Brecht, the "Fable," and the Teaching of Directing Craig Kinzer

"Once in a generation the world discovers a new way of telling a story: this generation's pathfinder is Brecht." – Kenneth Tynan

In the study of stage directing the examples of great directors of the past can provide the student with a variety of directorial techniques and a sense of the cultural and historical context of past production practices. The value of this study, however, is not in its capacity to teach students to replicate those practices or to recreate specific production style. Rather, it can help students develop a personal process, adaptable to a variety of texts and production situations. In examining past masters, the guiding question must be: How can we adapt without merely imitating; learn a sensibility as well as technique; take the living, breathing process of an artist and mold it to our own needs? How can a student director best absorb the working style of a master, acquiring the strengths of a time-tested process, and maintaining the freedom to use those skills in the development of a personal directorial style?

Bertolt Brecht stands as perhaps the most significant director and dramatist in twentieth century theatre, "whose plays and new techniques of staging and acting have provided a personal instrument attuned to the peculiar temper of our time." In addition to a body of dramatic literature clearly ranking among history's finest, Brecht's legacy includes productions which astounded audiences in his home base of East Berlin as well as London and Paris. Early critics lauded his productions of Mother Courage and Galileo as signifying a breakthrough in modern dramatic technique. Carl Weber remembers the impact of seeing the 1949 Mother Courage production:

It was the first time I had ever seen people on the stage behave like real human beings; there was not a trace of "acting" in that performance, though the technical brilliance and perfection of every moment was stunning. The economy of the set, of every prop used, was absolutely overwhelming to one who had seen until then only run-of-the-mill-and sometimes the best German Theatre. And it was astonishing how the idea of the play was brought across, without pushing, without hammering into the audience.

Surely these are laudable qualities every student of directing should strive to achieve in his/her work. But what processual elements in Brecht's work were the source of these strengths?

Brecht's position in the academic theater is problematic, marred by the over- abundance of the playwright's own critical theory which has colored our perception of his actual working process. Like the works of Stanislavski, much of what we know and try to teach about Brecht comes to us through his own admittedly polemical writings about the theater, translated into English selectively, sometimes not in chronological order, and without the context of the actual productions to illuminate them. Brecht's theories are

2 examined in the classroom in order to illustrate what we believe to be "Brechtian" practice, but we often fail to view the body of critical writing left to us as reflective of an evolutionary process, as it were, steps along the road in the artist's development. Moreover, Brecht himself was the ultimate circumstantialist, capable of adjusting his process to suit the needs of his audience, his actors and the story he wanted to tell. This essential fact of Brecht the director has often been lost on students of his drama, relying as we do on the polemical writings of his early period (largely abandoned by Brecht in the Ensemble days at the end of his career). Even the much vaunted and equally misunderstood term Verfremdungseffekt (untranslatable and largely misleading to post- Absurdist theater students [often: the “alienation effect]) was modified and then virtually ignored by Brecht himself during this late period. The notion of an epic theater, developed as the paradigm of "theater for the scientific age," was also abandoned by Brecht in favor of the term "dialectic theater." Theory must, then, be approached with caution and, to be thorough and historically fair, in the context of the work itself.

In searching for a valuable processual key to Brecht's work, the "fable" emerges as a key directorial device. The "fable" informed all aspects of his theatrical style, affected work with designers, actors and dramaturgs, and acknowledged the composition and historical position of his audience.

The Fable

According to Carl Weber, one of Brecht's assistants at the Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s, the “fable” was, of course, Brecht's preferred term designating a play's plot as it is retold on stage from a specific point of view, in a clearly defined gestus. As with many terms in Brecht's dramatic theories, “gestus” is difficult to translate into English. It can be rendered variously as gist or gesture, attitude or point; “one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed.” Brecht defines the term as a distillation “of overall attitudes ...conveying overall attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men.” In the context of the fable, the gest indicates the central thrust or essence of the play, capturing the director's attitude towards the text. More than a simple plot summary, the fable is intended to reflect the essential action of a play as the director (or production itself) intends it to be perceived by the audience. It indicates not only what happens but a sense of how and why it happens. Out of the numerous possible readings or interpretations of a text one is decided upon and will guide the execution of the production. The fable is an attempt to both capture and reflect that reading in a compact and distilled form.

An example of a fable can be found in A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht's seminal statement about the art of the theater written shortly before embarking upon his triumphant leadership of the new Berliner Ensemble. He describes a possible production of Hamlet:

It is an age of warriors. Hamlet's father, king of Denmark, slew the king of Norway in a successful war of spoliation. While the latter's son Fortinbras is arming for a fresh war the Danish King is likewise slain: by his own brother. The

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slain kings' brothers, now themselves kings, avert war by arranging that the Norwegian troops shall cross Danish soil to launch a predatory war against Poland. But at this point the young Hamlet is summoned by his warrior father's ghost to avenge the crime committed against him. After at first being reluctant to answer one bloody deed by another, and even preparing to go into exile, he meets young Fortinbras at the coast as he is marching with his troops to Poland. Overcome by this warrior-like example, he turns back, and in a piece of barbaric butchery slaughters his uncle, his mother and himself, leaving Denmark to the Norwegians.

The salient features of a Brechtian fable are here. This short, seven-sentence paragraph highlights the essential moments of significant action from this particular director's point of view. Of the countless possibilities available for Hamlet and its central dramatic line, Brecht has developed a particular reading of the play and captures it in the fable.

One can imagine the details of production which would reflect the point of view the fable implies: a harsh and gray world, littered with the signs of the preparations for war and conquest; a somewhat effete and ineffectual Hamlet, bewildered by the inefficacy of his intellectual training; a surrounding cast of fit and brawny Danes, warlike, brutal and quick to action, contrasted with Hamlet's own vacillation and reserve. Moreover, the production this fable reflects grows out of a particular time and place, in this case, the aftermath of World War II. The fable describes a production which would address the audience's memories of their recent past and the failure of rational discourse to stop the horrors of world war. In a further note to this fable, Brecht points to the central thrust and impact he wishes his Hamlet to have:

These events show the young man, already somewhat stout, making the most ineffective use of the new approach to Reason which he has picked up at the university of Wittenberg. In the feudal business to which he returns it simply hampers him. Faced with irrational practices, his reason is utterly unpractical. He falls a tragic victim to the discrepancy between such reason and such action.

The brevity and vividness of this fable is the source of its strength and usefulness to the director. A clear, crystallized vision of the intended production reflects the central architecture of the text, and on its structure the more specific detailed choices of all aspects of the performance can be built. How the fable was generated is at the heart of Brecht's process as a director.

…By giving Brecht a clear central architecture, the fable allowed him the freedom to experiment with options for the delivery of the fable's essential gest. It served as guidepost for the myriad choices made in the production process by designers, actors, composers, as well as the director. The Berliner Ensemble's production "style," much replicated and studied, was in truth a result of Brecht and his designers choosing only those visual elements which were essential to communicating the fable's basic gest to the audience.

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