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Saint Joan of the Stockyards
Bertolt Brecht |
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Brecht began his theatrical career, the theatre in Germany presented "bombastic productions of the classics alternat[ing] with empty photographic replicas of everyday life, whether in melodrama or drawing-room comedy." It was a "theatre that oscillate[d] between emotional uplift and after-dinner entertainment." (Martin Esslin, Brecht: the Man and His Work, (W. W. Norton & Company, 1974), pp.127-28.) German theatre was dramatic, according to Goethe and Schiller in their 1797 essay "On Epic and Dramatic Poetry," because it presented events on the stage as totally present. Therefore, the audience participated in the fortunes and misfortunes of the actors, who represented themselves as specific individuals; and the audience followed the action on the stage, without imagination or thought. For Brecht, such a dramatic theatre was all illusion and identification. (Esslin, Brecht: the Man and His Work, p. 130.)
Bertolt Brecht preferred the epic. "Today [1931] when human character must be understood as the 'totality of all social conditions' the epic form is the only one that can comprehend all the processes which could serve the drama as materials for a fully representative picture of the world." (Bertolt Brecht, "Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper," Schriften zum Theatre, p. 35 [quoted in Esslin, Brecht: the Man and His Work, p. 129].) Brecht eschewed identification and illusion because it made the audience passive recipients of whatever message or ideology the piece contained. Instead, he proposed a theater "consciously aware of its artificiality, a theater which constantly reminded the audience–by breaking through the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, . . . and otherwise breaking up the flow of the play it was watching–that they were spectators not to reality, but to a stage production. . . . [T]his disruption [is termed] Verfremdung–estrangement–a removal from the incident or character of everything that is familiar, known, and taken for granted." (Michael Richardson, "Making Use of Brecht," The Book Press, February 1999 [Review of Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (Verso, 1998).)
Brecht estranged or "‘alienated’ his audience from the play through theatrical devices . . . that dispelled any illusion of reality that the play might evoke." (February 9, 2001 Brün Interview.) Primary among these devices is the use of episodes, which contrast to the suspenseful scenes of a well-made play. Episodes do not mount to a climax; the story unfolds in a number of separate situations, each rounded and complete in itself. Brecht believed that the electrification of staging also resulted in an important device for the epic theatre: the use of film and film projections as integral parts of the setting. "The setting was thus awakened to life and began to play on its own, so to speak; the film was a new gigantic actor that helped to narrate events. By means of it documents could be shown as part of the scenic background, figures, and statistics. Simultaneous events in different places could be seen together." (Bertolt Brecht, ‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler," Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, translated by John Willett (Hill & Wang, 1966), p. 77-8.) Epic theatre used music, choruses, and choreography to explain the action to the audience and to interrupt the flow of the onstage action to give the audience a chance to reflect. Staging and the costumes provided historical background material to assist the audience in understanding the message of the play. Lighting sources were displayed and were non-naturalistic to break unreflective illusion.
Even the Brechtian acting style established "a new circuit between the role and the argument [since] it is, for the actor, to give meaning to the play and no longer to himself in the play." (Roland Barthes, "Seven Photo Models of Mother Courage," The Drama Review, v. 12, n.1 (1967), p. 44.) An epic theatre actor is not completely transformed into the character he is portraying; he "must invest what he has to show with a definite gest of showing." (Bertolt Brecht, "Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces the Alienation Effect," Brecht on Theatre, p. 136.) However, epic theatre actors are not simply two-dimensional embodiments of a play's ideas: "the stage of a realistic theatre must be peopled by live, three-dimensional, self-contradictory people, with all their passions, unconsidered utterances and actions. The stage is not a hothouse or a zoological museum full of stuffed animals." (Bertolt Brecht, "From a Letter to an Actor [1951]," Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, p. 235-36.)
Brecht’s "impetus for developing the challenge of [e]pic theater was rooted in his commitment to a socialist revolution, and the political and social critiques that he saw his works offering were decidedly Marxist ones." (Michael Richardson, "Making Use of Brecht," The Book Press, February 1999.) This dynamic interplay between theatrical and political ideology is clearly manifested in the creation of SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS. Brecht's epic theatre is inextricably woven into the very fiber of this play. In 1926, Brecht worked on Joe Fleischhacker from Chicago, a play about wheat speculators in the Chicago stock market that was transmuted into SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS in 1932. This play is of central import in Brecht's political and theatrical ideology.
For a certain play I needed the Chicago grain market as background. I thought I would acquire the necessary knowledge by a few quick questions to the specialists and people in that field; but the affair was to take a different course. Nobody, neither well-known economists nor businessmen—I travelled [sic] from Berlin to Vienna to meet a broker who had worked his whole life on the Chicago exchange—could give me a satisfactory explanation of the happenings in the grain market. . . . The projected play was not written—instead of that I started reading Marx."
H.J. Bunge, W. Hecht, K. Rülicke-Weiler. Bertolt Brecht (Berlin, 1963), p. 40.
Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's collaborator at this time, wrote in her diary in July 1926 that Joe Fleischhacker from Chicago was one play in a series about "the coming of mankind into the big cities" for which Brecht realized that a new form of drama was needed:
[Brecht] had concluded that the old (great) form of drama wasn't fit for representing such modern processes as the international distribution of wheat, the life stories of people of our times and generally for all events with consequences. . . . During these studies he drew up his theory of "epic drama."
Elisabeth Hauptmann, "Notizen ueber Brechts Arbeit 1926," Sinn und Form, Second Special Brecht Issue, 1957, p. 243. Quoted in Darko Suvin, "The Mirror and the Dynamo," The Drama Review, v. 12, n.1 (1967), p. 63.
Brecht's unfinished play about the wheat speculators on the Chicago Stock Exchange was melded with elements from several other unfinished or unsuccessful works to become SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS, which was completed in 1932. Brecht's unsuccessful 1929 musical, Happy End, concerned "the efforts of a Salvation Army girl to save the souls of some Chicago gangsters." (Esslin, Brecht: the Man and His Work, p. 45.) In another unfinished play, The Bread Shop, "Brecht had introduced a Salvation Army girl to show the absurdity of wanting to solve economic problems by mere charity. This character . . . coalesced with the Salvation Army girl in the abortive musical Happy End into Joan Dark...." (Esslin, Brecht: the Man and His Work, p. 55.) Brecht could not get SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS produced in a theatre in 1932. The play was first performed on stage in Hamburg on April 30, 1959.
SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS begins with a long scene showing the machinations of big business--buying and selling, deception, fraudulently manipulating the market. The action in the play involves the quest of Joan Dark, who is a member of the Salvation Army-like Black Wool Hats, to help the workers of the Chicago stockyards. The ruthless meat tycoon, Pierpont Mauler is besting his competitors in the canned meat business by fraudulently manipulating the stock market. Joan gains an audience with him to convince him to help the workers in his plants who often disappear in the mincing machines. Mauler attempts to justify his actions by demonstrating to Joan that the poor are wicked and greedy: "You will see what sort of people these are." Workers are locked out of the plants because of the market. Joan tries to organize the farmers. Mauler buys all their beef cattle to ruin his competitors and drive up the prices. The plant remains closed and people are starving. Joan is expelled from the Black Wool Hats because of her meddling. She decides to join the workers; she wants to share the suffering of the unemployed until the plants are open. The Communists want the stockyard workers to join them in a strike. Joan fails to deliver a letter about the strike because she fears the use of violence. Mauler reopens the plant after he vanquishes his competitors. The strike is called off. Joan is sick and homeless after sharing the privations of the unemployed workers. As she dies, she realizes that violence is needed to really help the workers: "For only violence helps, where violence reigns/And only men can help where there are men. . . .". But she is "canonized" as the saint of the stockyards now that the plant is reopened.
Stefan Brün, a co-founder of Prop Theatre Group, adapted SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS and also directs the 13 actors in the 60 roles in the play. His direction is sure, measured, and masterful. Brün directed Prop's inaugural play, Brecht’s Puntila and Matti, 20 years ago and since has spent years working and studying in Germany. He clearly knows the technical mechanics, purpose, and spirit of Brechtian theatre. His SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS is epic theatre at its best and most effective.
Brün’s adaptation asks the audience to imagine a "production done by a small German theater group in 1932 Berlin [j]ust after that election which brought the Nazi Party into the conservative-coalition government. . . . these actors pull together a minimally scenic rendition [set in 1904 Chicago] that is still able to be broadcast live over radio." (Stefan Brün, "A Few Words," Stagebill, p. 15.) The audience cannot merely sit spellbound by the action. They must actively use their imagination. But even though the audience imagines a radio broadcast, it experiences the actors enacting the play in realistic costumes and wigs and makeup—without German accents. The audience experiences Brechtian alienation from the performance as they reflect upon the relationship between the historical times, in 1904 and 1932, and the present.
Brün's production of SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS adopts many of Brecht's favorite theatrical devices. The use of a multi-level set-- with most of the Stock Exchange scenes on the upper level, the plant workers and the strikers on the lower level-- suggest the class division of the society. This type of staging was important to Brecht: "our theatre's significant stage groupings are not just an effect or a 'purely aesthetic' phenomenon, conducive to formal beauty [but] part of a hugely-conceived theatre for the new social order, and they cannot be achieved without deep understanding and passionate support of the new structure of human relations." (Bertolt Brecht, "From a Letter to an Actor [1951]," Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, p. 235.) The episodes in this long drama are smoothly paced, but performed as independent scenes.
The rear of the lower level of the set functions as a projection screen of newsreel footage and photographs, presented simultaneously with the action. The set is replete with exposed lighting that casts silhouetted shadows instead of realistically illuminating the action. The sound design presents recorded voices, commenting on the action, and out of sync readings pantomimed by the actors. The production also effectively uses instrumental music, which is played live on an offstage piano, live onstage by actors, and broadcasted as recordings. The singing and choreography in the production are presented in epic theatre fashion: "musical numbers are no longer smuggled in at the point when the emotional charge of a scene rises to a climax and speech merges into song, but are introduced as entirely distinct ingredients of the play, which interrupt its flow, break the illusion, and thereby render the action 'strange'." Esslin, Brecht: the Man and His Work, p. 135. This is particularly the case with the show stopping chorus number, "Welcome to Our Place" at the end of the play when the plant has reopened but Joan is near death.
The acting company is marvelous. They perform with individual vitality and interact with each other to present the audience with demonstrations of human situations. The two leads, Jenny Magnus and Jonathan Lavan, have mastered Brecht's acting style. They are perfect Brechtian actors who do not inhabit the roles, but help the audience understand their lives. As portrayed by Magnus, Joan is not only a simple girl who becomes a saint; Lavan's Mauler is not only a monstrous, ruthless business tycoon. They do present the historical figures for audience contemplation. Yet, their portrayals are full and rich and unknown--but not unknowable. Joan comes to understand the role of violence and the complexity of human nature, as her life is extinguished. Mauler is a self-deprecating man who is aware of his duplicity and confusion: he can be "torn with remorse" and exhilarated by his role in the inhumane system of buying and selling.
Brecht’s message in this learning play is that there is evil inherent when--throughout history’s "pernicious cycles," "power continues to be concentrated among even fewer." (Stefan Brün, "A Few Words," Stagebill, p. 15.) However, this production of SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS in the year 2001 engenders another message. Brecht himself was ambivalent about the character of Pierpont Mauler, the millionaire businessman. As written by Brecht, adapted by Brün, and portrayed by Lavan, it is impossible not to admire his energy and nerve, and be in awe of his ruthlessness. Within the context of the play, Mauler is the Dauphin to Joan Dark’s Joan d’Arc. He, or others like him, will ascend to the throne in our materialistic, capitalist society. For the 2001 audience, the scenes of the machinations of the Stock Exchange are not as alienating and strange as Brecht intended; they are even fascinating and alluring. Brecht knew that his audiences would move beyond the past into a different understanding of human society. In a 1926 poem entitled "The Babylonian Confusion," Brecht perhaps envisioned the audience of the year 2001 who experienced Prop Theatre Group’s production of SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS:
To those who have not yet been born
But will be born and will
Live in quite different times
And, happy they! Will no longer understand
What is a grain dealer of the kind
That exists among us.Quoted in Darko Suvin, "The Mirror and the Dynamo," The Drama Review, v. 12, n.1 (1967), p. 62.
-- Sandra Marie Lee
SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS. Bertolt Brecht's drama, Prop Theatre Group. Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-883-1090. Through April 8:
Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 PM; Sundays, 3 PM. $17-$22.
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