My plans to write something about The Ark every day have begun to fall by the wayside, but in my defense I blame this on a combination of a lack of compelling new things to say AND a creeping sense of fatigue that comes from being steeped in so much new material.

I think I left off late last week as we had started to read the “quadrilogy of Brecht masterpieces”: Caucasian Chalk Circle, Good Person of Szechuan, Mother Courage, and Life of Galileo.  Having now read all of them, I can say that I would put two or three of those in the masterpiece category, but not all four.  I still think Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, Man Equals Man, and In The Jungle of Cities are just as good (if not better).

Caucasian Chalk Circle is one of those plays that I’ve heard about constantly but have never read.  Now would be a good time to admit in public that I’ve never seen “Anne of Green Gables” from beginning to end, or most episodes of “Seinfeld”, but I have learned that if I smile and nod confidently when these works are being discussed, I can bluff with the best of them.  I always thought the word “Caucasian” was some kind of Aryan reference, and assumed that the play was some sort of response to Nazi propaganda.  Not so, dear reader!  The play is an adaptation of an ancient Japanese story of ‘the chalk circle’, reset in the Caucasus region shortly after the Nazis were forced out of the region in World War II.  In fact, Brecht added the opening Caucasus valley scene as a prologue to the play in order to clarify it: he was bothered that people thought the play was in the realm of ‘fantasy’ when he had, in fact, tried to give it an accurate historical and geographical setting.  The central coflict of the play revolves around the search for and fight over a young child of great value, who is being sheltered and raised by a woman who is not his mother.  I won’t say much about it, other than that I regret having bluffed for so long.  Unlike “Seinfeld”, “Caucasian Chalk Circle” is about something.  And the scenes with Azdak — the district judge — are high comedy of epic proportion and way more funny than anything in “Anne of Green Gables”. Or so I’ve heard.

On Saturday we read another adaptation of Mother Courage, as adapted by Peter Hinton.  Read into that what you will; I certainly have, because making inferences is fun.  This new adaptation is still very much in-progress, but is likely far closer to Brecht’s original intention that the David Hare adaptation we read last week. I don’t suppose you can really call this new version a ‘translation’, since it is based on a survey of seven or so other translations and adaptations, in addition to a literal German translation, illuminated by language that resonates in a Canadian context. It never ceases to amaze me, though, how much work can be put into a project like this.  It is careful and painstaking, but I think it’s paying off.

Yesterday we plowed through The Life of Galileo, a play about which I feel quite conflicted.  The Ark team is quite divided on their passion for it: I’m in the “don’t-love-it” camp, but feel the problem is really with the verbose nature of the script and not in its subject matter.  As you may guess from the title, the play is Brecht’s take on Galileo’s life, roughly from the time of his adoption of the telescope to the “house arrest” he lived under subsequent to his appearance before the Roman Inquisition.  The play exists in a few different versions because it was reworked several times; we read the version that was published just before Brecht’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947.  The central theme is purported to be about the cost and risk associated for speaking out about things you believe (in this case, the eradication of the notion that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that everything revolves around it).  There are great debates in the play on the topics of religion versus science, the empowerment of the individual by making knowledge freely available, and the desire to cling to a truth under pressure… but in my mind the play relies too much on broad-stroke rhetoric and long-winded preachy speeches to be as effective as it could be.  In short, brother needed an EDITOR.  Brecht was preparing a new production of the play just before his death in 1956; I would love to have a look at the script of that production to see if Brecht edited it down.

Finally, today we had our reading of “Threepenny Opera“.  After plowing thorugh the thickness of the last few plays, it was actually a little refreshing to go back to something a bit more straightforward.  I think I managed a fair enough job of singing Macheath, given the VERY limited amount of prep time; overall, the reading went off terrifically well and the combination of songs and script provide a reasonable approximation of what a production might feel like.  That sounds a little glib, perhaps, but someone pointed out after the reading that while music played such a massive role in Brecht’s work, we have (for the most part) just been reciting lyrics for songs that appear in other plays.  So much more is brought to the table with the Weill/Eisler/Dessau scores, and I wish we had more time to look at those!

Tomorrow we’ll be reading “The Rise And Fall of Mahagonny” to the best of our ability.  That means we’ll be reciting a lot of the lyrics instead of singing them, since the opera is actually very difficult, and too hard to read through given the range of artists in the room.  We’ll put a few of the songs in, but that’s all we can manage.  It’s a bit of a bummer, but it means the reading won’t take all day, and we’ll have a chance to do some other things, like listening to Brecht’s 1947 testimony before HUAC! Whee!

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