epic theatre,’” as, at that point, he had replaced it
with the dialectical, BOT 284.
27
Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 86.
10 B. GELBER
through social contradictions.”28 Instead of imposing a singular vision

upon their collaborators, the director encourages them to consider the
implications behind the Figure’s social relations, especially as they reveal
contradiction, to take a closer look at the script from a sociological per-
spective, with the director, for example Brecht, serving as the mediator
between the different views proposed by the team members.
The Fabel was the key to unlocking the play and an instrument for
agreement between the various artists: it focused everyone’s attention on
the same place. “The [Fabel] gratifies only a specific set of many possible
interests.”29 Ultimately, the Fabel “is the theatre’s great undertaking, the
complete composition of all the gestic incidents, containing the communi-
cations and motivations that from now on constitute the audience’s
enjoyment.”30
Verfremdung
Verfremdung was rendered in English by John Willett in the first edition
of Brecht on Theatre as “alienation,”31 a word that may be confused with
its Marxist meaning: the worker being alienated from the fruits of his
labor. What Brecht meant by Verfremdung was the means of making the
familiar unfamiliar, to show the contradictions within a common-place
view of the world to demonstrate that the workings of that view are man-
made rather than inevitable and are susceptible to change. This becomes a
political move, as social systems are presented by those in control as natu-
ral and unchangeable, while any close examination of them is discouraged.
With this technique the spectator critiques these systems in an operation
that is “combative in nature.”32 Brecht is here promoting what he calls
“interventionist thinking” on the part of the spectator,33 that is, the
28
Barnett, Brecht in Practice, 89.
29
“Short Organon for the Theatre,” BOT 250. The editors have translated instances of the
word “Fabel” as “plot.”
30
BOT 250. For a discussion of gestus and gestic, see below. How gestic incidents are
revealed through acting is discussed below and in Chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.
31
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 1st ed., ed. John
Willett. (London: Methuen, 1964), beginning on page 71 and then continually used
throughout his book.
32
BOT 261.
33
BOT 243, “Short Organon for the Theatre §46.”
audience interprets everything they see in order to intercede or interpose

themselves in it, just as a sports fan may have enough separation from the
competition to comment on a football play.
Ever-thus
Conceptually Verfremdung is applied to create a struggle within the minds
of the spectators with what they consider foregone conclusions, the view
of society as an unchangeable and ineluctable natural phenomenon; Brecht
called this idea of inevitability an “ever-thus (Immeriges).”34 From this
perspective, current social norms, laws, and systems had always been in
place, and therefore the possibility of change was deemed a fruitless
endeavor. By giving this view a label, Brecht playfully suggested its oppo-
site, a world ever changing, the ever-thus a useful construction applied by
a ruling hegemony to discourage change but just that: a construction that
could be replaced, as it had many times throughout history.
Historicization
In “On Experimental Theatre,” Brecht couples the idea of Verfremdung
with a device he names historicization.35 Brecht defines historicization as
“viewing a particular social system from the point of view of another social
system.”36 Two processes are involved here: (1) the actor must play the
events in history as unique and therefore comparable to later periods, and
(2) actors should treat present-day events as historical ones. In each the
behavior of people involved in those incidents is shown to be directly con-
nected to a specific social order, one that can be critiqued. At the same
time, such changes have occurred between the past and the present, sug-
gesting further change is possible. These processes foster a scientific atti-
tude, “a technique of getting irritated with the everyday, ‘self-evident,’
universally accepted occurrence.”37 In this way, the spectator becomes “a
social historian” who can contemplate how yesterday became today.38 This
leads to Verfremdung.
34
Wekwerth, Daring to Play, 36. I have not discovered this term in other writings about
Brecht’s theories in English.
35
BOT 187.
36
BOP 122.
37
BOT 188.
38
BOT 196–198.
12 B. GELBER
The contrasts and similarities between behaviors are instructive onstage,

as the spectator notices different environments lead to different behaviors.
Arrigo V. Subiotto outlines the way this might be accomplished: by begin-
ning with the original author’s environment and intent, “the ideas imbed-
ded in the play, the contemporary documents and historical situation, the
particular individuality and attitude of the author towards his time,”39 to
consider the play dramaturgically.
Historicization does not simply refer to works from other periods. As
Subiotto puts it, “Crucial in Brecht’s attitude to literature is his belief
[that] a work of art is tantamount to a historical event and, once created,
belongs to history.”40 Thus, in Brecht’s method, even contemporary plays
can be treated as historical documents with an attitude of unfamiliarity,
and any dramaturgical treatment of such plays must engage in a form of
historical research, unearthing those ever-thuses, such as the strain of
patriarchal attitudes or discrimination against the marginalized, that
remain as undercurrents in contemporary society.
Gestus
It is one thing to create a theoretical strategy. It is another to realize it in
performance so it is clear to an audience. Brecht did so through what he
called “gestus.” An exact definition of what Brecht meant by this word is
hard to pin down. It is important enough to Brecht’s work that Hanns
Eisler enthused, “The gestus is one of Brecht’s brilliant discoveries. He
discovered it in the same way as Einstein, for example, discovered his
famous formula.”41 The editors of Brecht on Theatre noted the famed
writer “ultimately used the word in such an inflammatory way that gestus
could stand in general for Brecht’s entire approach to staging theatre.”42
For the purposes of this book, I apply the term gestus using a definition
suggested by the editors: as a procedure that can “connect theatre event,
society, and audience by making actions observable, pointing to the struc-
turally defining causes behind them, and enabling critique.”43 More than
39
Arrigo Subiotto, Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations for the Berliner Ensemble (London: The
Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975), 5.
40
Arrigo Subiotto, Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations, 9.
41
Hans Bunge, Brecht, Music and Culture: Hanns Eisler in Conversation with Hans Bunge,
eds. Sabine Berendse and Paul Clements (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 54.
42
BOT 6.
43
BOT 6.
a simple “gesture” (the literal translation of gestus when it’s not referring
to Brecht’s practice), this form of the term describes a range of behaviors
that reveal how society affects relations. The gestus signifies what a motion
or action means as social behavior, separating these social relations from
hegemonic ideology and language to see them more clearly as historically
determined. For Brecht, this is the concrete truth of behavior separated
from its bourgeois trappings allowing the audience to more clearly exam-
ine reality.
The historicized events are the gestic incidents revealed through the
behavior of the Figures. This is because the epic theatre “is chiefly inter-
ested in the behavior of people towards one another, wherever they are
socio-historically significant (typical).”44 In this way, “the scene is played
as a piece of history,”45 so that the spectators can consider it from a differ-
ent perspective, one separated from the everyday.
The Fabel is the first attempt to apply gestus to particular moments in
the play before they are realized specifically onstage. In this way, all the
elements to come, including the design and performances, are aiming
towards the revelation of gestus.46
Haltung47
In the actors’ case, behavioral signs must be clearly revealed through per-
formance. Manfred Wekwerth notes that Brecht would refer to the gestus
of the actors as “an individual stance taken by a character.”48 This attitude,
revealed through the Figure’s comportment, and including vocal and
physical choices, is the Haltung. Unlike a character, which may have an
overarching attitude and be driven by a particular intent, the Haltung of a
Figure is fluid: it may vary from moment to moment based on the rela-
tionships of the Figures towards each other and their surroundings as well
as the tendency of the Figures to react in a contradictory fashion to various
situations. Such contradiction within a display of behaviors, a series of
stances the spectators can examine, may lead to Verfremdung because the
Figures’ actions prove to be inconsistent. The Figure cannot be pinned
44
BOT 126.
45
BOT 126.
46
See later passages in this chapter for further discussion and definitions of gestus.
47
Plural Haltungen.
48
14 B. GELBER
down to one attitude but is defined by many: the various Haltungen

together make up the complete Figure. At the same time, the actor is
encouraged to have their own attitude to the Figure, their own Haltung,
which may contradict the attitudes of the Figure they are playing. In later
chapters of this book, the Haltung will be discussed using Keith Johnstone’s
idea of status as he applies it to the behavior of human beings in social
relations. This will serve as a shorthand for the actors when they relate to
each other as Figures.49
The “Not…But”
In Daring to Play, Manfred Wekwerth explains a Brecht strategy: “The
play must be performed, produced and written in such a manner that the
spectator is surprised by the plot development and the characters’
behavior.”50 A Figure has options, what they do versus what they don’t
do, and Brecht wanted both displayed in such a way the audience could
see one choice and imagine others. He gave this idea a name: the
“Not…But.” The Figures do not act according to the audience’s experi-
ences and expectations but disappoint them. In this way, as Wekwerth
notes, “The expectation that is NOT fulfilled has to be built up by the
actor and the accompanying production to such an extent that the BUT is
a ‘breath-taking’ surprise.”51 This is another form of Verfremdung, offered
by the performance. Many examples of this concept will be discussed in
relation to Mother Courage as a play and as realized in performance by the
Berliner Ensemble and in 2015 at Texas Tech.
Separation of the Elements

One way in which specific gestic incidents are highlighted is the employ-
ment of all the theatrical elements in conversation with each other. Each
of the design elements—lighting, sound, music, props, settings—can
comment on the incidents in their unique ways. Brecht sought to counter
the overbearing artistic trance created by a Gesamtkunstwerk such as pre-
ferred by the composer Richard Wagner: a complete artwork with an over-
all theme or mood. By allowing the elements to have their own unique
49
See Chaps. 5 and 6.
50
Wekwerth, Daring to Play, 62. Emphasis Wekwerth’s.
51
Wekwerth, Daring to Play, 62–63. Emphasis Wekwerth’s.
character, Brecht avoided the seamless combination of each for purposes

of Verfremdung to circumvent “the undignified intoxication” that would
be produced in the audience.52 At the same time, as each element was
subsumed for the purpose of making one statement, Brecht felt it lost its
special ability to add to the conversation: “[A]s long as art forms are to be
‘fused together,’ then the individual elements must all be degraded to the
same degree.”53 Instead Brecht proposed the Separation of the Elements,
the opportunity for each design to interact with and comment on
the others.
Literarization
One strategy for accomplishing the act of Verfremdung in the early days of
Brecht’s epic theatre was Caspar Neher’s use of a half curtain, a light fabric
strung with wires across the stage at about head height that could be
quickly opened and closed for scene changes.54 More importantly it
became a projection surface, for the titles of scenes or films. The space
above it exposed the workings of the fly gallery or the lighting instruments
but also made room for further screens or signs. Banners, whether flown
or projected, became a theatrical form of footnotes, a scheme Brecht
referred to as literarization: “the strategy of linking the theatre with other
intellectual institutions by incorporating written text…so as to provoke a
different mode of reception on the part of the audience.”55 Literarization
was a form of Verfremdung because it disrupted the flow of the narrative.
The audience was “encouraged to look up and down and from side to
side, so that their visual space transcends that of the action on stage in a
process termed complex seeing.56 Spectators could use this form of com-
plex seeing as a researcher might, consulting other sources to further
52
Bertolt Brecht, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, trans. and ed. Steve Giles
(London: Methuen Drama, 2007), 69.
53
Brecht, Rise and Fall, 68.
54
This practice continued with the Berliner Ensemble until eventually both Brecht and
Neher felt it had become a Brechtian cliché. In Zurich in 1941, the names of the countries
the family traveled through were projected; the physical signs, constructed as part of the
scenery were flown in for the 1949 production. Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays: Five, eds.
John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen Drama, 1995), 280.
55
BOP 5.
56
BOT 184–185.
16 B. GELBER
interpret the phenomenon witnessed on stage.57 Brecht’s “leafing back,”

was applied here as well; the spectator/reader could consult earlier scenes/
pages for comparison, especially when engaged with complex questions
and ideas.58 Any of these signs could also inhibit suspense by announcing
the scene’s ending in advance, for example, noting Mother Courage will
lose her officer’s shirts which are the source of conflict in Scene 5 of the
play. This was also a means of encouraging interventionist thinking, as the
audience was no longer wondering what would happen, but why, and how
it could be avoided.
By including those meta-theatrical means, Brecht reminded the audi-
ence everything they were seeing on the stage was artifice, built by arti-
sans; craft had been applied by theatrical workers sometime in the past and
was now being displayed. The various effects the audience experienced
came from specific sources, whether a band of musicians, a row of lighting
instruments hung by a technician, or an apparatus that produced sound
when an operator used it.
Over-egging and Pre-empting

An artwork which aimed to be a Gesamtkunstwerk over-stated a particular
mood through a conjunction of all artistic means. Manfred Wekwerth
writes that Brecht dismissed these attempts as examples of “over-egging”
or “pre-empting.”59 For Brecht, over-egging was the manner in which a
production would coordinate the elements of a play so monolithically that
they served a single function, all designs bombarding the audience with
one mood. To offer endless examples of the same idea was to add too
many eggs to the dialectic soufflé and thereby ruin it.
Similarly, in his essay “Brechtian Theatre Today: An Attempt in Seven
Days,” Wekwerth refers to the old theatre motto “pre-empting is
precluding.”60 To spell out a message for the spectator risks short-circuiting
critical thinking and discouraging the spectators from reaching their own
conclusions. Pre-empting means doing all the work for the audience, like
a teacher who asks a question and then answers it themselves. Ideally, the
57
“This process is modelled [sic] in part on the way in which readers of a book consult
footnotes, or flip between its pages in order to compare one situation with another.” BOT
184–185.
58
59
60
learning would continue not only during the performance but beyond.
Peter Palitzsch, dramaturg and assistant director to Brecht, refers to the
whole process, the “‘Belehrung,’ or the education of the theatre spectator
from the time during the performance to well afterwards at home,”61 as a
“fundamental goal.”62
These terms, Verfremdung, historicization, ever-thus, gestus, Haltung,
the “Not…but,” Fabel, the Separation of the Elements, literarization,
over-egging, and pre-empting will be discussed in more detail and applied
to specific productions of Mother Courage and Her Children, at the
Berliner Ensemble in the twentieth century and the School of Theatre and
Dance at Texas Tech University in the twenty-first. In the latter case, all
these concepts undergo testing in the laboratory that is a stage and
rehearsal hall in an institute of higher education.

To engage is “to entangle, to involve, to cause to stick fast.”63 Ours is an
approach of that kind: a direct entanglement with ideas that adhere to you
the more you involve yourself with them. Another definition of engage is
“to enter into, contest with, to bring to conflict.”64 As the book unfolds,
you may question, grapple with, reject, or accept the various concepts we
share—you may engage in a direct struggle that could ultimately lead to
new approaches.
Engaging has two further resonances within this text. The book’s title
encourages you to delve into the various ways in which art can be imag-
ined and constructed, to intertwine and engage your ideas with another.
A form of the word is also an adjective: to be engaging is to be enthralling,
captivating, and amusing, while at the same time intriguing and thought-
provoking. Theatre that requires you only to do one without being the
other runs the risk of being entertaining but trivial, in the first case, or
ponderous and pretentious, in the other.
61
Kristopher Imbrigotta, “(Re)Building the Engaged Spectator: The Katzgraben
Programmhefte of the Berliner Ensemble, 1953/1972,” Brecht Yearbook 39: The Creative
Spectator, ed. Theodore F. Rippey (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 99.
62
Imbrigotta, “(Re)Building,” 99.
63
Webster’s New International Dictionary: Second Edition Unabridged (Springfield, MA:
G. & C. Webster Company, 1934), s.v. “engage,” 847.
64
Webster’s, 847.
18 B. GELBER
Brecht and Stanislavsky

After creating the famous table for the essay “Notes of the Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahagonny,” Brecht was accused of rejecting all forms of emo-
tion on the stage to distance the spectators from the characters. In two
columns, he compared the dramatic (or as he also put it the “Aristotelean”)
with his form of Epic Theater, and in the epic column, he suggested emo-
tions, rather than being preserved, should be “driven to become
cognitions.”65 However, he very clearly stated in a footnote, “This table
does not produce absolute antitheses, but merely shifts of accent.”66 In
other words, some basic dramatic principles still applied and were there-
fore taken for granted. Regardless, he blamed himself for a misunder-
standing that seemed to pit him against Konstantin Stanislavsky in the
minds of many, including the apparatchik of the new East German govern-
ment, who preferred to champion the Soviet system.67
As a teacher of both Stanislavsky’s system and Brecht’s suggestions to
actors for realizing his ideas, I’ve found ways to combine the designs of
these two masters to coach actors in rehearsal in an exchange which
strengthens both. There is a precedent for this, as lead performers in
Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble such as Therese Giehse and Angelika Hurwicz
could be directed by Brecht while having recourse to their previous
Stanislavsky training. Emphasizing the idea of a Brecht acting style misses
the point—Brecht leads the performer to a specific attitude towards the
material in critical engagement with both the play and, by implication, the
outside world. The actor, however, must still act, and in a believ-
able manner.
One of Brecht’s favorite sayings was, “The proof of the pudding is in
the eating.”68 This book stands as one example of how to implement
Brechtian notions of theatre, to test them under particular conditions in
an educational setting. It serves as the record of an experiment: the appli-
cation of Brecht’s theatrical ideas to a modern production of his play
Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War by
a university theatre program in West Texas. In 2015, the School of Theatre
65
Brecht, Rise and Fall, 68. Steve Giles, also an editor of Brecht on Theatre, translates the
table, which appears in BOT, differently than in this volume.
66
Brecht, Rise and Fall, 67.
67
See Chap. 8 for a discussion on Brecht and Stanislavsky, both compared and contrasted.
68
Carl Weber, “Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble,” in Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks,
The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge: The University Press, 1994), 183.
and Dance at Texas Tech University took on the challenge of producing

Mother Courage, with a combination of scholarship and practice that led
to many conclusions about the viability of Brecht’s work today, not only
on his own plays but as a way of giving political import to contemporary
and classical works of many genres.
The range of materials now available to the English reader is compre-
hensive, and you are encouraged to seek it out, perhaps using the bibliog-
raphy of this book as a start. Most importantly, if this account of a particular
process we employed is of interest, the reader is urged to work with others
similarly to explore these concepts themselves. Though individual con-
templation of material has its value, there is an enormous advantage to
group work: Brecht operated from the conviction one could gather a
built-in audience of initial “spectators” to test it, to discover deeper and
more interesting results. To paraphrase Brecht, we will not know if the
pudding is any good until we eat it.
The book unfolds as follows:
In Chap. 2, I examine four productions of Mother Courage and Her
Children, the premiere in Switzerland, Brecht’s two East Berlin produc-
tions, and his Munich production, as they relate to my own work on the
play. I discuss English-language translations we considered and explain
why we chose the Tony Kushner adaptation for our production. Comparing
different translations of the same play requires the team to consider which
version will best serve as material for exploration while reminding them of
the difficulties inherent in adapting Brecht’s writing, a special form he
invented and which changed the German language itself. The selection of
a version should not be arbitrary, as the differences in texts change the
tone of the production and the way it is received by the audience. Primary
emphasis on Brecht as classic storyteller of dramatic theatrical events de-
emphasizes an important facet of his work: his use of satire and irony as
Verfremdung and to promote social change.
Mother Courage is an ideal play with which to engage the students in
Brecht’s work. As a playwright, Brecht had the advantage of creating texts
that encouraged or contained his theatrical concepts, and so we can more
easily identify how these are applied in that work. At the same time, the
production team may study the documentation on the Berliner Ensemble’s
premiere production, one of the most thoroughly considered plays in their
repertoire, using both the Courage model for 1949, originally published
in 1958, as well as the BE’s Theaterarbeit of 1952, a classic text docu-
menting in great detail the processes that led to their first six productions,
20 B. GELBER
including Mother Courage and Her Children. From there, the students can
eventually move on to other non-Brechtian pieces and note their facility
for handling those concepts.69
In Chap. 3, I discuss Brecht’s dramaturgical analysis, the Fabel, primar-
ily as applied to Mother Courage but also using examples from other plays
and productions. By applying Brecht’s use of contradiction and the con-
cepts historicization, ever-thus, Drehpunkte (or turning points),
“Not…but,” and Verfremdung, I demonstrate a means of converting plot
points to gestic incidents, as such a strategy requires a new form of critical
thinking by the production team. Implementing these keys to a Brechtian
interpretation and promoting dialectical thinking requires that all team
members come to an agreement about the lens to be applied to the pro-
duction, the attitude towards society as reflected in the author’s work, and
its relevance to contemporary ideologies.
In Chap. 4, I discuss how our production team collaborated in ways
suggested by Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble and how design is consid-
ered as a series of unique interpretations by each artist who contributes to
the discourse, as Brecht puts it, in a Separation of the Elements. At the
same time, I refer to Brecht’s concepts of literarization and the forms of
meta-theatricality Brecht used, as well as suggest new technological forms
available in the twenty-first century. Our design examples, based on our
view of the environment of the play as a laboratory, led to the creation of
an installation that allowed for the interdisciplinarity of art forms—sculp-
ture, painting, and music—and interrupted the progress of the play to
allow the audience to examine each of the events more closely.
In Chap. 5, the empirical work of mounting the play with actors is
accomplished by concentrating on the attitudes or stances (Haltungen) of
actors towards characters (Figures), and Figures towards each other. The
combination of the different Haltungen of each Figure creates what
Brecht calls the Grundgestus of the Figure, an overview of the role. I use
Keith Johnstone’s status as a shorthand for discovering Brecht’s gestus
through his unique treatment of the concept of Haltung. Brecht studied
the relationships between two or more people; Johnstone offers a means
of identifying this relationship, depending on the respective parties to
affect each other as they respond to levels of dominant or submissive
69
For examples of Brecht concepts used in Shakespeare, Chekhov, Patrick Marber, Arthur
Miller, and others, see David Barnett, Brecht in Practice and David Zoob, Brecht: A Practical
Handbook (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018).
behaviors. Though on the surface status seems to embrace the psychologi-

cal, it can also contain a political element, as each Figure demonstrates
their place within a social system. This includes the personal status of the
Figures which contradicts their roles in society.
In Chap. 6, I discuss the application of Brecht’s staging process, the
Arrangement, or the placement of a theatre element within the framework
of the stage—in this case the actors—as a key tool in realizing the Fabel.
What further distinguishes our own work from that of the BE is our
emphasis on the actors’ contributions to the initial stage groupings as
opposed to that of their designers, who added characters to their render-
ings, creating Arrangementskizzen or arrangement sketches. The actors’
input is accomplished through various tableaux vivant they offer in the
rehearsal room for the production team’s critique, with an emphasis on
gestus and Haltung. The actors are first introduced to such directorial
concepts as picturization and composition to clarify their work before add-
ing a political dimension.
Chapter 7 describes how the team worked from detail to detail in
rehearsal, trying, discarding, rethinking, and adapting ideas by using
Brecht’s Zero Point (Nullpunkt) or the concept of “not knowing,” to take
a fresh look at each day’s work in continuous reconsideration of the means
to enable critique. I “channeled” Brecht to serve as a devil’s advocate for
ideas using this concept to challenge the team to deeply explore the com-
plexity of each Figure and carefully dissect each event as realized by the
Fabel. This was the longest period of rehearsal, but an element of fun was
added to the proceedings by considering the challenges or puzzles the text
offered.
In Chap. 8, I explain how I combine the precepts of the Stanislavsky
System, a common training practice for American actors, to Brecht’s ways
of working, with an emphasis on how the two approaches can be used
together in a theatre that promotes social change. My years of experience
as both a teacher of Stanislavsky and Brechtian techniques has allowed me
to find bridges between the two and provide new exercises for actors to
explore in rehearsal and performance. Brecht did not altogether reject
principles from Stanislavsky but, given access to the Russian master’s oeu-
vre in German, especially his later work, Brecht was able to reconsider its
usefulness. For example, Brecht found Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical
Actions approximated some of his own ideas about physicality as a means
of communication to the audience. Many of the members of his company,
22 B. GELBER
the Berliner Ensemble, were Stanislavsky trained; they continued to use

that training where useful in addition to Brecht’s own.
In Chap. 9, I describe the practice of documentation and archiving by
the Berliner Ensemble as adapted for our production of Courage. At the
same time, I note early British attempts to create similar forms—in par-
ticular by Ken Tynan at the National Theatre. Assistants to Brecht note
that documentation was notably arduous. In the Brecht archive, one can
examine the typed copies of reports and the physical copies of the model
books, where the photos and captions are carefully pasted to each page.
The assistants spent hours on these projects, to the point of diminishing
returns: ultimately all but abandoning the most exhaustive practices.
The thorough documentation of a production is still essential as a
means of reflecting on the process and results, particularly as a pedagogical
tool, but it can be realized with much less effort on the part of a contem-
porary team. The instant access to photos or video, the use of word pro-
cessing and presentation software, the ability to share files among the
participants online—all these innovations can streamline the process of
identifying and refunctioning the solutions to theatrical problems. I sug-
gest ways in which today’s artists can use modern documentation for fur-
ther reflection on their work and to derive general principles from Brecht’s
solutions to particular problems.
In Chap. 10, I discuss the conclusions we reached after presenting the
play to the public and ways in which these conclusions may be used to
suggest further exploration with other plays by Brecht or other authors.
Ultimately, I suggest Brecht’s way of working still resonates and can serve
as a plan for applying a historical perspective to the present, creating the-
atre for social change in a contemporary society that continues to repeat
the mistakes of the past.
A Note
I directed Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty
Years War in the Spring of 2015. Since then, I have had the opportunity
to reconsider my work on that production and to add to my knowledge of
Brecht’s theoretical writings and practices, taking advantage of more
recent scholarship while continuing to implement new ideas and proce-
dures in the testing ground of a graduate scene study seminar in Brecht.
Therefore, the narrative that follows both describes what was accom-
plished back then and further develops that work based on my studies
since. When Brecht published interviews about his work, on occasion he

used fictive interlocuters to pose the questions he wanted to answer, ensur-
ing his control of that discourse. Using a similar strategy, I’ve adjusted the
tracking of the 2015 production process, weaving my findings after 2015
into the narrative as part of the means of offering a more up-to-date peda-
gogical model. It is not my intention to deceive the reader but to further
explicate and expand on the work we did at the time. For this, I beg your
indulgence.
Mother Courage was an important choice for the school. One of the
great plays of the twentieth century, it was ideal work for training a large
group of actors who would portray the various historical characters in an
epic chronicle, testing their skills in a variety of dramatic contexts while
narrating the events of a conflict considered one of the worst in human
history from the perspective of a common people who lived on the mar-
gins of major events. At the same time, it was a prime example of Brecht’s
purpose for writing and producing plays, a means of commenting on the
underlying motives behind policies that shaped the world.
If you are interested in the views of one of the world’s germinal theatre
makers and want to participate in the production of works that activate in
people a desire for change, read on. I hope you enjoy following our jour-
ney as we explored the myriad ways Brecht thought and as we tried out the
director’s ideas on our feet with one particular play.
Looking back to 2015, I could not have imagined how quickly America
could change. Working on this introduction some years later, I realize how
even more relevant Brecht is today. A rise in nationalism and authoritari-
anism during the twenty-first century was something Brecht would have
dreaded but could have predicted: having lived through a similar rise, he
often worried the snake had been scotched, not killed. In Germany
between the two world wars, an emphasis on illusionistic theatre for the
masses, and art that grew more and more to promote a fascist and anti-
socialist viewpoint, prompted him to seek ways in which theatre could
counter dangerous political movements through interventionist thinking.
Even in a society that he considered the start of the socialist experiment,
he feared the GDR was still a haven for ex-Nazis who might rise again.
Today’s students will find it even more important to consider how
Brecht used theatre to seek change, and how what he did with his own
historical moment can be useful today, as we experience a new and trou-
bling time. The twenty-first century still has a place for Brecht, perhaps
now more than ever.
CHAPTER 2
Five Productions of Mother Courage: 1941,

1949, 1950, 1951, and 2015
Writers cannot write as rapidly as governments make war, because writing

demands hard thought.1 (Bertolt Brecht)
This chapter considers five stagings in the production history of Mother

Courage: the play’s premiere in Zurich in 1941; Brecht’s 1949 produc-
tion, introducing him to the East German public and leading to the estab-
lishment of the Berliner Ensemble; Brecht’s 1950 Munich production
using the 1949 production as a model; Brecht’s restaging of Mother
Courage at the BE in 1951, the production that, in Paris and then London,
established Brecht as a world-famous theatre director; and the 2015 pro-
duction and the choices made by the production team in relation to the
dramaturgical study of the earlier productions, including the origins of
Brecht’s play and the ways in which works with which he was familiar
influenced the perspective he took on the events of the Thirty Years War.
A brief synopsis of the play Mother Courage and Her Children: A
Chronicle of the Thirty Years War is provided, along with a comparison
between the different productions and why the 1951 production, based
on Brecht’s work when he applied his 1949 model of the play in the
Munich production of 1950, was considered the closest to Brecht’s inten-
tions. Of particular interest was the way Brecht rewrote the play based on
1
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War,
trans. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1966), xxix.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Switzerland AG 2023
B. Gelber, Engaging with Brecht,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20394-7_2
26 B. GELBER
the reception of the premiere production in Zurich in 1941. Finally, an

explanation for the choice of Tony Kushner’s translation for the 2015
production, as compared to other English-language versions by British
authors and the American version by Eric Bentley, is included.
Brecht worked on productions of the play over a span of years, but the
1941 production in Zurich, though successful as the premiere of a work
by Brecht, was neither supervised nor attended by the author. However,
based on the reports Brecht received from those who saw it, the Zurich
production was still instructive, as it convinced him of changes that still
needed to be made; Brecht’s 1949 production in Berlin, co-directed
with Erich Engel and introducing his new company to the East German
audience, began to rectify those mistakes. Adjustments continued with the
production he directed in 1950 in Munich with Therese Giehse as Mother
Courage and using his Berlin model; and his own remounting of the play
in 1951 for the BE, based on his work in Munich, revealed how Brecht
further rewrote and restaged the play for the effects it might have on the
spectator, the ways in which it could prove instructive for a twentieth-
century audience, and the critical thinking it encouraged about issues that
still reverberated concerning war as “a continuation of business by other
means.”2
The Mother Courage production of 1949 at the Berliner Ensemble is so
famous and so well documented by that company, it still offers lessons that
can be applied to contemporary engagements with the play, without
strictly adhering to the original staging. Our production in 2015 was no
exception. In working through our analysis of the piece, we could look to
a thorough explication of each scene and its socio-political implications
based on the material in the Courage model book, as well as Theaterarbeit.
For example, as the script changed to meet Brecht’s requirements for
speaking to a post-war audience, his reasoning was laid out for the reader,
the different versions of the play explained with a view to setting down the
thinking behind directorial and dramaturgical decisions. While the model
books outlined specific solutions to various moments, an emphasis was
placed on identifying the challenges that allowed future practitioners to
imagine their own solutions.3
2
See Brecht, Brecht Collected Plays: Five, John Willet, 282. This is Brecht’s reformulation
of Clausewitz’s war as “the continuation of politics by other means.”
3
See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht Collected Plays: Five, particularly 271–331.
2 FIVE PRODUCTIONS OF MOTHER COURAGE: 1941, 1949, 1950, 1951… 27
The Mother Courage team of 2015, therefore, looked to the thought-

processes that went into mounting the earlier productions of Mother
Courage as ways to approach the material anew, using Brecht’s ways of
working. These included the identification of contradiction within the
actors’ playing through the juxtaposition of different attitudes, for exam-
ple the varying decisions made by Courage in Scene 3 concerning her son
Swiss Cheese that changed as the scene progressed.
We did not dutifully copy the work of the Berliner Ensemble, nor did
we ignore it. By studying the history of the play’s life on stage, we identi-
fied those traps we felt other productions had fallen into when they
ignored Brecht’s intentions for both writing and producing the play. Since
our goal was to test Brecht’s means for creating a piece of theatre, we were
returning to first principles, with the understanding that we were bringing
our own perspectives as twenty-first-century artists to the work. At the
same time, as Brecht suggested in terms of using his models, we were
looking to identify challenges the script offered, to find our own solutions
rather than to blindly accept those that had already been applied.
The reasons why Brecht first wrote the play had changed when he came
to direct it himself; the script he completed in 1939, a warning about the
world war to come, became by 1949 a reminder of the costs of war to the
citizens of East Berlin, a city bombed nearly to rubble. When the audience
in Berlin traveled through this devastation to reach the Deutsches Theatre,
the outside world became, in the spectators’ minds, the real backdrop to
the production onstage. Today, its effects on a contemporary audience
have changed yet again.
Influences
Even in his youth, Brecht had been drawn to the events of the Thirty Years
War through fictional writings and the study of German history. His first
play, Die Bibel (The Bible), was a one-act play set during that time. He was
also familiar with the most famous novel from the seventeenth century,
Hans Jakob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen’s picaresque The Adventures
of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), as well as that author’s The Life of
Courage, the Notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond (1670).
Grimmelshausen experienced the Thirty Years War first hand, and it is
believed he was present at the siege of Magdeburg, an event depicted in
Scene 5 of Mother Courage.4 Brecht would also have been familiar with
4
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus,
trans. J.A. Underwood (New York: Penguin Classics, 2018) xvi.
28 B. GELBER
Friedrich Schiller’s one-act play, Wallenstein’s Camp (1880), the latter a

one-act play from the larger Wallenstein trilogy that had been assigned to
him as a schoolboy to inspire feelings of patriotism for Germany’s part in
the First World War. His use of these materials for Mother Courage varies.
Schiller’s play concentrates on those figures behind the scenes, Courage-
like sutlers, minor officers and soldiers, camp followers, rather than the
major figures who guide the struggle. Indeed, Wallenstein, the famous
general who led the Catholic forces as supreme commander until 1634,
when he was assassinated, makes no appearance in Wallenstein’s Camp.
From Grimmelshausen, Brecht borrows the name Courage for his leading
character as well as a skewed view, both horrific and comic, of the war as
seen from someone (Simplicius) on the periphery of the main events. In
The Life of Courage, Grimmelshausen’s title character is a fortune teller, an
activity her name-sake practices in Scene 1 of Brecht’s play.5 And
Grimmelshausen’s chapter headings, in both Simplicius and The Life of
Courage, resemble the titles that preface each of Brecht’s scenes.6 As
Brecht worked on the play, Naima Wifstrand gave him Tales of a Subaltern,
also entitled The Tales of Ensign Stål, an epic poem of the Finnish War
(1808–1809) by Johan Ludvig Runeberg published in two parts in 1848
and 1860. Canto XXII concerns the story of Lotte Svard, a canteen
woman, a more romantic figure than Mother Courage:
She loved the war, whatsoe’er it brought,--

Of weal, woe, trouble or cheer;
And the gray-clad boys had their tenderest thought,
And so she to us was dear.7
Brecht’s study of history as a schoolboy certainly included the dark

period in the seventeenth century when the Thirty Years War took place.
Augsburg, his birthplace, was an important site of contention during that
conflict between Catholic and Protestant; there in 1555 the Lutheran
church was officially recognized and maintained a peace with the Catholic
majority for nearly a hundred years. But a widespread European war
5
Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief,
Whore and Vagabond, trans. Mike Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus Limited, 2001). The author’s
name varies depending on the edition and title of the work.
6
This latter point is made by Peter Thomson in his excellent study of the play, Brecht:
Mother Courage and Her Children (Cambridge: The University Press, 1997), 7.
7
Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Collected Poetical Works (Hastings, East Sussex: Delphi Classics,
2015), 1847.
among the faiths finally devastated the city. By the time the war ended,
Augsburg’s population had gone from 45,000 to 16,000 inhabitants.8
Brecht could not have helped but see this division mirrored in the rela-
tions between the Catholic citizens of Augsburg and the Protestant faith-
ful, including his mother, “the rebellious Protestant in the family.”9
Meanwhile, his lead character comes from Bamberg, a Bavarian city
106 miles from his hometown.
Later his position as an exile, looking at the terrible machinations com-
ing from his home country, inspired the writing of the play. When he left
Germany, he first settled in Denmark, buying a fisherman’s cottage along
the Svendborg sound, only 62 miles from the German cities of Flensburg
and Kiel and sounds of military operations. German patrols along that
body of water would point to the gathering storm, and the sense of
another destructive war was overwhelming.
By April 1938, Brecht’s fears of the advance of the German army had
already convinced him to leave his Danish home in Svendborg, and he was
fortunate to have friends who could come to his aid.10 Naima Wifstrand,
who had played the title character in her own Swedish translation of
Brecht’s play Señora Carrar’s Rifles in March 1938, found living quarters
in exile for Brecht and his family, including Weigel; his children, Stefan
and Barbara; as well as his collaborator and lover, Margarete Steffin. On
August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia had signed a mutual Non-
aggression Pact; any sense that Stalin would stop the tide of Nazi conquest
was dashed, especially when Russia, too, invaded Poland. In September,
when the Third Reich accepted Poland’s surrender, Brecht began to write
his chronicle.
The Brechts rented a house from the sculptor Ninnan Santesson on
Lidingø, an island near Stockholm in Sweden, where they would live for
less than a year. Wifstrand ran an acting school, and she invited Helene
Weigel to teach acting classes. Not only did she introduce Brecht to Tales
of a Subaltern, inspiring him to drop his work on The Good Person of
Szechwan, but he also planned on casting Wifstrand as Courage in a
Swedish production. In parallel, he also created the part of the
8
Parker, Bertolt Brecht, 12.
9
Werner Frisch and K.W. Obermeier, Brecht in Augsburg (Berliner and Weimar: Aufbau,
1998), 247.
10
Brecht lived in Svendborg for six years, with visits to Paris, Moscow, New York, and
London during that period.
30 B. GELBER
speech-impaired Kattrin for his wife, who spoke no Swedish. Brecht wrote
Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War, in
a flurry of activity between September 27 and November 3, 1939.
The final product was an epic of twelve scenes, ranging over a period of
twelve years. The Thirty Years War (from 1618 to 1648) was a protracted
and agonizing conflict fought over a wide swath of Europe, and the cause
of an estimated four and half to eight million deaths. On the surface, the
war was a struggle between Protestant and Catholic armies supported by
the Bourbons or the Hapsburgs, but Brecht highlighted a deeper truth:
those religious conflicts allowed the leaders of each side to acquire, by
force, great wealth and resources. Brecht concentrated not on generals
such as Wallenstein and Tilly, but on the common people, whose homes
were invaded by friend and foe alike and who were most brutally and
immediately affected by the ravages of the fighting. We follow one of
them, Anna Fierling, ironically nicknamed Mother Courage because she
crossed a battlefield at Riga, afraid her wares would go stale before she
could deliver them. As she leads her offspring through a hellish landscape,
they subsist by selling booze and supplies to both sides. As a petit bour-
geois, Courage does her part to prolong the war through business, despite
the devastation she sees around her and the losses she suffers.
Synopsis
The play opens in 1624. Mother Courage plies her trade by selling sup-
plies and serving food and drink from her wagon as she follows the Second
Finnish Regiment of the Protestant army. Courage and her three chil-
dren—sons Eilif and Swiss Cheese, and a mute daughter, Kattrin—encoun-
ter two soldiers seeking new recruits for the Finnish Regiment. While
distracting Courage, the soldiers convince Eilif to join the army. Two years
later, Courage meets Eilif again, as she haggles with an army cook over the
price of her chicken. Eilif has proved himself to be a brave soldier and is
being feted by the General, but his mother considers his heroic actions
foolish.
Three years pass. Courage finds herself in the company of the Cook,
Yvette (a camp whore), and the army Chaplain when suddenly the
Catholics attack the Finnish Regiment, with whom, so far, Courage has
cast her lot. The Cook escapes, but Courage and her family are prisoners
in their own camp. Swiss Cheese, loyal to the Regiment, hides their cash
box from the enemy. He is captured and refuses to betray either his
regiment or his family to the soldiers. Courage must then bargain for her
son’s life, at one point trying to parlay her one source of income, her can-
teen wagon. But Courage bargains too long; she hears the shots of the
firing squad that executes her son.
After three years, Courage, Kattrin, and the Chaplain find themselves in
Magdeburg during its siege and destruction. The Chaplain forces Courage
to hand over her valuable officers’ shirts to be torn into bandages for the
wounded. A year later, she is selling drinks to the soldiers during the
funeral of Field Marshall Tilly. She rejects the Chaplain’s offer of marriage.
She sends Kattrin for supplies, but her daughter is assaulted and scarred.
Courage curses the war. Shortly after, as her fortunes improve, she praises
the war for what it has given her.
Later in 1632, peace has been declared. Courage is reunited with the
Cook. Yvette reappears, the rich widow of an old army colonel. Yvette
recognizes the Cook as Piping Pieter, whose seduction she blames for her
debauched life. After confronting the Cook, Yvette accompanies Courage
to the market, where she will sell her wares before their price falls. The
Chaplain, realizing that Courage prefers the Cook’s company to his own,
decides to return to the cloth.
During the ceasefire, Eilif mistakenly kills some civilians and is sen-
tenced to die. He comes to the camp under guard, but Courage is not
there. The Chaplain accompanies him to his execution. Just after they
leave, news reaches the camp that the ceasefire is over. Courage is back in
business, and the Cook decides to keep Eilif’s fate to himself. The Cook
accepts Courage’s offer to join her and Kattrin on their travels.
In the autumn of 1634, winter has come early. Courage and the Cook
must beg for food at a parsonage. The Cook tells Courage of a letter from
Utrecht informing him that, due to the death of his mother, he has inher-
ited an inn. He invites Courage to join him but not Kattrin. When Courage
and the Cook enter the parsonage for some soup, Kattrin decides to set
out on her own. Courage stops Kattrin from leaving. When the Cook
reappears, he finds them gone.
For more than a year, Courage and Kattrin follow the armies through
Germany. In January 1636, Courage and Kattrin have stopped at a farm-
house. When Courage goes into town to buy more supplies, Kattrin stays
with the farmers. Soldiers appear and force the farmer’s son to lead them
to the nearby town of Halle, which they plan to attack at night while
everyone is sleeping. The farmers begin to pray, but Kattrin climbs up on
the roof of their hut with a drum and attempts to wake the townspeople.
32 B. GELBER
The soldiers try to persuade Kattrin to come down. Though they finally
threaten her with death, she continues drumming. They shoot and kill
her. Suddenly, the bells of the town ring out: Kattrin’s warning has suc-
ceeded, and the sneak attack is foiled.
Courage returns before dawn to find her daughter’s body laid out in
front of her cart. She sings Kattrin a lullaby and pays the peasants to bury
her. Mother Courage returns to the road pulling her wagon alone, follow-
ing the armies and determined to get back to business.
Production History
When Mother Courage and Her Children premiered, on April 19, 1941, at
the Zurich Schauspielhaus in Switzerland, it was produced without
Brecht’s input or his presence in the audience.11 Instead, from his exile, he
received reports of its success and its effect on the spectators. Brecht must
have been pleased with the choice of his friend Therese Giehse for Mother
Courage, and she would go on to play the role for him in Munich in 1950.
Brecht noted that, unlike his host countries, it was in Switzerland that
theatrical artists were brave enough to produce him. Philosophically, how-
ever, since he had not staged the piece himself, it was, according to his
own methods, incomplete. Without a chance to test and revise, he had not
been able to maintain artistic control or indeed to tinker with it on the
stage. This was borne out by the way in which it was received and the
mistaken impressions it made.
In a 1956 German edition of the play, the following note appeared:
“To judge by the press reviews and statements of spectators, the original
production in Zurich, for example, though artistically on a high level,
merely pictured war as a natural catastrophe and ineluctable fate ….”12
Brecht’s message was confounded. Instead, it confirmed “the belief of the
petit-bourgeois members of the audience in their own indestructibility
and power to survive.”13 Once the war was over, Brecht was able to make
changes in the script before its 1949 East German premiere to rectify this
misconception. In this revised version, Courage’s choices demonstrate the
contradiction between what spectators might do as humane and engaged
11
The production was directed by Leopold Lindtberg and designed by Teo Otto.
12
Brecht, Collected Plays: Five, 321–322.
13
adults and what Courage chooses to do because of her survivalist instincts

coupled with her desire for profit.
When Brecht first wrote the play, the possibility of a world war had
been on the horizon, and Brecht had seen Mother Courage as a warning of
things to come. Ten years later, he would stage the show among the ruins
of a Berlin ravaged by that terrible debacle, his predictions having come to
fruition in his favorite city, destroyed according to “an etching by churchill
[sic] after an idea by hitler [sic].”14
Brecht made changes to three scenes, highlighting the negative conse-
quences of Courage’s behavior to avoid analogous misinterpretations in
the future. In a work journal for November 25, 1948, he wrote, “we have
to alter the first scene of COURAGE, since it has in it the seeds of what
enabled the audience at the Zurich production to be moved mainly by the
persistence and resilience of a being in torment (the eternal mother crea-
ture)—which is not really the point.”15 He goes on to mention his assis-
tant Heinz Kuckhahn’s suggestion of a rewrite for Scene 1 to clarify that
Courage is distracted from Eilif’s recruitment by her intent on selling the
belt buckle to the Sergeant, which was incorporated into the 1949
version.16
Similarly, in the earlier draft, in Scene 5 Courage reluctantly donates all
her officers’ shirts to bandage the wounded at Magdeburg and even tears
them up herself, while in the draft used in the 1949 production, she refuses
to give up the shirts. The contradictory nature of her opinions of the
war—opposition in Scene 6 versus support in Scene 7—is not so clear in
the original, which does not yet contain the latter scene in which Courage
pivots to praising war’s profitability. Brecht intended that the audience
should see Courage as a small cog in a very large economic machine. In
this cog’s-eye view, because Courage only perceives the potential for prof-
its, she is blind to the emotional price she will pay in return. Embracing
rather than rejecting bourgeois capitalism means that she learns nothing
from her experience.
14
Bertolt Brecht, Journals 1934–1955, ed. John Willett (New York, Routledge, 1996),
401 (October 27, 1948). Brecht’s idiosyncratic use of lower case and upper case letters is
kept here to note Brecht’s emphases.
15
Bertolt Brecht, Journals, 404. Brecht’s emphasis.
16
In the earlier script, Courage shows her concern for the Sergeant, who she has spooked
with her foretelling of his death. While she revives his spirits with alcohol, the Recruiter
leaves with Eilif: this care for another human being is replaced by concern over a sale. See
34 B. GELBER
Brecht also added Scene 10 to the 1949 production. In this short inter-
lude Courage and Kattrin, as they pull their wagon, come upon a cottage,
in which a young woman is singing the “Song of the Rose,” a song
expressing gratefulness for a warm home in winter. According to Käthe
Rülicke-Weiler, this reminds the audience of what Courage has sacrificed
by choosing her daughter over the Cook.17
These changes apparently had the affect Brecht wanted: “The tragedy
of Courage and her life, which was profoundly tangible to the spectators,
consisted of the fact that there was a horrific contradiction here that
destroyed a person, a contradiction that could be resolved, but only by
society itself and only through long, terrible struggles.”18 The tragedy was
not just Courage’s but society’s; it was a form of common beliefs that she
embraced and that led to her downfall.
Mother Courage would be Brecht’s reintroduction to a German audi-
ence after fifteen years. Whether East or West Germany would welcome
him was a real question in the spring of 1948. Brecht was offered a chance
to work with his old friend Erich Engel at the Munich Kammerspiele.
However, the U.S. Secretary of State banned him from entering the US
Zone. The leaders of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in East
Germany, on the other hand, offered him many incentives to settle in the
Soviet sector, including a venue for his plays and a large budget from which
to operate. Brecht also wished to participate in the new socialist society. He
decided to make East Berlin his home for the rest of his short life.
The play was a personal watershed for Brecht: its premiere in East
Berlin at the Deutsches Theater on January 11, 1949 (Image 2.1), was
co-directed by Erich Engel and starred his wife Helene Weigel as Courage,
Angelika Hurwicz as Kattrin, Paul Bildt as the Cook, and Werner Hinz as
the Chaplain, with a new score by Paul Dessau, and settings by Teo Otto.19
It was a directorial triumph and paved the way for the establishment of his
own company, the Berliner Ensemble.20 Weigel was recognized as an
international star, and Courage became her signature part. She continued
17
Rülicke-Weiler, Die Dramaturgie Brechts, 91.
18
BOT 304.
19
Dessau’s score was first used by the Zurich Company when they played in Vienna in
1946 and then the Berliner Ensemble in 1949: Brecht, Collected Plays: Five, xxxiv.
20
The play did not open the official first season of the Berliner Ensemble, nor was it the
first play they produced at their permanent home, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on
March 19, 1954. (The former was Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, the latter an adaptation
of Moliere’s Don Juan.) See Parker, Bertolt Brecht, 583.
Image 2.1 Mother Courage and Her Children rehearsal with Brecht, Helene
Weigel (as Courage), Erwin Geschonneck (as Chaplain), and Angelika Hurwitz (as
Kattrin), Berliner Ensemble 1951. (Photo: Hainer Hill)
to play this demanding role even as she took on the role of Intendantin of
the BE, the operations manager of the company in charge of all business
and technical matters, a post she held until her death in 1971.21
In 1950, at the Kammerspiele in Munich, Brecht decided to test the
work he had done in 1949, directing the Zurich Mother Courage, Therese
21
Käthe Rülicke-Weiler describes Weigel’s role in detail in “Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner
Ensemble,” int. Matthias Braun, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 7, Issue 25, February 1991
(Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3. Brecht served as the artistic director. Intendantin is
the feminine form of the noun.
36 B. GELBER
Giehse.22 He used the model he had created with Ruth Berlau, the exten-
sive documentation he had insisted be kept on the premiere Berlin produc-
tion. He did not slavishly follow his original findings, especially as he had a
very different actress for his lead. Unlike her performance in Switzerland,
and on tour in Vienna, Giehse enacted a new Courage closer to Brecht’s
intentions than her previous playing of the part, contributing new business
and interpretations. He was very pleased with the results, noting, “The
moves based on the model are triumphant,” and of Giehse’s performance
he wrote, “giehse is quite admirable in the way she completely revamps the
moves she had used with such success in Zurich and vienna [sic].”23
Theaterarbeit included an even more glowing review from the Berliner
Ensemble. According to the authors, Giehse “showed how a great actor
can make use of the arrangement and theatrical material in a model pro-
duction to devise a unique and distinctive character.”24 The discoveries he
made in this production were applied to his update at the Berliner Ensemble
in 1951 with Ernst Busch as the Cook and Erwin Geschonneck as the
Chaplain and Helene Weigel and Angelika Hurwicz reprising their roles.
One of the most important additions was Courage’s penultimate line,
added in the Munich production: “I’ve got to get back in business.”25 This
was a verbal reminder that Courage had learned nothing from her experi-
ences, but would continue to seek to profit from the war.
With Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht brought his company
to the attention of a world-wide audience, appearing at the Festival of
Dramatic Art in Paris in June 1954 and being awarded both Best Play and
Best Production. This recognition gave him some leverage with the East
German government, who preferred the style of Stanislavsky and the
Moscow Art Theatre promoted by the Soviet apparatchiks, and continu-
ally attacked Brecht’s work as “formalist.”26 This was in this same year the
company was able to finally move into their own building, the site of
Brecht’s first triumph, The Threepenny Opera in 1928, the Theater am
Schiffbauerdamm. They would no longer share a space with the Intendant
Wolfgang Langhoff at the Deutsches Theater.
22
For more on models and model books, see Chap. 9. Couragemodell 1949 was published
in 1958.
23
Brecht, Journals, 431.
24
BOP 206.
25
David Richard Jones, Great Directors at Work: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Kazan, Brook
(Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), 117.
26
The acclaim wasn’t universal, as the Soviet-led government in East Berlin objected to the
portrayal of an unheroic protagonist. This was a sign of political trouble to come.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Oh, don’t shout like a cheap skate,” answered Ned disgustedly.
“Go and fix yourself up, if you can, so I won’t be ashamed to go to
supper with you!”
Laurie glared, swallowed hard, and finally nodded. “Listen,” he
said slowly. “You don’t have to be seen with me if it offends your
delicate sensibilities. Get it? And, what’s more, I don’t want to be
seen with you. I’m particular, too, you big bluff. When you want to go
to supper, you go!”
Laurie grabbed wash-cloth and towel, strode across the room, and
slammed the door resoundingly behind him. Left alone, Ned
shrugged angrily. “Ugly-tempered brute,” he muttered.
When supper-time came he descended alone to the dining-hall.
Laurie had not returned to the room. Laurie arrived a few minutes
late, with Kewpie, and took the seat at Ned’s left in silence. He had
put talc powder over the abrasion on his cheek-bone, and at a little
distance it would not have been noticed. Nearer, however, the lump
was plainly visible and seemed to be still swelling. Ned caught a
glimpse of it from the corner of his eye, but his irritation still
continued, and he offered no comment.
After supper both boys returned to No. 16, although not together,
and for two hours occupied opposite sides of the table, and
crammed for their last examination, which was due at ten to-morrow.
Neither spoke once during the evening. At nine Laurie closed his
books and went out. Half an hour later Ned undressed and went to
bed. Sleep didn’t come readily, for there was to-day’s examination to
worry about, and to-morrow’s, too, for he hadn’t made much of that
two hours of preparation, he feared; and then there was this silly
quarrel with Laurie. He guessed he had been as much to blame as
his brother, but there was no sense in any one’s getting mad the way
Laurie had. When Laurie was ready to make friends, why, he’d be
ready, too, but that silly goop needn’t expect him to lick his shoes!
No, sir, if Laurie wanted to make up he could jolly well say so!
Sleep did come at last, and when he awoke it seemed hours later.
The room was in black darkness, but the squares of the wide open
windows were slightly grayer. What had awakened him he at first
didn’t know. Then his gaze caught a darker something against the
gray-black of the nearer casement opening, something that scuffled
on the stone ledge and grew larger as he wondered and watched.
He opened his mouth to speak, and then remembered that he and
Laurie were at outs. The form disappeared from sight, and footsteps
went softly across the boards, were muffled on the rug, and sounded
again by the door. The door was opened, and for a moment Ned
mentally pictured the boy peering anxiously out into the dim hall.
Then the door closed again, and after a short silence Laurie’s bed
creaked. To prove to the other that his return had not been made
unknown, Ned sat up in the blackness and thumped his pillow,
striving to express disapprobation in the thumps. Across the room
the faint stirrings ceased, and silence reigned again.
Ned smiled grimly. Laurie had probably thought that by being so
quiet he could get in without his brother’s knowing it, but he had
shown him! Then Ned’s satisfaction faded. What the dickens had
Laurie been doing out at this time of night? It must be twelve, or
even later! If he had been up to mischief—but of course he had; a
fellow didn’t climb into his room by the window unless he had
something to hide. Even being out after ten o’clock was a punishable
offense! Ned began to worry. Suppose some one had seen Laurie.
Why had Laurie gone to the door and listened unless he had
suspected some one of having seen him? The idiot! The chump! The
—
Over his head he heard a board creak. He listened. The sound
reached him again. In Elk Thurston’s room some one was up, too. Or
had he imagined it? All was quiet now. Was it possible that Laurie
and Elk had been settling their score? Surely not at this time of night.
And yet— From across the room came the unmistakable sounds of
deep and regular breathing. Laurie was asleep beyond a doubt! Ned
frowned disgustedly. Here he was worrying himself about a silly coot
that was fast asleep! He poked his head resolutely into his pillow. All
right! He guessed he could do that, too! And presently he did.
In the morning Ned waited for Laurie to break the ice, but Laurie
didn’t. Laurie went about his task of dressing in silence. There was a
sort of stern look in his face in place of the sullen expression of last
evening, and more than once Ned caught him looking across in an
oddly speculative way. The last time Ned caught him at it he began
to feel uneasy, and he wanted very much to ask what Laurie meant
by it. It was almost as if Laurie had caught him at something, instead
of its being just the other way about! But he was too stubborn to
speak first, and they went out of the room with the silence still
unbroken.
At breakfast, Mr. Brock, at whose table they sat, made the
disquieting announcement that Edward and Laurence Turner were
wanted at the Doctor’s study at 8:30. Involuntarily the gaze of the
two boys met swiftly. Each thought at once of examinations, although
further consideration told them that it was still too soon for any
shortcomings of theirs to reach the principal.
Although they had entered the dining-hall separately, now a
common uneasiness took them together to the Doctor’s, albeit in
silence. They were asked to be seated, which they accepted as a
favorable sign, but there was, nevertheless, something
unsympathetic in Dr. Hillman’s countenance. The latter swung
himself around in his chair and faced them, his head thrust forward a
little because of a near-sightedness not wholly corrected by his
spectacles. And then Laurie observed that the Doctor was gazing
intently at a point just under his left eye, and told himself that the
summons was explained. He was, though, still wondering why Ned
had been included in the party when the Doctor spoke.
“Laurence,” he asked, “how did you come by that contusion?”
Laurie hesitated, then answered, “I was having a—a little bout with
one of the fellows and he struck me, sir.”
“Who was the boy?”
“Thurston, sir.”
“Have you witnesses to prove that?”
“Yes, sir, several fellows were there. Pat—I mean Patton Browne,
and Proudtree and—”
“When did it take place, this—ah—bout?”
“Yesterday afternoon, about half-past five.”
The Doctor mused a minute. Then, “Which of you boys entered
your room by the window last night at about a quarter before twelve
o’clock?” he asked. The question was so unexpected that Laurie’s
mouth fell open widely. Then, as neither boy answered, the Doctor
continued: “Was it you, Laurence?”
“N-no, sir!” blurted Laurie.
Then, ere the words were well out, he wished them back, and in a
sudden panic he added, “I mean—”
But the Doctor had turned to Ned. “Was it you, Edward?” he
asked.
Ned’s gaze dropped from the Doctor’s, and for an instant he made
no reply. Then he raised his eyes again, and, “I’d rather not say, sir,”
he announced respectfully but firmly.
There followed another brief silence. Laurie was trying hard not to
look at Ned. The Doctor was thoughtfully rolling a pencil across the
big blotter under the palm of one hand. Ned watched him and
waited. Then the Doctor looked up again.
“You are, of course,” he said not unkindly, “privileged to refuse to
answer, Edward, but when you do there is but one construction to be
placed on your refusal. I presume that you did climb into your room
by a window last night. I confess that I don’t understand it, for this is
the first time since you came to us that your conduct has been
questioned. If you are shielding another—” his glance swept to
Laurie and away again—“you are doing wrong. Punishment that falls
on an innocent party fails of its purpose. I am, therefore, going to ask
you to reconsider, Edward. It will be better for every one if you
answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to my question.”
Ned returned the principal’s gaze straightly. “I’d rather not, sir,” he
replied.
“Very well, but I warn you that your offense is a very serious one
and that it calls for a drastic penalty. Were you alone in the—ah—
escapade?”
Ned looked puzzled. “Sir?” he asked.
“I asked you—But you need not answer that. I’ll put it another way.
There were two of you in the car according to an eye-witness. Who
was the other boy?”
“Car?” faltered Ned. “What car, sir?”
The Doctor frowned disapprovingly. “It is so futile, my boy,” he
said, “to act this way.” He turned to Laurie. “What do you know about
this, Laurence? You have said that you did not enter your room last
night by the window. At what time did you return to your room?
Where were you, for instance, at, say, a quarter to twelve?”
“I was in bed, sir.”
“What time did you go to bed?”
“About ten minutes past ten.”
“Where was Edward then?”
“In bed, sir, and asleep.”
“What? You are telling me the truth? Did you see him there?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Doctor frowned perplexedly. “Then you know nothing of any
one’s having entered your room by a window close to midnight?”
Laurie hesitated now. Then, “I went to sleep about ten minutes
after I got in bed, sir, and so I wouldn’t be likely—”
“Please answer my question,” interrupted the Doctor coldly.
“I’d rather not, sir,” said Laurie.
“One more question, then,” announced the inquisitor grimly. “Were
you in Mr. Wells’s automobile last evening when it collided with a
hydrant on Washington Street at approximately half-past eleven?”
“Why, no, sir! I didn’t know it had—had collided!”
Ned was looking rather white.
“You know nothing about the incident?”
“No, sir!”
“And you, Edward?”
“No, sir.”
“But, if you deny the automobile part of it, why not deny the rest? I
see, though. You knew that Mr. Cornish had seen you climbing in at
the window. I’m afraid you won’t get anywhere that way, Edward. Mr.
Wells’s car was taken from the front of the school last evening and
driven out Washington Street six blocks, where it was in collision with
a hydrant. It was abandoned there. A reliable witness states
positively that there were two persons in the car just before the
accident. About ten or twelve minutes later Mr. Cornish saw some
one climb up the Washington Street side of East Hall and disappear
through your window. Those are the facts, Edward. The evidence
against you is so far circumstantial, but you must acknowledge that
the incident of the car and that of your—of some one’s entrance into
your room by the window look to be more than a mere coincidence.
In other words, whoever entered your room at midnight was in the
stolen car a quarter of an hour before. That’s a fair and very natural
assumption. If I were you, I’d think the matter over carefully and see
me again before eight o’clock this evening, at which time it will come
before the faculty conference. And now, Laurence, let me have those
names once more.” He drew a scratch-pad to him and poised a
pencil. “You say Elkins Thurston struck you and that Proudtree,
Browne, and—who else was there?”
“Lew Cooper and Gordon Simkins were there when—right
afterward, sir, and I guess they saw it.”
“Thank you. That is all, then. I shall have to ask both of you to
remain in bounds until this matter is—ah—settled. Good morning.”
“But—but, Doctor, I’m—I’m on the baseball team, sir!” exclaimed
Laurie in almost horrified accents. “We play this afternoon!”
“I’m sorry, Laurence,” was the reply, “but until you are more frank
in your answers I shall have to consider you under suspicion, also.”
“Well,” said Laurie bitterly, when they were outside, “you certainly
have made a mess of things!”
“I!” exclaimed Ned incredulously, “I’ve made a mess of things?
What about you?”
“Me? What could I say?” countered Laurie hotly. “I did all I could!”
“All right,” said Ned wearily. “Let’s drop it. He won’t be able to pin
anything on you. You’ll get out of it all right.”
There was a trace of bitterness in Ned’s voice, and Laurie
scowled. “Well, he asked me so suddenly,” he muttered
apologetically, “I—I just said what came into my head. I’m sorry. I’d
have refused to answer if he hadn’t sprung it so quick.”
“It would have been rather more—rather less contemptible,”
answered Ned coldly.
Laurie flushed. “Thanks! I guess that’ll be about all from you, Ned.
When I want any more of your brotherly remarks I’ll let you know!”
He swung aside and left Ned to go on alone to No. 16.
The story of the purloining of the physical director’s blue roadster
was all over school by that time. Ned got the full details from Kewpie.
Mr. Wells had left the car in front of School Hall, as he very often did,
and was playing a game of chess with Mr. Pennington. Shortly after
half-past eleven he had looked for the car, had failed to find it, and
had hurried to the corner. There he had met a man coming down
Walnut Street who, when questioned, said that he had seen such a
car as Mr. Wells’s about five blocks east, where Washington and
Walnut Streets come together, not longer ago than five minutes.
There were two persons in it, and the car was not being driven more
than, possibly, twenty miles an hour. Mr. Wells had gone out Walnut
Street and found the car with one front wheel on the sidewalk, the
mud-guard on that side torn off, and the radiator stove in. There was
no one about. The car wasn’t very badly damaged, it was said, but
Mr. Wells was awfully mad about it. It was down in Plummer’s
Garage, and Ned could see it if he wanted to. Kewpie had seen it. It
looked fierce, but maybe it wouldn’t cost more than a hundred dollars
to fix it up again!
“Know who did it?” asked Ned.
“Me? I’ll say I don’t!” Kewpie laughed relievedly. “I guess it was
professional automobile thieves, all right, though. They were
probably heading for Windsor. That’s a dark corner up there, and I
guess they lost the road and turned too quick. They must have lost
their nerve, for Mr. Wells drove the car down to the garage and it
went all right, they say. Guess they thought it was done for and didn’t
try to see if it would still go. Sort of a joke on them, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose,” said Ned carelessly, “none of our fellows are
suspected?”
“Of course not. Why, it happened after half-past eleven! Say, you
haven’t—haven’t heard anything?” Kewpie’s eyes grew round with
excitement. “Say, Ned, what is it?” But Ned shook his head wearily.
“I know no more of the business than you do, Kewpie. Now beat it,
will you? I’ve got an exam at ten.”
CHAPTER XXIII
SUSPENDED
N ed didn’t get much studying done, though. Instead, he spent

most of the half-hour remaining before the examination in trying
to solve the mystery of the stolen car and Laurie’s part in the affair. It
wasn’t like Laurie to indulge in a prank so mischievous, and he could
scarcely believe that Laurie had taken part in the escapade. Still, he
had the evidence of his own senses. He had seen Laurie enter by
the window; and, too, he recalled the latter’s stated desire to drive
Mr. Wells’s car. At home in California Laurie was forever begging the
wheel away from his father and was never happier than when
steering the big car along the smooth roads about Santa Lucia. But,
if Laurie had taken Mr. Wells’s roadster, who had been with him? He
wished that Laurie hadn’t told a lie to the Doctor. That, too, was
something very unlike Laurie. Of course, as he had said afterward,
the question had been sudden and unexpected, and he had said the
first thing that came into his mind, but that didn’t excuse the lie.
Ned’s refusal to answer had been made in the effort to shift
suspicion from Laurie to himself, but he wondered now if it would not
have been as well to tell the truth. His self-sacrifice hadn’t helped his
brother much, after all, for Laurie was still suspected of complicity.
The affair would probably end in the suspension of them both,
perhaps in their expulsion. It was all a sorry mess, and Ned hadn’t
discovered any solution of it when ten o’clock came.
Rather to his surprise, he got through the examination, which
lasted until past twelve, very well. Then came dinner, at which
neither he nor Laurie displayed much of the exuberant spirit that
possessed their table companions. After the meal Ned went over to
the library for an hour. When he returned to No. 16 he found Laurie
standing at the window that looked southward toward the distant
ball-field, dejection in the droop of his shoulders. Ned felt very sorry
for the other just then, and he tried to find something to say but
couldn’t, though he cleared his throat twice and got as far as “Hm!”
You couldn’t see much of the baseball game from that window. The
diamond was at the far end of the field, and a corner of the football
stand hid most of it. Laurie found a book and read, and Ned began a
letter to his father. Somehow the afternoon wore away.
Kewpie burst in at a little before five, at once triumphant and
downcast. Hillman’s had won, 11 to 8, but Kewpie Proudtree had not
been allowed to pitch for even a part of an inning, and so his last
chance was gone, and if Pinky called that doing the square thing—
But Laurie broke in just then. “Can it,” he said gruffly. “You saw the
game, anyhow, and that’s more than I did!”
“That’s right,” said Kewpie, apologetically. “It’s a rotten shame,
Nod. What’s Johnny got on you, anyhow? You can tell me. I won’t
say a word.”
“He hasn’t got anything on me,” growled Laurie. “He just thinks he
has. Who pitched?”
“George started, but they got to him in the fourth—no, fifth, and
Nate finished out. Gee, they were three runs ahead of us in the
seventh!”
“Did Elk get in?”
“No, he’s got a sprained wrist or something. Pinky had Simpson, of
the scrubs, catch the last of the ninth. He dropped everything that
reached his hands, though.”
“Elk’s got a sprained wrist, you say? How’d he do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t a wrist. He’s got something wrong,
though, for I heard Dave Brewster talking about it.” After a minute
Kewpie returned to his grievance, and, since Laurie appeared busy
with his own thoughts, he was allowed to unburden himself to his
heart’s content. Ned condoled with him somewhat abstractedly.
When he had taken himself out Laurie broke the silence.
“With Elk out of the game,” he said bitterly, “I’d have had my
chance to-day, and then this had to happen!”
Ned might have reminded Laurie that he had only himself to
blame, but he didn’t. He only said, “I’m sorry, old son.” There was
sincerity in his tone, and Laurie heard it. He made no answer,
however. But later, at supper, their feud was dead, and after supper,
in the room, they talked enough to make up for twenty-four hours of
silence. One subject, though, was not mentioned.
Sunday morning the blow fell. There was another visit to Dr.
Hillman’s study. Both boys were again questioned, but their answers
did not vary from those they had given on Saturday. The Doctor
showed genuine regret when he made known the decision of the
faculty. Laurie had been exonerated from lack of evidence against
him, although it was apparent that the Doctor considered him as
deserving of punishment as Ned. Ned was suspended. That meant
that he would not be passed in his examinations and would have to
return next year as a lower-middler again. He might, as the Doctor
reminded him, study during the summer and so make the upper-
middle class during the fall term, however. As the present term was
so nearly at an end, the Doctor continued, Ned would be permitted to
remain at school until Laurie was ready to accompany him home.
The Doctor ended the interview with the suggestion that it would be
a manly act on the part of the twins to reimburse Mr. Wells for the
damage done to his car. Ned opened his mouth as though to say
something then, but he changed his mind and closed it again very
tightly. A minute later they were outside.
“Gosh, Ned, I’m sorry!” said Laurie miserably.
Ned nodded. “Thanks. It’s all right. One of us had to get it.”
“One of us?” repeated Laurie a bit blankly. “Why, yes, I suppose
so, but—”
“Well, you’ve got your baseball to look after, and I haven’t
anything. So it’s better they picked on me, isn’t it?”
“We—ell,” began Laurie. Then he stopped and shook his head in a
puzzled way. Finally, “You’ll stick around until Thursday, won’t you?”
he asked anxiously.
The other nodded. “Might as well,” he said. “I could get out now
and wait for you in New York, but I don’t see any reason why I should
spend all that money just to act haughty.”
The blow having fallen, Ned, who had already discounted it,
cheered up quite remarkably. After all, he told himself, he had saved
Laurie, and last autumn Laurie had saved him from something very
close to disgrace, and so this sacrifice only somewhat evened
accounts. He allowed himself to be persuaded to accompany the
others on the Sunday afternoon walk, only pledging Laurie to say
nothing of his suspension. It was not until Monday noon that the
news leaked out, and not until hours after that that the school began
to connect the incident of the wrecked automobile with Ned’s fate.
Even then most of those who knew Ned intimately refused to believe
that there could be any connection between the two things.
Questioned, Ned was very uncommunicative, and by Tuesday even
his closest friends began to waver in their faith.
Laurie went back to the baseball fold on Monday. Kewpie’s report
about Elk was true. Elk was nursing a lame wrist. He had, it seemed,
hurt it in wrestling with his room-mate. It had kept him out of the
game Saturday, and it prevented his doing any catching on Monday;
but on Tuesday the injured wrist appeared as good as ever, and
Laurie, who had been temporarily elevated to the position of first
substitute catcher, again dropped into third place. The Farview game
was due on Wednesday, which was likewise Class day and the final
day of the school term. On Monday Coach Mulford was very easy
with the first-string players but gave the substitutes a hard
afternoon’s work. Laurie caught four of the five innings that the
substitutes played against the scrub team. In the final inning he gave
place to Simkins and took that youth’s berth at first base. Tuesday
saw the whole squad hard at work in the final preparation for the
enemy, and no player, from Captain Dave Brewster down to the least
of the substitutes, had a minute’s respite. “You fellows can rest all
you want to after to-morrow,” said the coach. “You can spend all
summer resting if you like. To-day you’re going to work and work
hard.” Even Kewpie, who knew that Fate held nothing for him, was
subjected to almost cruel exertion. He pitched to Laurie until his arm
almost rebelled, and he was made to “dummy pitch” from the mound
and then field the balls that Pinky batted at him and to all sides of
him. And he ran bases, too, and Kewpie considered that the final
indignity and privately thought that the least Pinky could do was to
leave him in peace to his sorrow. But before Tuesday’s practice
began other things of more importance to our story happened. While
dressing Tuesday morning Laurie let fall a remark that led to the
clearing away of mistakes and misconceptions.
“You must have gone to bed with your clothes on the other night,”
he observed. “If you didn’t, you sure made a record!”
Ned stared. “What other night?” he asked.
Laurie floundered. Neither of them had referred to the matter since
Sunday. “Why—well, you know. The night you got in the window,”
Laurie explained apologetically.
“The night I got in the window! Are you crazy?”
“Oh, well,” muttered Laurie, “all right. I didn’t mean to make you
huffy.”
He went on with his dressing, but Ned still stared at him. After a
minute Ned asked: “Look here, old son, what made you say that?
About me getting in the window, I mean.”
“Why, nothing.” Laurie wanted peace in the family. “Nothing at all.”
“You had some reason,” Ned persisted, “so out with it.”
“Well, you were so blamed quick, Ned. You went to the door and
then I heard you get into bed about thirty seconds afterward. It don’t
seem to me that you had time to undress.”
“Let’s get this right,” said Ned with what was evidently forced calm.
“Sit down there a minute, Laurie. Why do you say it was I who came
through the window?”
It was Laurie’s turn to stare. “Why, why because I saw you! I
waked up just as your head came over the sill, you chump!”
“You saw my head come— Look here, are you in earnest or just
trying to be funny?”
“Seems to me it’s you who are acting the silly ass,” answered
Laurie aggrievedly. “What’s the big idea, anyway?”
“But—but, great Scott, Laurie,” exclaimed Ned excitedly. “I saw
you come in the window!”
“Cut the comedy,” grinned Laurie. “I wasn’t out, and you know it.”
“Well, was I, you poor fish? Wasn’t I in bed and asleep when you
came in, as you told Johnny you did?”
“Sure, but— Say, do you mean to tell me I didn’t see—”
“Of course you didn’t! But—”
“Then who did I see?” asked Laurie a trifle wildly.
“Who did I see?” countered Ned. “You say it wasn’t you—”
“Me! Hang it, I went to bed at ten and wasn’t awake again until I
heard a noise and saw you—well some one coming in that window!
Look here, if it wasn’t you, why didn’t you tell Johnny so?”
“Because I thought it was you, you poor prune!”
“What! But I’d said—”
“Sure you had, but I’d seen you with my own eyes, hadn’t I?”
Laurie shook his head weakly. “This is too much for me,” he
sighed. “It wasn’t you and it wasn’t me but it was one of us! I pass!”
“But it wasn’t one of us,” exclaimed Ned. “That’s what I’m getting
at. Don’t you see what happened?” Laurie shook his head.
“Listen, then. We were both asleep, and we each heard the noise
and woke up. Some one came through the window, crossed the
room, opened the door, looked out to see that the coast was clear,
went out, and closed the door after him.”
“But I heard you get into bed!”
“No, you didn’t. You heard me sit up and punch my pillow. I wanted
you to know that you weren’t getting away with it. For that matter I
heard your bed creak and thought you were getting into it.”
“I sat up, too,” said Laurie. “Gee, that’s a queer one! All this time I
thought it was you and could have kicked myself around the block for
yelling ‘No!’ when Johnny asked me that question! Then—then who
the dickens was it, Ned?”
“That,” answered Ned grimly, “is what we’ve got to find out. Just
now it’s up to us to get out of here before we miss our breakfasts!”
“Hang breakfast!” shouted Laurie. “This is better than a hundred
breakfasts! Why—why, it means that you—that you aren’t
suspended! It means—”
“Put your collar on, and make it snappy,” laughed Ned. “We’ve got
some work ahead of us this morning!”
After breakfast they hurried back to No. 16, barred the door
against intruders, especially Kewpie, sat down at opposite sides of
the study table, and faced the problem. They continued to face it
until nearly eleven. They examined the window-sill for clues, and
found none. They leaned out and studied the ivy by means of which
the mysterious visitor had reached the second story, and it told them
nothing, or so it seemed at the moment. As they turned back to the
room Ned said idly: “It’s lucky the fellow didn’t have to get to the third
floor, for I don’t believe he could have made it. That ivy sort of peters
out above our window.”
Laurie nodded uninterestedly and silence ensued, just as silence
had ensued so frequently before in the course of morning. Then,
several minutes later, Ned said suddenly, questioningly:
“Thurston!”
Laurie shook his head. “Not likely. Besides, what reason—”
“Wait a minute. I didn’t tell you. It didn’t seem important. After I’d
settled down again that night I heard the floor up-stairs creak twice. I
wasn’t just certain then, but now I am! Elk Thurston was moving
about up there, Laurie!”
“Well, what if he was? That doesn’t prove—” He stopped and
frowned intently. “Hold on, though, Ned! What about Elk’s wrist?”
“We’ve got it!” cried Ned.
“Yes, maybe. Let’s go slow, though. You don’t happen to know
whether Elk can drive a car, do you?”
“No, but I’ll bet you anything you like that he tried to drive that one!
Look here, our window was open and it was easy to reach. He
couldn’t have made his own without chancing a fall. He trusted to our
being asleep. He—”
“What about the other fellow, though?” asked Laurie. “We didn’t
see—”
“No, but maybe he got in first. Maybe it was really he who awoke
us. Come to think of it, you said that when you woke up the fellow’s
head was just coming into sight. Well, in that case there wouldn’t
have been enough noise—”
“By jiminy, that’s so! Bet you that’s what happened. But who—
Say, maybe the other fellow was Jim Hallock!”
“Just what I was thinking,” agreed Ned. “I don’t see, though, how
we can prove anything against either of them. Look here, son, I
guess the best thing we can do is see Johnny and tell him all about
it. After that it will be up to the faculty. Come on!”
They had to wait some time for an audience, but finally they were
facing the Doctor, and Ned, as spokesman, was saying very
earnestly: “Neither Laurie nor I was out of our room after ten o’clock
Friday night, sir. Somebody did come in our window, though, and
woke us up. I thought it was Laurie and he thought it was me, and
that’s why I didn’t want to answer your question, sir.”
Now, nothing could have been clearer and simpler than that and
yet, when Ned had finished, the principal blinked behind his
spectacles, gazed a moment in silence, and then waved a hand.
“Sit down, boys,” he said. “Now, Edward I think you’d better say
that all over again.”
CHAPTER XXIV
MR. GOUPIL CALLS
A fter practice that afternoon Laurie returned to the room to find

Ned engaged in sorting things out preparatory to packing up.
When Laurie entered, however, the other paused in his effort to stuff
more rubbish into an already overloaded waste-basket and
announced in triumph, “We had it right, partner!”
“Elk Thurston?”
“Elk and Jim Hallock. Elk’s just left here.”
“Left here? You mean he was in to see you?”
Ned nodded. “Yes. It was rather decent of him, I think. Take that
idiotic expression from your face and sit down. This is how Elk tells
it. He and Jim were looking out of their window that night and saw
the lights of Mr. Wells’s car on the other side of the hedge. One of
them said something about Mr. Wells always leaving his car around
and what a joke it would be if it wasn’t there when he came back for
it. Well, that idea sort of stuck, and after a while Elk suggested that
they sneak down and run the car off around the corner. Elk says that
Jim usually wouldn’t have gone in for anything like that on a bet, but
there’d been some tough exams that day, and Jim was sort of keyed
up. Anyhow, they sneaked down-stairs after a while and got out by
one of the windows in the recreation-room. They didn’t dare try the
front way, for Cornish had his study door open. They put the brakes
off and tried to push the car toward Washington Street, but it was
heavy, and after they’d got it a little ways they decided to start it and
run it around the corner. So they did, pretty sure that it was too far off
for Mr. Wells to hear. Elk took the wheel and they went to
Washington Street. Then, he says, the thing was working so pretty
they thought they’d go on further. When they got to where
Washington joins Walnut it was pretty dark, and he swung to the
right too soon.
“That’s when they hit the hydrant. Of course, they were scared
pink, and Elk shut the motor off and they beat it as fast as they
could. When they got back here they found that some one had been
prowling around and had locked the window. Then they saw our
windows open and decided to climb up by the ivy. Elk says they
hoped we’d be asleep. If we waked up they meant to tell us and ask
us to keep mum. Jim climbed up first and made it all right, but Elk
had hurt his wrist when the car struck the hydrant, and he had a hard
time of it. They didn’t either of them know that Cornish had seen
them. For that matter, he only saw one, I guess, and that one was
probably Elk, for he says it took him two or three minutes to get to
the window because his wrist hurt him so. Seems that Jim left the
hall door open after him, but the draft closed it, and that’s what woke
us up, I guess. Well, what Elk came for was to say that neither of
them knew they’d been seen and that they hadn’t meant to throw
suspicion on us. He says if they’d known that Cornish was prowling
around they wouldn’t have entered our window. He was very
particular about making that clear. Guess he thought you might think
he had done it on purpose to get even with you. And that’s that, old
son.”
Laurie nodded thoughtfully. “Kind of too bad,” he mused. “I
suppose they didn’t intend anything but a sort of joke on Mr. Wells.
Did he tell you what they were going to get?”
“Get? Oh, they’re suspended, he says. He seemed to feel worse
about Jim than about himself. Do you know, old son, after all Elk isn’t
such a bad sort. At least, that’s the way it strikes me after hearing his
spiel. He says he’s not coming back next year. He’s going to tutor
this summer and try and make college in the fall.”
“Yeah,” said Laurie abstractedly. “Well, I’m sort of sorry for him.
And of course he didn’t mean to get us in wrong.” He lapsed into
silence. Then, abruptly, “Cas Bennett split his finger with a foul tip
about half an hour ago,” he announced.
“He did?” exclaimed Ned. “Gosh, that’s tough luck! Will it keep him
out of the game?”
“Yes,” replied Laurie.
“That is tough! Say, what are you looking so queer about?”
“Just thinking,” answered Laurie. “You try it.”
“Huh?”
“Use the old bean, son. Cas has split his finger, Elk’s suspended
—”
“Great jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! Why, then, you—you—”
“Correct,” said Laurie. “I’ll have to catch to-morrow, and—and at
the present moment, Ned, I’m scared to death!”
That had been a day of events, and it was not yet over. Attic
Society was giving its usual end-of-the-term blow-out that evening,
and both Ned and Laurie were invited. The affair began at eight, and
at half-past seven they were in No. 16 putting the finishing touches
to their toilets. Although it was a stag-party it called for best clothes
and polished shoes and carefully brushed hair, and Laurie was trying
hard to subdue a rebellious lock on the crown of his head when there
came a knock on the door. Both boys shouted “Come in!”
simultaneously. Then the door was opened, revealing Mr. Cornish,
the hall master, and a stranger. The boys grabbed for their coats,
Laurie dropping a military brush to the floor with a disconcerting
noise. Mr. Cornish ushered the stranger in but himself came no
further than the door-sill.
“Here is a gentleman to see you, Laurence,” said the instructor. “I
was quite certain you were in, and so I brought him up.”
Mr. Cornish smiled, nodded to the guest, who bowed impressively,
and departed, closing the door behind him.
“Very glad indeed—” began Laurie.
“Have a seat, won’t—” supplemented Ned.
“Thank you.” The stranger again bowed and seated himself,
placing a cane across his immaculately clad legs and balancing a
somewhat square derby hat perilously atop. “I begin by offering you
my apologies for this intrusion,” he continued.
“Not necessary,” mumbled Laurie, his gaze busy with the guest.
The latter appeared to be about fifty, was under rather than over
average height, and was very broad and thick and, like his derby,
rather square of contour. He even had a distinctly square face which
began very high up, because of the disappearance of what hair may
have adorned the front of his head at one time, and ended in an
auxiliary chin. He wore a very black mustache whose ends were
waxed to sharp points. His eyes were quite as black and almost as
sharp as his mustache. He looked foreign, and, indeed spoke with
more than a trace of accent, but he was evidently a gentleman, and
he impressed the boys very favorably.
“With your permission,” he continued, “I will introduce myself.” He
regarded Laurie. “I have the honor of addressing Mr. Laurie Turner?”
Laurie nodded. The guest carefully secured hat and stick, arose, and
bowed deeply. “I,” he announced then, “am Mr. Goupil.”
For an instant silence ensued. Then, “Mister—I beg your pardon,”
said Laurie, “but did you say Goupil?”
“Goupil,” confirmed the gentleman, bowing again and smiling very
nicely.
“You mean,” stammered Laurie, “the Mr. Goupil? Of Sioux City?
Miss Comfort’s Mr. Goupil?”
“Surely.”
“Why—why, then,” exclaimed Laurie, “I’m mighty glad to meet you,
sir.” He stepped forward with outstretched hand, and Mr. Goupil
enfolded it in a far more capacious one. “And this is my brother Ned.”
Mr. Goupil then shook hands with the amazed Ned. After that they all
sat down. Mr. Goupil arranged stick and hat with precision, cleared
his throat, and began:
“My dear sister-in-law has told me of your most kind efforts in her
behalf, and I have presented myself to make explanation and to add

(Download PDF) Engaging With Brecht Making Theatre in The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Bill Gelber Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

(Download PDF) Engaging With Brecht Making Theatre in The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Bill Gelber Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

(Download PDF) Engaging With Brecht Making Theatre in The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Bill Gelber Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Engaging with Brecht.

Governing California in the Twenty-First Century

Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century 1st

Militant Aesthetics - Art Activism in the Twenty-First

Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century

History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the

European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century:

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-

The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and

Engaging with Brecht

ISBN 978-3-031-20393-0 ISBN 978-3-031-20394-7 (eBook)

Many thanks go to…

1 Why Engage with Brecht? 1

4 The Design Team, Meta-theatricality, and Literarization 73

5 First Rehearsal: Tools for Actors, Status, and Haltung 97

6 Rehearsing the Actors I: Arrangement119

7 Rehearsing the Actors II: Moment to ­Moment143

8 Rehearsing the Actors III: Playing the Events169

9 Documenting the Work: The Model Book193

10 Responses and Future Work215

Appendix 1: Mother Courage Fabel Spring 2015235

Appendix 2: Working on a Scene with Stanislavsky

Why Engage with Brecht?

In a historical situation that threatens critical thinkers and devalues strategies

In this volume, I record a process of applying a pedagogy of engage-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

work of a wide variety of applied theatre practitioners.”2 While scholars in

In some ways, this obscurantism is understandable. Brecht himself

Völker, Brecht: A Biography, 110–111.

painstakingly researched volume, did much to correct the errors of the

at the BE attested to Brecht’s eschewing of theory in rehearsal: “Many

The Character versus the Figure

The Epic Label

through social contradictions.”28 Instead of imposing a singular vision

audience interprets everything they see in order to intercede or interpose

The contrasts and similarities between behaviors are instructive onstage,

down to one attitude but is defined by many: the various Haltungen

Separation of the Elements

character, Brecht avoided the seamless combination of each for purposes

interpret the phenomenon witnessed on stage.57 Brecht’s “leafing back,”

Over-egging and Pre-empting

Engaging with Brecht

Brecht and Stanislavsky

and Dance at Texas Tech University took on the challenge of producing

behaviors. Though on the surface status seems to embrace the psychologi-

the Berliner Ensemble, were Stanislavsky trained; they continued to use

since. When Brecht published interviews about his work, on occasion he

Five Productions of Mother Courage: 1941,

Writers cannot write as rapidly as governments make war, because writing

This chapter considers five stagings in the production history of Mother

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

the reception of the premiere production in Zurich in 1941. Finally, an

The Mother Courage team of 2015, therefore, looked to the thought-­

Friedrich Schiller’s one-act play, Wallenstein’s Camp (1880), the latter a

She loved the war, whatsoe’er it brought,--

Brecht’s study of history as a schoolboy certainly included the dark

adults and what Courage chooses to do because of her survivalist instincts

N ed didn’t get much studying done, though. Instead, he spent

1 Why Engage with Brecht? 1

4 The Design Team, Meta-theatricality, and Literarization 73

5 First Rehearsal: Tools for Actors, Status, and Haltung 97

6 Rehearsing the Actors I: Arrangement119

7 Rehearsing the Actors II: Moment to Moment143

8 Rehearsing the Actors III: Playing the Events169

9 Documenting the Work: The Model Book193

10 Responses and Future Work215

Appendix 1: Mother Courage Fabel Spring 2015235

Appendix 2: Working on a Scene with Stanislavsky

The Mother Courage team of 2015, therefore, looked to the thought-