January 2023
Intermediate to advanced
442 pages
15h
English
“We have art so that we shall not die of reality.”
–Nietzsche
When playwright and director Bertolt Brecht staged his plays in Weimar Germany, he sometimes strung a rope from one side of the proscenium to the other to bisect the visual plane; he didn’t want the audience to be lulled into the charade unfolding on stage. This alienating effect, from the German verfremdungseffekt, was a rejection of the dominant plays at the time, which, like the Depression-era classical Hollywood movies, were a means of escape from the world.
While Brecht conceded that theater should entertain, he believed that by calling attention to the instruments of theater (lights, rigging, etc.) the audience could ...
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