Flying Gogoplata

On “These Games Are So Bad It’s Not Funny”:

I don’t know why his random pot shot at Brecht annoyed me, though it seems to be because it speaks to a somewhat common misunderstanding of Brechtian theatre. I’ve heard it before in the classroom as well from one of the most arrogant amateur playwrights I have met – “It seems like what [Brecht] is advocating is bad acting.” What Brecht advocated was a theatre which exposes its mechanism so that the audience cannot be lost in the world of the play and forget that they are watching a constructed work of art. This can be implemented at every level of the presentation and performance.

The job of the actor in any performance is to construct a character using the tools of behavior, of action. That character CAN be realistic, but it DOES NOT HAVE TO BE! What matters, for the acting to be good, is the intention to construct a character and good execution. Good execution without purpose is not artful and it reads as such. Good intentions with poor execution is boring. Neither is just painful.

I am not in any way an idolater of Brecht. His work is definitely worthy of criticism. But it does frustrate me to see it criticized for things he didn’t write. It’s sad to me that the only implementation of exposure of the mechanism of acting can be bad acting. That Gestus can only be wooden. It speaks to a lack of creativity and innovation.

Sometimes I get a lot of surprise and pleasure from clarifying vague information from my childhood. In this case it was an odd and fairly popular song performed by The Doors called “Alabama Song”. I used to read a lot about The Doors and having noted the atypicality of Alabama Song, it stuck out in my head that it was actually a cover of a song from some sort of obscure musical. It stayed there because I never would have associated The Doors with a showtune. That information stayed in my head without my ever being able to identify the musical it came from.

Until today when I decided to continue ripping more of my CDs into digital format. The music database pulled all the relevant information from The Doors debut album, including original composer information. Listed in that column for Alabama song were Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, one of my favorite playwrights, and two of the most important figures in Modern/Postmodern theatre. I was amazed for a minute then everything seemed to make sense. I’ve never considered Brecht and Weill’s work to be musical theatre, but rather theatre with music. So the notion of this staged song worked a bit better in a Doors cover than a showtune. Now, of course, I feel the urge to make sure to see The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, if only to hear the song as it was originally composed.

On a slightly unrelated note, I found it odd that the Wikipedia entry for “Alabama Song” has it listed as a pop standard. This notion is also very odd to me because it is difficult for me to consider Brecht “pop”. This has the same effect when I here Louis Armstrong or Frank Sinatra singing the old standard “Mack the Knife“, a song from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. These just don’t fit my notion of pop or showtune so my head explodes just a little when I see these labels applied to them.