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Brecht in L.A.

by Rick Mitchell
Intellect Books, Bristol, UK and Portland Oregon, 2003
100 pp. Paper, $29.95
ISBN: 1-84150-105-0.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
9 Belvedere Road, London, UK, SE1 8YW

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

In 1999 Rick Mitchell moved to Los Angeles to teach playwriting and dramatic literature. As an experimental playwright he was aware of the irony of moving to the home of Hollywood realism. This tension between his personal position and the larger environment he found himself in led him to think about Bertolt Brecht’s six years in LA, from 1941 to 1947, when Brecht fled the Nazis and entered the US via Finland. The result is Mitchell’s award winning play, Brecht in LA, which draws upon Brecht’s own theories of theatre to depict his experiences in trying to get his work produced while being surreptitiously investigated by the FBI for the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

Mitchell introduces the play with an essay on its first reading in LA, describing the basic tenets of Brecht’s epic theatre and the challenges he faced in trying to persuade actors trained in realism and emotional engagement with the characters they had to play to act in a Brechtian style. The essay includes an account of Mitchell’s own understanding of Brecht, and the ideas he expresses here are embodied in the play itself. The book also includes notes on the historical context of the play and the real characters it depicts and a review of its first production. These additions will obviously make the book attractive to anyone engaged in teaching Brechtian drama to literature, drama, or film studies students.

In the play Brecht is depicted as pre-occupied with his writing and willing to force any sacrifices he considers necessary on his mistress and collaborator, Ruth Berlau, and on his wife and family. His daily life bears little resemblance to his political ideals. Yet he is a sympathetic character who emerges as vulnerable and human. In his introductory essay Mitchell argues that Brecht’s plays engage the spectator far more than is traditionally represented.

The gap between Brecht’s awareness of what should be done and what he can and does do is huge and often amusingly portrayed. Knowledge and action are frequently in conflict in the play. Brecht’s epic theatre was intended to enhance the spectator’s capacity for action and, hence, to be a catalyst for social change. Mitchell critiques these ideas by showing how social and historical circumstances limit an individual’s capacity to understand his position and to act on any knowledge he may acquire. The play, therefore, uses Brecht’s own theories to examine Brecht’s life at a particular time and shows something of the extent and limit of those ideas.

But beyond all the theorising, the play is a delight to read. Mitchell exhorts all those who would work with the play to bear in mind Brecht’s advice to the player’s of the Berliner Ensemble: "Keep it quick, light and strong," and in Brecht in LA he has done exactly that.

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