Brecht on Theatre

Brecht invented Epic Theatre as a direct political weapon against the bourgeois theatrical convention that asks audiences to lose themselves in a story and feel rather than think. He wanted the opposite: an alienated audience — his word — that remained critically aware it was watching a constructed reality, that was never allowed the comfortable emotional release that substitutes for action. The techniques he developed to achieve this — breaking the fourth wall, placards, direct address, actors who comment on their characters rather than becoming them — are now so absorbed into performance culture that their radicalism is invisible. This collection of essays, notes, and fragments is the source: Brecht explaining in his own words what he was doing and why. Exiled by the Nazis, called before HUAC in America, surveilled on two continents simultaneously. The most important theatre theory book on this shelf and the one most directly relevant to what DoCR is building — the tradition of making audiences think rather than feel is the foundation of every filmmaking and storytelling workshop that takes its politics seriously.