Bertolt Brecht, Germany's premier twentieth-century avant-garde playwright, and Erwin Piscator, a noted director, created the theatrical movement Brecht called Epic theater. As the name implies, Epic theater has a massive scope. Spanning a panorama of historical time and place, brimming with... [more]

Bertolt Brecht, Germany's premier twentieth-century avant-garde playwright, and Erwin Piscator, a noted director, created the theatrical movement Brecht called Epic theater. As the name implies, Epic theater has a massive scope. Spanning a panorama of historical time and place, brimming with a cast of characters, and incorporating intricate plot devices, the ultimate goal of Epic theater is didactic: its architects believed that this type of theatrical experience cultivates the ideal climate for social change. Brecht passionately advocated theatrical works crafted solely for educational merit and intellectual involvement, denouncing plays designed purely for entertainment as 'culinary art.' To achieve the lofty aim of theater as society's teacher, Epic theater operates in a highly theatrical, emotionally alienating fashion. To enforce the audience's critical distance from his plays, Brecht hammered them with reminders that they were in a theater. His insistence that the audience stay emotionally remote ultimately led him to develop 'alienation effects.' He historicized his plays, setting them in remote historical periods. He exoticized them by locating them in legendary or exotic locations. He used disjointed, episodic scenes, and ushered them in with revealing opening titles. He did anything he could to leave his audience open for a purely intellectual engagement with the play's social and moral messages. The social agenda of Epic theater productions dominate even the priority of a work's dramatic unity. Every production element is subsumed under the project of expressing the play's political message. Ever diligent on the ideological front, even the songs in Brecht's works reveal more about political lessons than plot or characters. Masterworks like 'The Threepenny Opera' (1928), 'Mother Courage and her Children' (1938), and 'The Good Woman of Setzuan' (1938-1940), underline Brecht's burning obsession with social change -- particularly Marxist -- an obsession that dominates the theories defining Epic theater. [show less]