Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht’s concepts of epic theater, verfremdungskeffekt, and his performance philosophy influenced how I approached this performance as more than just a staged adaptation.

The Brechtian style has some focus on the relationship between telling and showing a situation. Brecht concentrates on actively spurring the audience to action or thought through the method of performance. My performance, being so grounded in real social culture and true, personal experience, was asking for more than just a staged adaptation of a fictional story. There needed to be something to relate the narrative back to reality that provoked the audience into thinking about the content, not just sitting back and enjoying it. According to David Barnett, Enoch Brater, and Mark Taylor-Batty, “Brecht wants his spectators to be surprised by what they see on stage and actively to construct their own accounts of the characters’ actions and behaviours, based on their connections with the play’s social contexts” (30). Many of Brecht’s qualms about traditional theater come from the naturalism and realism that was popular in his younger years— these styles were bent on inspiring empathy and creating a world so seemingly real that an audience might forget they are watching a performance. Barnett, Brater, and Taylor-Batty continue, “Brecht’s ‘epic’ devices are more about making the reception of the theatrical event complex rather than banishing illusion. They invite an audience to compare different kinds of theatrical communication or to challenge them to process a scene in a different kind of way” (72). Naturalism is bent on the impossible task of creating an illusion so realistic that the audience forgets the performance context from which they watch the work , which epic theater embraces the theater as a place in present time and space. This harkens back to the Viewpoints notion of using the physical aspects of time and space to the performer’s advantage, as a common ground between the audience, the performers, and the theater. It would be much more productive to work with those ‘constraints’ rather than against them. Speaking with regard to naturalism specifically, Brecht himself writes:

…a particularly suggestive reproduction will lead spectators to immerse themselves instantly in the acting character and thus fail to ask the questions which they might potentially have asked…The spectators themselves succumb to anger or jealousy, and completely lose the ability to understand, as it were, why it is that people become angry or jealous. In this way they lose interest in the causal nexus of these ‘natural’ emotions which do not seem to call for any further examination (Brecht on Performance 34).

If the audience enters the performance space and is able to sit back, watch the performance, and feel a sense of conclusion and complete fulfillment, the performance has not stimulated thought in a way that might result in productive action. Brecht writes, “The theatre presents the spectator not only with solved problems but with unsolved ones too” (Brecht on Performance 45). In this way, the audience has some holes left to fill in themselves. If a performance is meant to invoke change or inspire thought, as my performance is, then the audience cannot be left with a final solution that leaves nothing wanting. Brecht continues, “Epic theatre confronts the audience with situations where it must make choices. The spectator can no longer sit passively consuming but has to make decisions for or against what he sees on stage. He becomes productive” (Brecht for Beginners 76), taking the experiences of the theater into real life and using them in interacting with others, particularly, in this case, with minority groups or second generations specifically. Creating a performance that deals with social issues benefits from a Brechtian approach because it leaves the audience with a question, so they can, in this case, leave the theater pondering over the struggle of immigration as a cultural experience.

Furthermore, in relation to naturalism’s goal of eliminating the auditorium, Brechtian theater seeks to highlight the performative quality of the space itself. As stated in Brecht for Beginners, “As far as Brecht is concerned sets are supposed to let the audience know they are in

the theatre rather than in Athens or Venice, for example. The best way to do this is to leave the workings of the set visible” (61). Rather than create a realistic—but still very obviously

theatrical—setting, why not use the theater to further emphasize the themes within the

performance? Set designer Caspar Neher said, “If a set doesn’t contribute to the production, it detracts from it” (Brecht for Beginners 62). Going with minimal staging does not make the performance less profound; in fact, it may highlight the profundity of the performance. There are no false distractions, no sentimental design elements. Instead of a traditional set design, I was interested in creating a set using primarily color and fabric, one that would heighten the theme of liminality without distracting from the primary purpose of the performance: to hone in on the internal struggle of the second generation. Working with minimal staging mirrored the second generation’s lack of grounding.

In the context of my performance, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories act as an entry point into the piece. The narratives function as a connection between the audience and the personal, as a way to relate the audience to me without asking them to make a leap directly into my own experience. Without incorporating an exact plotline, we used moments in the story as jumping off points to create vivid, engaging movements on stage. In Performance and Philosophy, Brecht remarks, “…the gesture is precisely what can arouse interest. The interest comes in the wake of the gesture, not as a prior condition for it” (27). From this I gather that the performance as a gesture is the thing that can inspire further speculation into the social condition of the children of Indian immigrants. While Lahiri’s stories alone function more as naturalism might, as a method of escapism, linking them to my personal experience, and never disguising the personal experience as theatrical or constructed, could lead the audience to question the state of immigration today and certainly the ways in which other cultures are represented in society.