The Caucasian Chalk - American Conservatory Theater · table of contents . Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of The Caucasian Chalk Circle 5. A Little Bit of an Anarchist: An Interview

WORDS ON PLAYS prepared byelizabeth brodersenpublications editordan rubinpublications & literary associatemichael pallerresident dramaturgkatie maypublications internellen cassidydramaturgy intern

Words on Plays is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the donors of The Next Generation Campaign.

by bertolt brechttranslated by domenique lozanodirected and designed by john doyleoriginal music by nathaniel stookeyamerican conservatory theaterfebruary 18–march 14, 2010

The Caucasian Chalk Circle

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VAT O RY T H E AT E R

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director

P R E S E N T S

© 2010 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

CHALK CIRCLE WOP draft2 (correct pagination)v2.indd 1 2/3/10 1:06 PM


table of contents

. Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of The Caucasian Chalk Circle

5. A Little Bit of an Anarchist: An Interview with Director John Doyle by Elizabeth Brodersen

3. Language Under Your Fingernails: An Interview with The Caucasian Chalk Circle Translator Domenique Lozano by Ellen Cassidy

7. The Constraints of a Godzilla-Phone: An Interview with Composer Nathaniel Stookey by Katie May

24. A Brief Biography of Bertolt Brecht by Katie May

28. Brecht and His Contradictions: More Is More by Michael Paller

32. A Dramatic Circle: From the Judgment of Solomon to the Judgment of Azdak by Dan Rubin

37. Textual Origins of The Caucasian Chalk Circle

42. A Play for Today: On Brecht’s Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Dan Rubin

44. Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .

OPPOSITE Die Probe mit dem Kreidekreis (The Trial of the Chalk Circle). All drawings were done by Tadeuz Kulisiewicz for the 1955 Berliner Ensemble production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. NEXT PAGE Interior of the American Conservatory Theater during reconstruction after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Photo by Sherman Takata, Gensler and Associates Architects (March 1995). Director John Doyle found this photograph inspira-tional during the early planning process for The Caucasian Chalk Circle.



characters, cast, and synopsis of THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLEThe Caucasian Chalk Circle was first produced in English (translated by Eric Bentley) at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, May 4–8, 1948. The play was first produced in German by Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, opening October 7, 1954. The world premiere of Domenique Lozano’s a.c.t.–commis-sioned translation opened at the American Conservatory Theater February 18, 2010.

ensembleRené AugesenNick ChildressManoel FelcianoAnthony FuscoRod GnappCaroline HewittOmozé IdehenreGregory WallaceJack Willis

synopsis

i. the heavenly childA Singer introduces the story: On Easter Sunday in Nukha—a small town in the prince-dom of Grusinia, which is fighting a bloody war against Persia—the wealthy Governor, Georgi Abaschwili, and his beautiful, vain wife, Natalie, leave their palace to go to church. Their only son and heir, Michael, is brought before the people for the first time. The family is greeted by Prince Kazbeki, the seemingly obsequious “Fat Prince.” Simon Chachava, a soldier, and Grusche Vachnadze, a servant, meet and flirt. At first all seems calm, but a mil-itary coup is underway, led by the subordinate princes of Grusinia, who are unhappy at the way the Grand Prince is conducting the Persian war. They want to overthrow the Grand Prince and his governors. An alarm sounds from the palace, and two soldiers march the Governor off in handcuffs. Fighting breaks out in the city, and the palace is thrown into chaos, as servants scurry about trying to pack for the Governor’s family to escape. Simon and Grusche agree to marry, and he promises to return to her when the war is over—in “two


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weeks, maybe three.” She promises to wait for him. The Governor’s Wife, preoccupied with trying to choose which of her numerous fancy dresses she can bear to part with, flees, oblivi-ously abandoning her child, Michael. The Fat Prince, revealed to be a leader of the revolt, arrives with his troops bearing the Governor’s head on a pike; he orders his men to search for the child. Reluctant to accept responsibility for Michael, but unwilling to abandon him to a likely gruesome fate, Grusche hides the child from the soldiers and sits by him through the night; at dawn she steals away with him.

ii. the flight into the northern mountainsGrusche decides to flee to the home of her brother, Lavrenti, in the Northern Mountains and to wait there in safety until the war is over. Along the way, she buys milk for Michael at

an exorbitant price from an Old Farmer whose land has been ransacked by soldiers. She tries to pretend she is an aristocrat in order to share a room at an inn with two high-born ladies also on the run, but her willingness to work and cracked servant’s hands give her away. Forced back to the road to continue her flight, she attempts to leave Michael with a peasant couple whose farm has not yet been touched by violence, but the Fat Prince’s men overtake her. She bashes one of them over the head and escapes with Michael. After 22 days of wandering, they reach the Janga-Tau glacier, where Grusche finally accepts as her own the child she has come to love. They arrive at a 2,000-foot-deep gorge spanned by a dangerously rotten bridge. As the Fat Prince’s men draw near, a desperate Grusche takes the chance, steps onto the swaying bridge, and makes it safely to the other side with Michael.

iii. in the northern mountainsSick with exhaustion, Grusche arrives at her brother’s farm, expecting comfort and safety after her extraordinary journey. She receives little of either. Fearing the angry reaction of his pious wife, Anna, to having an unwed mother in the house, Lavrenti tells Anna that

Grusche


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Grusche is on the way to meet her husband “over the mountain.” She reluctantly agrees to take Grusche and Michael in. Grusche spends a bleak winter cowering in the cold and watching Michael grow. Lavrenti fears that the truth about Grusche and the child will come out, so when spring arrives, he arranges for her to marry a dying man so that she can become a widow, giving her and Michael some degree of legitimacy. For Michael’s sake, she agrees. After the wedding, however, hearing the news that the war is over and the Grand Prince has returned to power, the groom, Jussup, makes a miraculous recovery. He has been dodging the draft by pretending to be sick. Time passes: Michael continues to grow, and Grusche grudgingly becomes a wife. Eventually Simon returns and comes to find Grusche in the mountains. As she tries to explain to him what has happened, the authorities arrive and seize Michael. Hearing Grusche tell the men that Michael is hers, Simon is devastated by her betrayal and leaves. Grusche runs after the men who are car-rying away her child.

iv. the story of the judgeThe story backtracks to the day of the coup, the day Grusche took Michael: While poach-ing in the woods, the village clerk, Azdak, has come across someone he believes to be a refugee. He has brought the man home and agrees to hide him from the police. Only after the man has gone does Azdak discover that it was the Grand Prince himself, who escaped the clutches of the rebel princes. Ashamed of himself for helping “the Great Butcher” escape, Azdak turns himself in, expecting to be punished. At the courthouse, he finds that the judge has been hanged and the Fat Prince’s Tank Drivers are in control. Azdak is himself nearly hanged by taunting Tank Drivers, but they let him go, laughing. The Fat Prince brings in his nephew to be ratified as the new judge, but the Tank Drivers, after testing the nephew in a mock trial in which Azdak accuses the rebel princes of profiting from the Persian war, make Azdak judge instead.

During two years of civil war, Azdak presides over legal disputes, turning the law on its head, doling out “tweaked” justice and accepting bribes as he sees fit, while taking from the

Der Azdak


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rich and giving to the poor. Finally, the unrest ends, the Grand Prince comes back, the Fat Prince is killed, and the Governor’s Wife returns from exile, determined to find Michael. Frightened that his behavior over the past two years will land him in trouble now that order is restored, Azdak promises to help Natalie Abaschwili get her son back.

v. the chalk circleThe story returns to Nukha, where Grusche anxiously awaits the trial that will determine who is Michael’s rightful mother. Simon offers to swear that he is the child’s father. The Governor’s Wife arrives with her lawyers in tow. Azdak, who has been declared an enemy of the newly restored regime, is dragged in and stripped of his judge’s robe. He is about to be hanged when a messenger arrives announcing that the Grand Prince would like Azdak to remain as judge, in gratitude for saving his life that Easter Sunday.

Restored to power, Azdak presides over a trial in which he must judge who gets Michael—Grusche, who has risked her life to care for him; or his biological mother, Natalie, who abandoned him. Hearing the arguments, Azdak learns that the late Governor’s estate is tied to his heir; the Governor’s Wife has nothing unless she can convince the court to give Michael to her.

Azdak invokes the ancient wisdom of the chalk circle: the child is placed in the center of the circle, and Azdak declares that whoever is strong enough to pull him out must be the true mother. Grusche lets go, allowing the Governor’s Wife to pull Michael out of the circle; she can’t bear to hurt him. Azdak orders the women to repeat the trial. Grusche again cannot pull. Azdak judges her to be the true mother and awards the estate to the city, so that a children’s playground can be made out of it. The Governor’s Wife faints.

Azdak decides to hang up his judge’s robe, but he first signs a decree granting Grusche a divorce from Jussup, leaving her free to marry Simon. She explains to Simon that she took Michael because she fell in love with Simon on that Easter day, so he is truly “a child of love.” Everyone dances. Azdak disappears. The Singer explains the moral of the story:

That what is here, should belong to those who deserve it—The children to the motherly,So they may thrive,The wagons to the good drivers,So they are well driven,And the valley to those who water it,So it may bear fruit.


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a little bit of an anarchistAn Interview with Director John Doyle about The Caucasian Chalk Circle

by elizabeth brodersen (january 25, 2010)

In 2005, John Doyle’s multi-award-winning, stripped down, all-instruments-on-deck—some have said “neo-Brechtian”—

production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd upended the conventional musical theater world with its reimagining of the lavish stage spectacle Broadway musical audiences had come to expect.

While he admits to having studied with a member of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble (while at the University of Georgia on a fellowship at the age of 20), Doyle laughs when told—as he is repeatedly—that his working style is influenced by Brecht. “If I read that something is Brechtian, I think, ‘Oh I’m not going, it’ll be dreary,’” he has said. “There is a danger of thinking about Brecht, ‘Oh I don’t get emotionally involved,’ and I don’t think that’s good theater. Brecht’s theater is vital and alive. I see a danger in getting too much involved in it as a philosophy.”

A British theater veteran who has in his distinguished career run four theaters as artistic director and staged more than 200 productions, Doyle credits the development of his aesthetic to a fundamental pragmatism born of economic necessity. In 992 he found himself at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre with the desire to direct Leonard Bernstein’s Candide—and almost no budget. He realized he had just enough money to pay either a cast or an orchestra, but not both. So he found a way to make ten actor-musicians, working on a nearly empty set with the simplest of props, fill both job descriptions. In the process, he discovered what many consider a radical new way of making theater.

It is nevertheless the power of storytelling that remains front and center in his work. For Doyle—who has applied his bare-bones approach to numerous classic works of music theater, including Pal Joey, Fiddler on the Roof, Mack and Mabel, Cabaret, Company, and Oklahoma!, as well as recent productions of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes for The Metropolitan Opera, Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny for Los Angeles Opera, Chekhov’s Three Sisters for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and Sondheim’s new Road Show for The Public Theater—it is all about the story and the audience’s connection to it. Doyle’s creative approach is at heart “about giving the theater back to the actor, and is asking the audience to let go of all the stuff they knew as ‘theater’ and to take part in the story that’s being told.

John Doyle


“The major resource is the imagination of the audience,” he says. “My job is to tap that imagination. I like to think that’s my trademark.”

why did you decide to direct THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE?First of all, it’s a human story. When you really get down to it, it’s a simple story about human beings and about right and wrong. There’s a moral to the tale, and that interested me. But also, I suppose I’m drawn to the fact that the story allows for a particular method of storytelling. It’s nonnaturalistic. It’s not a well-made play . . . it’s beautifully made, but the classical idea of the well-made play is one with a beginning, a development, a climax, and an end, and this is not structured that way. It’s structured in a series of almost vaude-villian episodes, little vignettes one after the other, and that asks the director to do a lot of work in terms of how all of the scenes and images have contrast and theatricality, and I’m drawn to that kind of material.

why were you interested in coming back to a.c.t. to direct?The only time I’ve been in San Francisco was to see [my] production of Sweeney Todd [which launched its national tour at a.c.t. in the fall of 2007]. I came here for the week-

Set model for The Caucasian Chalk Circle by director/designer John Doyle


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end, and I thought: “Wow, it’s really quite nice here.” I particularly like the feeling of [a.c.t.’s] auditorium, I like the feeling of the city, and I’m drawn to the idea that there is a permanent company in this organization. In the United Kingdom, I was raised with that. I started a company myself when I was a very young man, 2 or 22 years old, to take theater to the highlands of Scotland, which is where I come from. We bought a van from the post office for five pounds—that’s less than ten dollars in today’s money—and toured the highlands for five years, working with the same actors all the time. I really enjoyed the business of all being together and storytelling together, the infuriating things about that, as well as the joys of that. That was something about theater that really attracted me, because I continued to work in a series of organizations that had that ethos. Also, I really was intrigued by the idea that there is a conservatory as a part of the organization, that skills can be passed down the line or up the line, depending on how you look at it. So, I said to [a.c.t. Artistic Director] Carey [Perloff ] that I would like to do the project with the resident company and with some of the students together, so that they are working together and teaching each other. I liked the energy that you have here. I don’t know how you make that a tangible thing, but I was intrigued by that.

how would you describe that energy?I think that the house itself has something about it; you can usually tell when you walk into an old theater, you can smell what’s happened there before. I’m not normally drawn to working within the proscenium arch; most of my career I’ve done everything I could to destroy it, or get out of it, or rip out the seats and do something else. I’m a little bit of an anarchist as far as all that is concerned. But I’ve sat in your auditorium a few times now, and I’ve enjoyed the relationship between the house and the stage. The stage doesn’t feel too high, which a lot of American stages do. And that’s quite impor-tant to how I work, because I absolutely believe that the barrier, the fourth wall, if you might call it that—I have a sense of a sort of responsibility to break it. I suppose that’s why I’ve become known for doing musical theater. I like musicals but never set out to be a director of musicals. I did set out, I think, if you ever know what you’re doing as a younger artist, I did set out to try to “pretend,” or to forget the pretense that there was a wall between us and the audience. I think that’s partly to do with coming from Scotland, being Celtic, having the ceilidh storytelling tradition, where you sat in a circle as a family and you told a story. I love that feeling in a theater. But I’m not so comfortable when the actors pretend that the audience isn’t there; I find that a little more problematic. I like that idea that we all turn up at the same . . . I like to think of it as the same altar at the same time.


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what do you expect the audience to bring to this production?I don’t expect them to know anything about Bertolt Brecht. I don’t expect anybody to have done any homework. I would like them to bring an openness, a willingness to listen and watch. But most importantly—and it is my job and the actors’ job to access this—I do ask the audience to use its imagination. Some of your audience will have seen Sweeney Todd, and in that production there’s no question about the fact that people had to imagine. Ten actors who played instruments were all in the same space at the same time, telling an epic story with very little visual help—a coffin, a ladder, chairs—which asked the audience to see its own barber’s chair, or its own pie shop, in the case of that story. In this piece we’ve got huge things that we have to do: we have to cross a bridge that nearly breaks, we have to imagine that we are outside a palace, we have to imagine that we’re hiding from the army, and so forth, and yet it’s only nine performers on a pretty empty stage. The audience has to fill in the rest, and that’s what I mean about breaking the fourth wall, really: to try to get away from the passivity of, “Okay, show me,” as opposed to, “Oh, I have to lean in towards this, I have to go towards the storyteller.” That’s what I’d like the audience to feel is happening to them. My job is to set up a world that accesses that.

what are some of your inspirations for this production? I wanted the production to feel like it was happening at a time of destruction, or a time of war, in a culture at war. But I didn’t want that environment to be a remote time; if we make it a war that was “way back then in olden times,” we perhaps might not take responsibility for what’s happening right now. After all, we are at war.

I always tend to start from visual inspiration. I looked at imagery of various wars of the 20th century—the photographs of the Spanish Civil War are remarkable, through Vietnam, and what we watch on cnn every morning. Also, when I came here, I looked at some visual imagery of what had happened to your theater at the time of the [989] earth-quake, when the theater nearly was destroyed. So I thought, “Perhaps I can access some of that imagery, as a place of storytelling that was unsafe for a period of time.” I thought the fact that we’re telling this story in that unsafe environment could be interesting.

This is a world with a space that has somehow been condemned, and is enclosed by a cage. It’s a world of storytelling that we’re not allowed to enter, a world where the story is banned. We are excluded from the story. People come into the space, which is, at the beginning, empty. It’s an empty theater space. It’s a smaller empty theater space than [a.c.t.’s] natural theater space, so we’re asking the audience to imagine a theater space within a theater space. So they’re already having to do something. There is no curtain when they come in, so they’re already seeing whatever it is. It’ll probably look a little bleak, which


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is typical of me, I’m afraid. Hopefully it won’t always, but it might start by looking like that. Then people come into the space to tell a parable.

you talked early on about the notion of “innocence in a dangerous landscape.” is that idea still in your mind?Yes. I’m fascinated by a number of things in any story I tell. Innocence in a dangerous land-scape is one of them. Sorry to refer back to Sweeney Todd again, but the angle of that was told through the eyes of the most innocent person on the stage, Toby [played on Broadway by a.c.t. Associate Artist Manoel Felciano, who plays the Singer in The Caucasian Chalk Circle]. I tend to be drawn toward seeing the story through the eyes of the vulnerable. I’m also very interested in the “extraordinary in the ordinary,” that ordinary people behave often in very extraordinary ways. I think it’s what makes humanity special, and I do feel a responsibility as a storyteller to reflect that. I think one of the great things about theater is that it’s something that can remind us that “we are all the same.” The performer and audience in [the theater] also have sameness. That’s very beautiful. And specifically in this play, I think the combination of light and darkness, the potential slaughter of the innocent coupled with the result that the innocent isn’t slaughtered after all, is beautiful.

do you find this to be a hopeful play?I think that the central idea—Who is the rightful parent? Who has the right to ownership? Is it the person who looks after [the child], rather than the person who takes advantage?—is hopeful. I think it’s a good time to be telling that story. Well, it’s always a good time, that’s the sadness of human beings, that that’s the case. So yes, I do think it’s hopeful.

you have become known for a very collaborative way of working in the rehearsal room. how would you describe that process? It’s rooted in the idea, well, in one word, which is the word “play.” We go to see a play, and we go to see people play. Sometimes I think we forget that the starting point in most of our lives is to play. From very early on we are asked to imagine, and then probably around the age of seven we are told to stop doing that. My function as a director is to access the possibility of playing. And to ask the actor to be playful, without setting them up. I don’t use improvisation, at all, and I never have. I do constantly set different tasks, create an interrelationship, and then infuse into that a different atmosphere, a different quality. I very seldom say, “No.” I don’t believe that there is a right or wrong—I do morally, but I’m talking about this way of working. I might say that something is inappropriate to the storytelling style, but not necessarily say that we shouldn’t try it, or shouldn’t do it. I try not


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to tell people what I want them to do, but to set them a task that allows them to show me something that may or may not become what I want them to do. The truth is—this may sound irresponsible—I go into the room not always knowing what I want. I may know where I want us to arrive in some way, but I don’t know how. If I knew how, why would we have actors in the room? It’s their job to show me how. And I try very hard never to ask a question to which I already know the answer. That last bit is the core of my working style. So I ask a question in a vulnerable fashion, not knowing. They will then find from their character viewpoint an answer for me. So it’s up to me to set up a wrestling ring that allows for that. And hopefully at the end of each day we feel that we’ve achieved something.

Usually it’s fun, I think. I hope. It takes a lot of concentration, because I have everybody in the room all the time, and it can be tough. A lot of it’s based in routine. Doing things again, and again, and again, and again, until they come naturally, or without thought, and then somehow they sound real. So it’s highly theatrical, it has a naturalism within it, but it should also look like the performers are in control of the storytelling.

you’ve described that as the difference between rehearsal and practice.Rehearsal, to me, is exploration. Safe exploration. I set up a safe environment which frees them to play and therefore to explore, and we explore many ways of doing something. And then we will find the way that is appropriate to us, for our particular production. And then in the latter stages of work, we practice that. When I started as director, I think I probably naturally worked that way. Then I think I went through a period, and I’ve been doing this for some 30-plus years now, when I began to start with practice. I would say [to an actor]: “It would be really beautiful if you would sit down after that line as opposed to before it.” And then I found that gradually very empty, and very soul-destroying for me. I did really think at that point about giving up the job. But I took a gear change and forced myself to go and work at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where the resources were . . . to say “limited” is polite. They were virtually nonexistent. And everyone had to be onstage all the time because there was no backstage. It’s a converted church, it’s a very famous theater in the u.k., but I went there to work, in what was a very tough city at that time, in order to find a different way of working. And this is what came out the other end. It was in that theater that I learned all the stuff about actors playing instruments, as well, because we couldn’t afford both cast and orchestra. So, I evolved the notion that, well, we have rock and roll, we have a city that produced the Beatles, who sang and played instruments at the same time, and sometimes spoke in between playing. I thought surely that could become some sort of form of theatrical storytelling. And the rest became stuff that people now


write about, bizarrely enough. Did I know that then? No. And am I appalled by that? Yes, I am. [Laughter] Because, to me it was natural, it was the ceilidh again.

how would you describe domenique lozano’s translation?Sometimes people can get really bogged down in fundamentalism where translation is concerned. There’s a difference between being honest to the original and being funda-mentalist about the words that are chosen. What Domenique has done is really good, and by good I mean it sounds like human beings speak. She has got a great ear, I think helped by the fact that she’s also an actor. And as we are working in the [rehearsal] room that’s becoming even more fluid. I don’t want people to come to this enormous history lesson of how to do Brecht; I want them to come to something that keeps them interested every second of the time. I think she’s done a really terrific job, and continues to do so, because she’s not only having to create an adaptation or translation of the play, but she’s also hav-ing to create a translation/adaptation for this production of the play. For the skills of this particular group of actors, and for this method of storytelling.

how does the music fit into this production?Very few of the performers themselves are actually musicians. They’re musical, but they’re not actually musicians. A lot of the music is being organically created for the piece, either from instruments or from materials that are available to us in the space. It should, as a musical style, feel very presentational, totally aware that the audience is there. It should not feel like you are watching a musical. What [composer] Nat [Stookey] is writing for us is quite complicated, but to my ear, it also has quite a childlike quality lying underneath it. And it’s wonderful to see the actors becoming comfortable with the fact that they can stand there and be holding a viola, or whatever it is, because there’s nobody to take it off-stage for them, and they continue to play the next moment with it in their hands . . . to me that’s completely natural. I never even think about it, because I’ve watched people sitting on top of coffins playing cellos—onstage, that is—but I can understand that it takes a little suspension of disbelief. Again that’s about imagining, pretending . . . and that’s good.

why do you think brecht is relevant today?There are a number of facets to answering that question. Brecht was writing parables to reflect the state of the world as he knew it. I think as theatrical storytellers, if we have any right to exist, if the movies aren’t doing it better than us, then that’s a challenge to us. We must take responsibility for telling stories that reflect the state of the world that we’re in today. He’s writing a story, in this case, about what is fair. And who judges whom. And do


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we trust our judges. And who determines what is right or wrong: Does nature determine it? Does nurture determine it? Does society determine it? Nothing has changed in that, it seems to me. Every day, in every newsreel, it’s a balance between what is right or wrong, or who is or is not telling us what to do. That’s no different. In fact, maybe we’re getting worse. So I think the subject is definitely relevant.

The second part of the answer to your question would be that he had this extraordinary, evolving theatrical style, which broke convention. It did indeed break through the fourth wall. It was not Noël Coward—no disrespect to Noël Coward—but Brecht was saying, “Okay, we don’t need these curtains, we don’t need real scenery to do what we do. We are going to tell you what a story is about and then do it.” The Greeks did the same thing, and so did Shakespeare. Shakespeare starts plays by saying, “This is what you’re going to watch, and now were going to do it.” Brecht was, it seems to me, taking everything that the Victorians had done to us in theater and smashing it.

If theater has a future, and I do believe it has or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you, it is to explore with the audience the fact that we are theatrically storytelling. As opposed to putting movies onstage, or doing the real thing. I have discovered more and more that when I try to reenact something onstage “for real,” it’s not as good as reality. It can’t be. So I have to try to enact something that asks the audience to participate in that vision of reality, and then it’s theater. Because they’ve filled in the gap.

So Brecht’s plays are relevant politically in terms of what they’re saying, and they are rel-evant in terms of how they are being told. And he was writing political theater, and that’s tougher for us because our need to scream and shout, our need to say “No!”—it erodes over time, I think. I was completely raised as a child of the ’60s, through the ’60s into the ’70s, totally raised in political theater, with the belief that it was important to stand up and say it. But it has gradually become harder to do that. I have spent quite a bit of my career working in nontheater environments—working with communities, working with prison-ers, working with the socially disadvantaged, and sometimes working with people who were mentally and physically challenged—in the belief that we can all tell a story.

I don’t see a separation between the actor and the human being; I believe that we all have that facility in us. How it is accessed, or how much skill it requires is a different thing, but I think we all have it in us. So that’s a long answer to your question, but to say that I think the relevance of the story still exists and the methodology of how he’s storytell-ing in that way is fascinating. We’ve grown from that, and theatricality has changed with that, and at the same time the importance of trying to make people listen, viscerally make people sit up and listen, is really fascinating.


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language under your fingernailsAn Interview with The Caucasian Chalk Circle Translator Domenique Lozano

by ellen cassidy

Domenique Lozano is a woman of the theater. A respected Bay Area actor,

teacher, and director and an associate art-ist at a.c.t., she teaches acting in the a.c.t. Master of Fine Arts Program and the Young Conservatory, where she has directed the American premiere of Sharman Macdonald’s After Juliet, the world premieres of Sarah Daniel’s Dust and Constance Congdon’s Nightingales, and a coproduction with Zürich’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater of Paul Steinmann’s Only Victory, among

others; she has also helmed A Christmas Carol on a.c.t.’s mainstage. She has performed at theaters throughout the Bay Area, including California Shakespeare Theater (where she is also an artistic associate), a.c.t., Berkeley Repertory Theatre, San Jose Repertory Theatre, San Jose Stage Company, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Although she had never translated professionally before, Lozano’s breadth of experience uniquely qualified her to undertake a translation of The Caucasian Chalk Circle for a.c.t.’s core acting company: She is fluent in German, spent 2 years of her childhood in Germany, and returned there to perform in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan during her graduate study. She has seen Brecht performed in German, both in the National Theater in Mannheim, near the small town where she grew up, and at the Berliner Ensemble. Lozano has long felt a deep connection to Brecht’s visceral language and wanted to create an English translation that retained the spirit of the German in its accessibility and pow-erful tone. She sat down with us to discuss her first translation and working with director John Doyle.

how did you initially become involved with this production?[a.c.t. Artistic Director] Carey [Perloff ] was talking about wanting to do the play at an artistic team meeting, and she said there just weren’t very many good translations out there. I thought, “I grew up in Germany and I speak the language.” I remember I was just kind

Actor, director, translator Domenique Lozano


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of leaning forward at the table. You know how you sometimes just find yourself doing something? “Oh! That’s my hand in the air?!” And I heard myself saying, “What if I trans-late a scene, and then I send it to you, and you send it to John [Doyle], and if it feels like it might be a good fit we could do it.” Then I did it. I sent Carey the trial scene, and she sent it to John, and they both liked it. So we approached Brecht’s estate and went through that whole process. Once it was approved, I just took the German and scanned it into my computer and did a literal translation first. Then I went back to make it sound like lan-guage people would speak to each other. And about that time we knew some of the casting, which was really helpful, because I knew the actors and their cadences and energies.

how do you think your experience acting and directing affected your work on the translation?I’d say when you’re translating you’re in there with the language first. You’re not really look-ing at the big picture. I was just looking at: What is Grusche saying here? What is Simon saying here? Not even looking at the whole picture of their scene yet. But then you take another little step back, and it’s the whole scene, and they’re talking to each other. How does this fit into that? And how does what he says here feed her next response? That’s more of a director’s perspective. [Being a director] helped me go from micro to macro. You have to start micro.

I entered the theater as an actor. I’ve done Brecht. I know what it is to have language in your mouth. [As I wrote] I’d imagine Jack [Willis] saying something, and I’d say it out loud. Then I’d think, “That’s not quite it. How would one say this?” John Doyle wants to set the play today—it could be Afghanistan, it could be anything we’re experiencing today. I really wanted it to sound like you and me in this room talking to each other, and not like a formal piece or very academic. I was really trying to tell the human story.

what is THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE like in german?It’s much easier in German. In German, it’s like you and me talking to each other. That’s what this play is. It’s very direct. I love Brecht. His language is very much of the people. It’s from the earth. There’s dirt under your fingernails. It’s not in verse or elevated, and it doesn’t conceal. Brecht really frames these people, who are essentially saying, “Give me that! I want that! I’m stepping on you to get that!” You just get a direct hit from it when you read it. So I have a response and a connection to that.

I think the translations, the ones that I knew, were clunkier. They made sense, but the characters didn’t seem like real people. They were so removed in how they articulated themselves. It becomes sort of a piece “over there,” so you can say, “Oh, that doesn’t have


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anything to do with me. I’m not going to be moved by it.” My goal has been to erase that distance, because that’s not how it is in German.

what is it like to translate german?Sometimes it was fabulous and other times I thought, “What?!” I would call my mom, who was born in Germany, and say, “What does this mean?” And sometimes she would know, and then other times she would say, “I have no idea.” Then there’s the humor. Whenever I go back to Germany, and I’m with my cousins and they’re telling a joke, it just doesn’t translate. You can’t translate a German joke into English literally, because the punchline is always some-thing like, “. . . and then the duck swam away.” We think, “That’s funny?” while the Germans are howling at it. So there were some very colloquial things in the text that are absurd in literal translation. So then I’d have to say, “What is the equivalent for us?” Sometimes that would come easily, and sometimes it would take weeks. I tried not to look at other editions while I was working, just because I didn’t want to be influenced by anything. Afterwards I looked at some other editions, and there are places where I disagree with some of their interpretations. I just diverged. I went a different way.

The songs specifically were very difficult to translate, and there’s so much music in the play. You have to juggle when you translate. You have to say, “I want to be faithful to Brecht,” but the songs are in meter and in rhyme. So am I going to try to translate it literally in meter and in rhyme? Of course, that’s impossible. Then you really have to say, “What’s the essence?” John Doyle was very helpful in that, as well. You don’t want the audience to think, “This is another song I have to sit through.” You want those songs to hook us and pull us forward: “I need it to get to the next thing,” versus “I have to endure it to get to the next thing.”

Natella Abaschwili mit dem fetten Fürsten Katzbeki (Natalie Abaschwili with the Fat Prince Katzbeki)


how did you make the idiomatic translation decisions? for example, translating words like “blockhead” and “tank rider.”A lot of that came out of discussions with John. The literal Panzerreiter is “tank rider.” John and I were talking about that, and he said, “I don’t really know what ‘tank rider’ means.” He understands the words, obviously, but what do they really mean? He liked the visceralness of someone driving a tank. There’s action and physicality to that image, that they’re not just your generic soldier. It’s got bite and movement to it. And the German Holzkopf is literally “wooden head,” or “blockhead.” But do we really say “blockhead” anymore?” When I found out Anthony [Fusco] was playing the Corporal, I just started playing around with it: “Hey, Dickhead! Shitface! Asswipe!” He’s so derogatory to his poor little underling sol-diers. Then Anthony asked me, “What if he says the same word over and over like in the German? What if he just always called him ‘Shithead’?” So that ended up being really a lot of fun to play with in rehearsal, because “blockhead” for me is really . . . Charlie Brown says “blockhead.” We don’t really say, “Gosh, he was such a blockhead!”

what kind of translation are we going to see onstage?It is definitely not a literal translation. It is absolutely my intention to honor the heart of Brecht and those people that he created onstage. And sometimes the language is close to the original and sometimes it’s not close to the original. It’s close to the original intent, but it’s not always close to the way it was originally articulated. So if Brecht is talking about peaches I’m not suddenly talking about baseball, but he might be talking about peaches in one way and I might be talking about them another way. But we’re still talking about the essence of the same thing. Especially the first two rounds, I was holding pretty close to the skirts of the original. Eventually you have to ask, “Why am I doing this translation? What am I going to bring to it?” That’s a question you have to ask, or why do it? I have some-thing I want to illuminate. I want to shine a light on it. It’s not like I want to rewrite it or redo it, but it’s coming through me, so it will be a marriage between the original and me.

what is it like working with john doyle?It’s really great. I think he has a tremendous capacity to bring out the best in people in a way that’s really extraordinary. I think it’s in how he listens to you. He always acted like he had complete faith in me. It was as if I’d translated a thousand texts and done all of them brilliantly. He let me feel competent and capable and creative. I really look forward to being in the rehearsal hall with everyone to see how he weaves that all together. I think he really believes everybody he’s working with is exactly who he wants to be working with, and is completely and utterly capable. That sets the ground for people to rise.


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the constraints of a godzilla-phoneAn Interview with Composer Nathaniel Stookey

by katie may

Early this fall, in one of his initial meetings with a.c.t. staff about his vision for The Caucasian Chalk Circle, director John Doyle was asked about his concept for the

music. Doyle, who is renowned for his use of musician/actors who play the music of his productions live on the stage, replied: “I would be very interested to see if we can develop a score of some sort that is played on instruments by people who can’t play instruments. By someone who is carrying around a cello that’s only got one string, or on instruments made out of what can be found onstage. . . . How will that manifest itself? I don’t really know.” Enter Nathaniel Stookey.

A San Francisco native, Stookey has seen his compositions commissioned and per-formed by some of the country’s most distinguished orchestras. He composed The Composer Is Dead with writer Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) and, with poet Dan Harder, Zipperz: a soaPOPera, written for two pop singers and orchestra. In September, he premiered Into the Bright Lights with Frederica von Stade in Canada; the piece will receive its u.s. premiere with San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque.

Stookey also spent three months as an artist in residence at Recology (formerly Norcal Waste Systems, Inc.), where he composed Junkestra, an original symphony in three movements written for “instruments” made out of trash scavenged from the Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center in San Francisco. The San Francisco Symphony has a per-formance scheduled for May 9.

Shortly before rehearsals began at a.c.t., we talked with Stookey about his unique style and his work on The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

your previous experience includes collaborating with writers to set texts to music, but have you ever composed for the theater with an established script already in place?No, I’ve never composed for theater before, and never really expected to, but I find starting with a script a thousand times easier. I think for a lot of artists, definitely for me, con-straints make it much easier than a total lack of constraints. For me, the text is a constraint that goes in the “good” category—ease of operation. If I have a text, I don’t have a blank page. I know what I’m doing. I’m taking this text and setting it in a way that projects its meaning, its words, its emotional content, etc. That is really helpful to me. In some ways,


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I’ve approached this process more as a translation process than a creative one, because I’m not collaborating with Brecht. In this case, I’ve been trying to get into his head, and of course my ideas about that are slightly different from [translator] Domenique Lozano’s and slightly different from [director] John Doyle’s, but we’re all trying to do the same thing, trying to get into Brecht’s head and make something ourselves that—while not exactly as he would have done it, because we can’t and don’t want to—is none the less true to his intentions.

what is it like collaborating with john doyle?My gut feeling is that John and I have a lot in common, and that comes from my experi-ence of Sweeney Todd, which is the only piece of theater that I have ever seen more than once, or wanted to. There is a personal reason for that—my best friend, Manoel Felciano, was in it—but also a musician’s reason, which is that what John did with the music in that play was make it a part of what is happening onstage. I’m not the only musician who was very excited by that production, because it allowed us to join the club. We were part of the action instead of being just the soundtrack. We were characters; the music became a character. I have a feeling that this project will be a challenging collaboration, because any real collaboration is. When you have multiple perspectives trying to make a whole, there are going to be challenges, and I expect that and wouldn’t have it any other way. But I think we have some fundamental similarities: the first is that we are practitioners; I am not college professor, I’m a composer. I work basically the same way John works. I feel my way around in the dark and when I run into something that feels good, I give it a little squeeze. [Laughter]

JUNKESTRA suggests that you are especially well suited to fulfill john doyle’s vision for this production. how did that work inform your approach to this piece?Writing Junkestra was exactly like writing a piece for symphony orchestra, except that instead of knowing what the constraints of an oboe are, I had to figure out the constraints of a Godzilla-phone, which is a bunch of old pvc pipe stuck through a chest of drawers. [Laughter] So I did have to do more exploring at the outset, because the instruments didn’t exist, but when it comes to composing the approach is exactly the same. Which is: this is the range of this instrument, this is what it can do, these are the technical limita-tions—you can’t ask an oboe to play a tuba melody; you just have to accept that there are constraints.


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as in JUNKESTRA, are we going to be seeing found instruments onstage?Junkestra was all junk—no instruments whatsoever, or at least nothing most people would recognize as instruments. With Chalk Circle, there’s some junk—pipes, buckets, and such—but also more conventional instruments—an accordion, a guitar, a viola. The main reason for that is to help the singers. In Junkestra no one had to sing along, and it’s very hard to get your pitches from a piece of rusty pipe.

did knowing you had to teach this music to actors rather than musicians change your process?It does affect the composition, but it doesn’t affect the process that much. The way I approach any piece, whether it’s for the San Francisco Symphony or for third graders, is: I take what I have, who I have, and get to know it. It’s really exactly the same in writing for symphony orchestra. If you write them something unplayable, they will never hire you again. Of course, they have different technical abilities, but what I try to do is to make something that the players will be able to internalize, whether those players are kids, or actors, or the Berlin Philharmonic. I really try at the outset to get to know them, who they are, what they like, where their comfort zone is, and how much I can push them beyond

Rehearsal instruments for The Caucasian Chalk Circle (photo by Dan Rubin)


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that without making them feel disoriented or stressed. No matter who the player is, there are limitations; you just need to know what those limitations are.

There is something exciting about taking a room full of actors, who are quite nervous about doing something like this, and being able to say: “Don’t worry, I’m going to make you guys sound great. It’s going to work. It’s not going to sound like some slick album, but that’s not what we want.” And I’ve felt in all my sessions with the actors that they already sound the way that I want, and the way that John wants them to sound. We still have a lot of rehearsing to do, but there is already so much beauty in what they are doing, paired with a vulnerability that you can’t get from something that is really slick and produced. I feel really good about the fact that they are going to be able to relax and enjoy this.

brecht had specific ideas about how music was supposed to function in his plays. have you researched the use of music in brecht’s work, or listened to recordings of the original music?My research has been minimal. I’ve read some of Brecht’s letters from his time in California (where he wrote Chalk Circle), so it’s not that I haven’t done any research, but for me the much more important thing is the text. I think that the text speaks much more than the piles of criticism and theory on Brecht. Brecht has become an intellectual concept for peo-ple, and that isn’t how I work. I also didn’t listen to the music. I don’t listen to that much music generally, and if I’m embarking on a project like this I wouldn’t do that because I’m not interested in writing a Kurt Weill score any more than Domenique is interested in writing an Eric Bentley translation. Why bother? For me, it’s more about spending a lot of time with this text, with Domenique’s translation, with the original German, and with John’s lyrical changes—trying to get a feel for who the characters are.

We haven’t always had the same vision. For instance, this morning, I didn’t feel right about a song that I’ve written for Azdak, played by Jack Willis. It wasn’t right for him, as a singer, and I also had my doubts about whether it was the Azdak I wanted to project as a character through music. So I wrote John this morning and said: “John, will you send me a handful of adjectives that for you describe Azdak?” He wrote back in five minutes with handful of adjectives, and that cleared everything up for me. Knowing what John wants to focus on is hugely helpful, and as a result I wrote a completely new song on the streetcar on the way here, which was liberating and fun.

is collaborating with a director a “good” constraint? I think so. In our first meeting it was more of a challenge because I’m used to dealing exclusively with the text as my guide. No conductor would ever tell a composer: “You know,


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I think measures 33 through 4 are not so hot.” So I had to get used to the fact that this is a fundamentally different way of working from the way I write for a symphony orchestra. What I decided to do because of the time constraints was to write as much music as I could right off the bat. There were some things that I did that were more or less in line with John’s vision, but then we had a first meeting where I shared some of that initial work with him, and he was able to say: “No, that character is more romantic than I wanted it to be, I want her to be more pragmatic,” etc., and now I have a better compass. It’s a constraint that helps me navigate better.

Another thing that has been liberating is that I can create many alternate versions, kind of like those kid’s books where you choose your own adventure. There are multiple ver-sions of each character, and John can pick and choose. It’s fun for me to be working both really fast and in an environment of constant collaboration. Actors are coming and going [in and out of the music rehearsal studio], and in between I’m working on parts of the score that haven’t been written yet. Theater isn’t totally foreign to me—my mother was a drama teacher and our dining room was more or less a theater every night—but working in theater is a totally new experience.

has there been anything in the text that has particularly inspired you, or taken you in a specific direction?What struck me is that it’s so far from the ideas I had about Brecht. I think of Brecht in a way I’m sure a lot of musicians think of Arnold Schoenberg, a composer who became more of a concept than a musician. In Brecht’s case I think people became enamored of his ideas and formed notions about what his work was, or should be. There are orthodoxies surrounding Brecht that, to me, aren’t reflected in the text. The text is very immediate. It’s very compelling in musical and dramatic terms because it’s so direct. It carries a very emo-tional charge. It talks about real stuff happening to people who feel real to me. Again, I’m not a scholar, it’s just that in reading these texts I have a strong feel for the characters: who they are, and what they’re like. As a compositional project it’s very exciting and attractive because of the strength of the characters—the strength with which they are drawn.

does each of the characters have their own musical theme?No, they don’t have character themes. The reason is that the bulk of the singing is per-formed by the Singer, played by Manoel, and augmented by his chorus, his band of musi-cians. It works more like a Greek chorus in that, for the most part, the character itself is not the one singing the song. I thought of the music the way that John has described the set in terms of the supports being visible. So while a lot of what they’re singing is very immediate


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and direct, I wanted the piece to have architecture. I’m used to dealing with long forms and pacing, and I wanted each act to have its own character, so that when you turn the page from one act to another there is a new color that defines it. That’s something that we do in writing for orchestra: we think in terms of color because the orchestra is a very colorful palette. If you use all your colors at once, you get brown, which I love sometimes, but you take away any surprises you might have. In this case, the palette is limited in many ways and there are a lot of words. And if we just had a succession of songs, I could see it being really miserably dull.

this piece sits on that fine line between a “musical” and a play with music in it. what do you think is the role of music in this production?Well, I’m not clear on the definition of musical. Because I’m not in the theater, my stron-gest sense of the word “musical” is that it’s something that’s not defined, but that people have emotional reactions to. For certain people, if you tell them it’s a musical, they’ll tear out their hair and rend their raiments. [Laughter] As far as I’m concerned, this is a play with an awful lot of music. It begins with music, it ends with music, and there is music all the way through. Brecht designed it that way. The idea of writing a score of this magnitude in this amount of time was, right away, very daunting. (I had less than a month before we started rehearsals.) Particularly because John wants it to have an improvised quality. As anyone who has ever been to a bad jazz performance will attest, a whole lot of stuff with an improvised quality (unless it’s being improvised by genius) is dull. So to get that qual-ity demands a lot more thought and architecture. You can’t just walk in and get the effect that John wants by sheer improvisation. It would all turn brown. The role of my music is to bring out the text, the surface, the structure, and the underlying emotions or feelings that might be contained in those words—which have certain qualities that I want to shine a light on. Music has the power to focus the audience wherever it’s shining the light. It’s deciding where to shine that light that is interesting.

are there any specific musical styles or genres that have influenced you in this piece?What has influenced me much more was this very strange parallel experience I had in Georgia [in Eurasia], where Brecht originally set The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

I was traveling through the Caucasus during a civil war, and experienced a lot of the characters and situations that are in this play. It was in 99, right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and there was a lot of conflict. My memories of Georgia are of nothing working, train stations with no power, and the only way to get on the train was to pay


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a bribe. On the border with Azerbaijan, I was taken off the train and grilled in an army barracks with heavily armed guards, while my wife, Jodi, waited in the train compartment. And at the end of this harrowing crossing of the Caucasus, I met a character who was exactly like Azdak. The first time I saw him, I was with this group of refugees trying to get on board a ship to cross the Caspian Sea. Jodi and I had put up a refugee family for the night because this ship hadn’t come, and they had a baby, and it was winter and freez-ing. They kind of attached themselves to us, but we were very limited in what we could do because it was a cash-only economy. Everything had collapsed, there were no credit cards and no traveler’s checks, and we had to get a very long way on what we had. Then this guy, Ali, appears.

He was originally Iranian and had fled Iran during the war with Iraq, having lost his family in the bombing. Now he was working as a sugar salesman based in the Ukraine, and he had this amazing ability to get things done. He just had that charisma, and people looked to him to pass judgment. Which is exactly what happened to Azdak: he’s not a judge, he’s just a guy—a guy who on some deep fundamental level is good. Ali had that incredible power. He helped us bribe our way onto this ship. It was like he had this magical power: the seas just parted for this guy.

Then the father of this refugee family that we had housed the night before appeared next to us; the captain had let him on board to plead with me to give him enough money to get his wife and baby on the ship. I turned to Ali, and he understood the whole thing immediately. He turned to the guy and said: “Come with me.” Twenty minutes later, he got them aboard. When I asked how he had done it Ali said, “I just went down and asked the captain: Sir, do you believe in Allah?” The captain had no choice but to say yes. And Ali said: “Well, then you know what you have to do,” and the family didn’t even have to pay anything; the captain just let them aboard. Later Ali told us that he’s an atheist, doesn’t believe in any of it, so he had this cynicism which was also incredibly Azdak.

how did this experience affect your approach to the play?It made me feel much closer to the characters and the music. I can relate to Azdak strongly, because I know him. And it also gave me a feeling of what I wanted the music to sound like. I have been in a bar in Georgia, surrounded by people singing this incredible music—this surrounding sound all around me. Not that I went and studied Georgian music and made something that sounded Georgian. I didn’t. But the appeal of that music is that Georgia is very much astride the East/West divide. It’s strange and exotic, but also could be anywhere. It shifts in and out of the here and the there. I’ve kept that memory with me, and that experience in that bar on that night has been a major influence on my music ever since.


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a brief biography of bertolt brechtby katie may

Bertolt Brecht was born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht in Augsburg, Bavaria, February , 898, to Sophie and Friedrich Brecht. The sons of a lapsed Catholic father

and a devoutly Protestant mother, Brecht and his younger brother, Walter, enjoyed a com-fortable middle-class upbringing. Brecht was frail as a child; hospitalized twice for cardiac troubles before the age of nine, he suffered his first true heart attack at twelve. His fragile health made him especially close to his mother, whose health was also poor, and, due to her influence, Brecht was well versed in the Bible, a familiarity that would influence his writing throughout his life.

Despite his poor health, Brecht displayed a nimble mind and a voracious appetite for knowledge at an early age. Throughout his childhood he learned a succession of instru-ments, though never stuck with any one long enough to master it, and by the age of fifteen he was writing and performing his own songs on his guitar for his friends—borrowing heavily from the popular tunes of the day as well as the words of poets and writers that fascinated him. In 93 he founded and was co-editor of his school’s magazine, Die Ernte (The Harvest), and by 94 he was writing for the local Augsburg newspaper, as well as making his first attempt at dramatic writing with his short play Die Bibel (The Bible).

By 7 he had emerged as a charismatic leader among his friends and enjoyed a popular-ity and success with women that would continue throughout his life. Around this time Brecht was also already developing many of the artistic partnerships that would serve him well throughout his career. His best friend, artist Caspar Neher, did sketches of Brecht’s characters throughout their boyhood together, and would eventually go on to design sets for some of Brecht’s most famous plays. It was during his teenage years that Brecht also began to display a distaste for authority in school and a refusal to conform—both traits that would continue to manifest in his later work. As World War i loomed on the horizon, Brecht’s school became a platform for propaganda as his young teachers joined the army and were replaced by veterans who espoused patriotism. By 95 there were only boys left in Brecht’s class, and by 97 most of his classmates had joined up. Due to his cardiac defect, however, Brecht was exempt from service. He enrolled in Munich University, volunteered as an auxiliary war worker, and began a long correspondence with Neher, who was stationed at the front. The two began their first serious collaboration on a play, Sommersinfonie (Summer Symphony), through a series of letters.


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In July 99, Brecht’s longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend Paula Banholzer gave birth to his first child, Frank. The two did not marry, however, and Brecht met and began an affair with the Viennese opera singer Marianne Zoff. His first produced play, Drums in the Night, was performed at the Munich Kammerspiele in 922. It immediately garnered criti-cal attention and acclaim, and in November of that year Brecht was awarded the Kleist Prize, Germany’s most prestigious liter-ary award of the time. That same month Brecht married Zoff, and in March of 923 their daughter, Hanne, was born.

In 924, Brecht moved to Berlin, where he worked as a the-ater critic and as Max Reinhardt’s assistant and dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater. While in Berlin he met actress Helene Weigel; the two began a relation-ship, and in October of that year Helene gave birth to Brecht’s third child, Stefan. Brecht ended his marriage to Zoff three years later. During this time he wrote a number of plays, including In the Jungle and Life of Edward II of England. His first real suc-cess, however, came with The Threepenny Opera in 928, fol-lowed a year later by Happy End.

In the mid 920s Brecht also began reading Marx’s Das Kapital, and the influence of this work became noticeable in his first collaboration with Kurt Weill, the song cycle Mahagonny (927), and his play Saint Joan of the Stockyards (929). In 929, Brecht married Weigel, and in October 930 their second

Bertolt Brecht, by Rudolf Schlichter (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)


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child (Brecht’s fourth), Barbara, was born. Brecht spent his last years in Weimar-era Berlin (930–33) working on the Lehrstücke, a group of plays driven by morals and music that were aimed at educating workers on socialist issues. At this time Brecht also adapted Die Mutter (The Mother) from Gorky, and agitprop performances of the play were eventually banned by the police.

In 933, Hitler began insisting on the immediate dissolution of the Reichstag, and on February 27 the Reichstag building was burned to the ground. Communists were blamed for the fire (most likely organized by the Schutzstaffel [ss] in order to give the Nazis a pretext for the arrests that were to follow), and during the night of February 27, four thou-sand Communist officials and party members were rounded up, along with writers and intellectuals who had resisted Nazism. Brecht was lucky enough, or perhaps clever enough, not to be at home. He was in the private clinic of a doctor friend, either for an operation or because it was a safe place. Without returning home, Brecht called on his friend and publisher Peter Suhrkamp, who helped Brecht, Weigel, and their son, Stefan (two-year-old Barbara was in Augsburg with Brecht’s father), escape to Prague. From there, the Brechts joined Weigel’s family in Vienna. It was obvious that Berlin was unsafe for the time being, but Brecht had no idea that he would remain in exile until the age of 50.

The Brechts left Vienna to settle in Denmark, but when war loomed again in 939, they moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where they stayed for a year. When Hitler invaded Norway, Brecht moved again, to Finland. In April 94, Hollywood film director Wilhelm Dieterle signed an affidavit supporting Brecht’s visa application to enter the United States, and by July Brecht was settled with his family in Santa Monica, California.

During the war years, Brecht expressed his opposition to the Nazi and Fascist move-ments in what would eventually become some of his most famous works, including Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and many others.

In the United States, Brecht worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and adaptor, which paid the bills, but he got little pleasure from it. During the “Red Scare” the House Un-American Activities Committee called Brecht to account for his Communist alle-giances, and he was soon blacklisted by movie studio bosses. Brecht, along with 4 other Hollywood writers, directors, actors, and producers, was subpoenaed to appear before the huac in September 947.

Initially, Brecht claimed that he would refuse to testify about his political affiliations, but on the advice of his lawyer he acquiesced, testifying that he had never officially held party membership. The day after his testimony, on October 3, 947, Brecht left the United


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States to return to Europe. Reunited with his old friend Caspar Neher in Switzerland, he decided to settle in Zürich, and the two immediately revived their artistic collaboration.

In Switzerland, Brecht adapted Sophocles’ Antigone, which was performed at Chur in 948. The production flopped, but Brecht’s adaptation, based on the translation by Hölderlin but modified considerably, was published under the title Antigonemodell (948), accompanied by an essay on the importance of creating a “non-Aristotelian” form of theater. The publication garnered critical attention, and as a result Brecht was invited to return to Berlin by East Germany’s Communist regime. He accepted the offer, went to East Berlin, and within weeks was holding auditions for Mother Courage. In 949, enticed by the offer of his own theater and theater company, Brecht officially made East Berlin his home. His company, the Berliner Ensemble, was formed with his wife, Helene, as artistic director. In 954, with the completion of their promised theater, the ensemble moved into its home: Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

Brecht’s communist sympathies had driven him from the United States but made him a hero in East Germany. Though it was true that he had not been an official member of the Communist Party, he had been schooled in Marxism by the well-known communist dis-sident Karl Korsch, and his belief in the principles of the movement were sincere. Brecht believed communism to be the only true antidote to fascism. He spoke openly of his horror at the remilitarization of West Germany and was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 954.

Brecht wrote very few plays in his last years in East Berlin, and none became as famous as his previous works. He dedicated himself to directing and developing the talents of the next generation of young directors and dramaturgs—continuing to run the Berliner Ensemble until he died of a heart attack on August 4, 95. Feeling too weak in the days before his death to oversee the preparations the ensemble was making to tour Mother Courage in London, Brecht’s last piece of writing came as a message left to the ensemble on a notice board: “We must preserve the tempo of a run-through, and infect it with quiet strength, with our own fun,” he wrote. “The dialogue must not be spoken grudgingly, as if giving away your last pair of boots, but must be tossed in the air like balls.”

Weigel survived her husband and continued running the ensemble until her own death in 97. The two are buried side by side in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof on Chausseestraße in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin.


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brecht and his contradictionsMore Is More

by michael paller

You have two rival spirits Lodged in you. You have got to have two. Stay disputed, undecided! Stay a unit, stay divided! Hold to the crude one, hold to the cleaner one! Hold to the good one, hold to the obscener one! Hold them united! —Bertolt Brecht, St. Joan of the Stockyards

Bertolt Brecht fled Germany on February 28, 933, the day after fire destroyed the Reichstag in Berlin. In the next 4 years he lived in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and

the United States, with stops in France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. During his decade-and-a-half exile, he wrote a group of plays considered among his greatest: The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Good Person of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

He settled in Santa Monica and came face-to-face with the realities of the American entertainment business, which became his primary economic and social environment for the six years he’d spend in the United States. He lived among, and was often supported by, Los Angeles’s large German expatriate community. Like Brecht, those who fled Hitler made for a curious sight along Hollywood Boulevard, among them Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the novelist Leon Feuchtwanger, and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who, like fellow exiles Igor Stravinsky and Aldous Huxley, represented the flower of European cul-ture adrift in southern California and sometimes attempting to work for incomprehensible and uncomprehending Hollywood studios. It was a startling contradiction, but Brecht was a walking contradiction and insisted on them in his work.

We may think of Brecht as a moralizer whose plays were lessons in the superiority of human relations under socialism, but the clear “message” in his plays, along with the striking clarity and directness of his storytelling, arose out of a love of contradiction and complexity. The Caucasian Chalk Circle itself was born out of a series of contradictions.

Brecht was a socialist and a supporter of the Soviet Union, but he was never averse to making money. In Los Angeles he tried writing for both the movies and theater. He made no


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headway in the movies and little that he wrote for the theater was produced before he left the United States in 947. In the 940s, there was only one theater to write for: the commercial theater, headquartered on Broadway. Brecht made four attempts to have a play produced on Broadway and was discouraged and frustrated when each one failed.

However, he had high hopes for The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He wrote it in 944 for another émigré, the actress Luise Rainer, who had won Academy Awards for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth. Indeed, adapting the 925 play The Circle of Chalk, by Klabund (itself an adaptation of a 4th-century Chinese play by Li Qianfu), was her idea. Brecht knew the play well, and in 940 had already based a short story on it called “The Augsburg Chalk Circle.” Rainer arranged for a producer named Jules Leventhal to commission Brecht and pay him a monthly salary until he finished the play. Some months later, the three fell out and the production was cancelled. Later, Brecht wrote, “The theater here . . . is the most cold-blooded merchandising of evening entertainment, a branch of the narcotics trade operated by gamblers.” Chalk Circle, he wrote, was “partly conditioned by a revulsion against the commercialized dramaturgy of Broadway.” That, however, was after the fact. Brecht would have been happy to operate among the drug pushers and gamblers; when he appealed to Rainer for work in the first place, he was all in favor of Broadway dramaturgy if it would suit his purposes.

The play itself, like so much of Brecht’s work, thrives on its contradictions. As Brecht points out in his notes on the play, Grusche, a kitchen servant in the household of the gover-nor, saves his infant son’s life, but the law regards her as a kidnapper. Throughout Grusche’s trials, her own interests—to stay out of trouble and not entangle herself with the welfare of the prince whose father has been overthrown—are at odds with the child’s. She has no money, her poverty is a threat to the life she’s determined to save, and caring for the child only adds to her own perilous situation. She decides, for his sake, to find a husband, a choice that almost costs her the soldier to whom she’s already betrothed. Azdak brings another set of contradictions to the play. He turns himself in for sheltering the tyrannical Grand Prince, but the soldiers he surrenders to reward him with a judgeship. When two years later the Grand Prince returns to power, Azdak fears for his life, as his judgments have supported the poor and powerless at the expense of the powerful; but the Grand Prince, whose interests aren’t those of the poor, reappoints Azdak out of gratitude for sheltering him.

The greatest contradictions come in the last scene, when Azdak must determine the true mother of the child. Is it Grusche the kidnapper, or the governor’s wife who deserted him? Azdak confronts Grusche with a bitter proposition: “I don’t believe that he’s your child, but even if he was yours, wouldn’t you want him to be rich? All you have to say is that he isn’t yours. And instantly he’ll have a palace with horses in the stable, beggars at


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his door, soldiers in his service, and lots of petitioners in his courtyard. What do you say? Don’t you want him to be rich?” The question and the logic are unanswerable, and Grusche is silent. The solution to the test of the chalk circle is also rife with contradiction—and yet any other outcome would seem completely wrong.

Brecht’s embrace of contradiction stemmed in part from his belief that, when it comes to texture in the theater, more is more. Although his productions were acclaimed for their simplicity, critics also noticed the beautiful costumes and the props that were basic but spoke of long, useful lives, every carefully chosen item in exactly the right place and used the right way.

He never sought to take away texture, but always to add. So while the lyrics in his songs would express one emotion, the music would very often express the opposite, and thus provide a comment on them, deepening the texture. He never sought to banish emotion from the theater (which he knew was impossible), but rather to reduce it so as to add to it another human response: judgment. The critic Harold Clurman wrote, “Brecht is a clas-sicist. He seeks . . . a manner which allows the spectator to appreciate the play with that repose and refinement of attention which liberate the spirit without drugging the senses. . . . The goal is wisdom rather than excitement.” Yet while Brecht wanted his audiences to arrive at socially useful conclusions about what his characters did, he never wished to aban-don the entertainment value of theater. He stuffed his plays with drama, comedy, color, and music; their structure has much in common with the medieval mystery plays that strung together a series of one-acts each complete in itself, each making its point without refer-ence to the others, mixing comedy, drama, music, dance, and rich costumes. He looked to Breugel as an exemplar of color and depth (and suggested that actresses playing Grusche study his Dulle Griet [Mad Meg]). Referring to Parisian critics who saw Brecht’s produc-tion of Mother Courage, Clurman pointed out another enriching contradiction: abetted by his designers, beneath the seeming simplicity of Brecht’s stage pictures was thick texture and complexity; Brecht’s “visual austerity was so artful that [they,] when they saw his pro-duction, spoke of its several hundred shades of brown.”

Brecht added more not only because he liked the aesthetic but because he was, at heart, a skeptic who was rarely satisfied with answers and so kept asking questions. “Skepticism moves mountains,” he wrote. It was the source of knowledge.

Beginning in 929 Brecht associated himself with communism and the Soviet Union, and he told translator Eric Bentley that as socialism went so would his work and reputa-tion. He saw himself connected to large historical forces in ways that the significant play-wrights of earlier generations, such as Chekhov and Pirandello, were not (they belonged to failed historical forces, i.e., the Russian bourgeoisie and Italian fascism).


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He was, however, a skeptic and artist before he was an obedient party soldier, and believed, as the Brecht scholar John Willett notes, that while artists should be open to political arguments, in the end they must be free to discover and employ whatever forms are best for their work. He believed this even when he relocated to East Germany in 948 (and acquired Austrian citizenship and kept his money in Swiss bank accounts). Indeed, the East German party bureaucrats never let go of their suspicion that Brecht was a for-malist and an enemy to the aesthetics of socialist realism. They were right. In 953, speak-ing of Germany in his diary, he wrote, “This country still gives me the creeps.” He wrote to Bentley, who was the first person to effectively promote his work in America, about the importance of experimentation in theater: “The very divergent forms of theater are certainly not attempts to arrive at a definitive form; the one thing that should be definitive is the diversity of form.”

The Iron Curtain fell, belief in communism has disappeared almost everywhere, and Brecht’s poetry and plays live on. He wouldn’t be pinned down, and in the end his alle-giance to complexity and contradiction was deeper than to any systematic political system. Like one of his favorite playwrights, Bernard Shaw, who always gave the best speeches to the characters we’re supposed to disagree with the most, Brecht believed that people came with their vir-tues and vices mixed together. “People don’t act on the basis of only one motive but always out of various motives that are in part con-tradictory,” he said. He wanted people to dis-cuss the issues in his plays, but real discussion is possible only when the playwright doesn’t stack the deck in favor of one character and against another, and characters’ words sometimes argue with their actions—in other words, when there’s something to discuss.

Grusche mit dem Kind (Grusche with the Child)


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a dramatic circleFrom the Judgment of Solomon to the Judgment of Azdak

by dan rubin

delegate: Will it be one of the old legends?singer: A very old one. It’s called “The Chalk Circle” and comes from the Chinese. But we’ll do it, of course, in a changed version. —Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle

It is generally acknowledged that the judgment of Azdak in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle traces its ultimate origins to the Old Testament’s Judgment of Solomon ( Kings

3: –28), in which wise Solomon instructs two women to cut a child in half with a sword in order to determine parentage: the true mother refuses to injure her child (see page 37). A few scholars, however, contest that the Hebrew interpretation is in fact based on the Buddhist Jātaka tales. “The Birth as Great Physician” tells of a magical Yakshinī who takes on the form of a woman and steals a child in order to eat it. The child’s mother chases her down, and the Buddha chooses the real mother by asking each woman to pull the child onto her side of a line he draws on the ground: the true mother refuses (see page 37). Whether they evolved out of the Indian tradition or the Semitic, a number of stories exist in Chinese folklore that are based on this template, as Dr. n. b. Dennys notes in his 87

study, The Folk-Lore of China: And Its Affinities with That of the Aryan and Semitic Races:

Two mothers have a dispute about offspring;They refer to the wisest official they can findHe tests their bona fides.The rightful party triumphs.

One (or perhaps many) of these variants was the inspiration for Huilan ji (Circle of Chalk; see page 39), part of the Chinese theater repertory known as Yuan-chu-po-cheng (The Hundred Pieces), composed by Li Qianfu during the Yuan dynasty (27–38). Circle of Chalk is about a dispute over an inheritance within a rich family in the Northern Song dynasty (90–27). The heir of the family fortune is the son of the second wife, but the first wife claims the child as her own. The dispute is settled by the governor, who tells the women to pull the child out of a circle drawn with chalk: the real mother refuses.

Circle of Chalk made its way west in the early part of the 9th century in Zang Maozun’s edited anthology Yuan ren bai zhong qu (One Hundred Plays of the Yuan Dynasty), compiled


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sometime between 550 and 20. Four plays of this collection were translated into French, and Stanislas Julien’s Hoei-lan-ki, ou l’histoire du cercle de craie, drama en prose et en vers (Hoei-lan-ki, or the History of the Chalk Circle, a Drama in Prose and Verse) was published in London in 832 by John Murray on behalf of the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland. There is little doubt that it was this translation that the German lyrical poet/playwright Alfred Henschke (who wrote under the pseudonym Klabund) used as the foundation for his 925 adaptation Der Kreidekreis (The Circle of Chalk; see page 39). In it, explains English translator James Laver, “Klabund substituted his own lyrics, and, indeed allowed himself a free hand with the play generally. In so doing he no doubt intro-duced certain anachronisms and impossibilities which will be obvious enough to those learned in things Chinese.” Importantly, to appeal to Western taste, Klabund washed over some of the ruthlessness of the original—which overflows with verbal and physical violence—and supplied a love interest for the protagonist, Hi-Tang (who would become Brecht’s Grusche).

Klabund debuted Der Kreidekreis in a production directed by Brecht’s colleague Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on October 20, 925, and he received a New York production just months later. Laver’s English translation enjoyed a successful London run beginning in March 929 starring Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as the heroine; it would receive a number of productions in the United States in the ’40s and ’50s, though the first English translation of Klabund’s play to receive a u.s. production was by i. s. Richter in 930. Despite two English translations faithful to Li Qianfu’s Chinese origi-nal (Ethel Van der Veer’s in 933 and Frances Hume’s in 954), Klabund’s version remained the most popular until Brecht adapted it himself.

Brecht first employed the chalk circle motif in his 925 short play The Elephant Calf (see page 40). This parody of the judicial system takes place in the courtroom of The Banana Tree, Judge of the Jungle. An elephant calf is tried for murdering her mother—who is not only still alive, she is present in the courtroom. The Banana Tree tests maternity by drawing a circle in the ground, tying a rope around the mother’s neck, and telling the calf that if she can pull her mother out of the circle then parentage will have been proved. The calf pulls. Her mother almost asphyxiates. The Banana Tree rules the innocent calf a liar and a murderer.

Looking towards more serious treatments of the chalk circle parable, in 938 Brecht began making notes for The Odense Chalk Circle, which was to be set in Denmark. Scholar Klaus Völker explains that Brecht “wanted to describe a time of suppression, tyranny, and alien rule.” Völker continues, “The few surviving Danish notes at least suggest the outlines of the later plot [of The Caucasian Chalk Circle]: an uprising brings about general chaos and


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the flight of a Governor; because he hid the fugitive ruler a rice farmer is made judge and his pranks are the cause of a lot of confusion and a little justice.”

A year later, in 939, while living in Sweden as an exile, Brecht wrote the short story “The Augsburg Chalk Circle” (see page 4). Setting the tale in his hometown during the Thirty Years War (8–48), Brecht explores the struggles of the young servant-girl Anna, whose Protestant mistress, Frau Zingli, abandons her son when a Catholic lynch mob ransacks her home. Despite the dangers of protecting the Protestant child, Anna takes him, eventually arriving at her brother’s home, where his wife becomes suspicious of this unwed mother. To protect the child, Anna marries the invalid cottager Otterer, who makes a miraculous recovery. Though resistant at first, Anna lives a contented life with this man for several years, until Frau Zingli steals the child while Anna is at the village market. Anna chases Zingli back to Augsburg, where the case is tried by Ignaz Dollinger, a judge “renowned far and wide for his down-to-earth proceedings, his biting remarks and wise sayings.” He uses the chalk circle test—which he “found in an old book”—to determine that Anna is the “right mother.” For the first time, the chalk circle test awards the child to a woman other than its biological mother. “The Augsburg Chalk Circle” was published in Internationale Literatur in June 94.

Also in 94, Brecht’s exile from Germany brought him to the United States, where he met Luise Rainer. An Austrian-born Oscar-winning actress who had performed the lead in Klabund’s popular Circle of Chalk, Rainer encouraged Brecht to dramatize the story he had created in “The Augsburg Chalk Circle” so that she might star in it. Productions of Klabund’s play had put a strong emphasis on the oriental exoticism of the Chinese origi-nal: incense was burned throughout the theaters, ushers wore black satin pajamas, tea was served, and gongs were sounded in the lobbies. Though Brecht’s aesthetic owes much to Chinese dramaturgy, he was not interested in recreating a Chinese chalk circle. He took his tale out of Augsburg and the Thirty Years War and moved its framework to a more imme-diately relevant location: the Georgian Soviet Republic and other areas of the Caucasus, where violent battles in 942–43 constituted a turning point in the war between the Soviet Union and Nazi invaders.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle did not come effortlessly. Rainer’s “encouragement” involved the Broadway backing of Jules Leventhal, and Brecht wrote in his journal on April 0,

944, that it was “interesting how much is destroyed when you are squeezed between ‘commission’ and ‘art.’ I dramatize unenthusiastically in this empty aimless space.” In May, he recounted an interaction with producers: “[They ask] what it means, and then they set out to criticize the structure. Where is the conflict, the suspense, the flesh and blood, etc.? . . . As they get into the car . . . they say, ‘He’ll never be a success. He can’t create emotions,


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he can’t even get identification, so he goes and makes up a theory, he is crazy and he’s getting worse.’” Their disappointment should not have necessarily surprised Brecht; many years later, he explained in an article for tdr: The Drama Review that he wrote the play as a reaction against commercialized Broadway theater, and that it “absorbed elements of the older American theatre, which excelled in the burlesque and spectacle.”

Brecht’s struggles were not limited to the circumstances in which he was asked to create. He also wrestled with his characters. He wrote on May 8, 944:

The problem of how to construct the figure of Azdak held me up for two weeks until I realized the social reason for his behavior. At first all I had was his disgraceful handling of the law, under which the poor came off well. I knew I couldn’t just show that the law as it exists has to be bent if justice is to be done, but realized I had to show how, with a truly careless, ignorant, downright bad judge, things can turn out all right for those who are actually in need of justice. That is why Azdak had to have those selfish, amoral, parasitic features, and be the lowest and most decrepit of judges. But I was still lacking some basic cause of a social kind. And I found it in his disappointment that the fall of the old rulers did not bring about a new age, but just an age of new rulers, as a consequence of which he continues to dispense bourgeois justice, but in a degenerate, subversive fashion, serving the absolute self-interest of the judge. Of course this explanation must not change anything I’ve already got there, nor must it serve to justify Azdak.

He finished The Caucasian Chalk Circle and sent it to Rainer on June , 944. Nine days later, he wrote about the inadequacy of the character Grusche:

Suddenly I am not happy any more with Grusche . . . she should be simple and look like Brueghel’s Mad Meg, a beast of burden. She should be stubborn and not rebellious, submissive and not good, long-suffering and not incorrupt-ible etc. etc. This simplicity must in no way be equated with “wisdom” (the well-known stereotype), but it is quite consonant with a practical bent, and even with a certain cunning and an eye for human qualities—Grusche ought, by wearing the backwardness of her class openly like a badge, to permit less identification and thus stand objectively as, in a certain sense, a tragic figure (“the salt of the earth”).


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The revision of Grusche took Brecht three weeks: “an act of dedication,” he wrote. Over the next two months, he rewrote the prologue and an optional epilogue, yet he still remained unconvinced by his creation. He lamented on September , 944, referring to the play, “Remarkable how worry and nervousness make your shoulders fall forward. What keeps them back in normal times?” Although his apprehension about the quality of the play was unfounded, the project was shelved after a falling out with Rainer.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle finally received its first production in the spring of 948 when Eric Bentley’s English translation premiered in Northfield, Minnesota, at Carleton College. It was published in 949. The play would not be presented in the original German until 954, when Brecht himself produced it with his Berliner Ensemble. Successful runs in Paris, London, and Moscow followed in 955, ’5, and ’57, and the play finally received its promised Broadway production in 9. Considered one of the playwright’s best plays, The Caucasian Chalk Circle came full circle in 992 when Hu Zhifeng, a well-known Peking opera performer, adapted Brecht’s play for the Chinese stage under the title Huilan ji.

In 949, Brecht wrote that The Caucasian Chalk Circle could be done at any time because its themes give theaters the opportunity to “display their arts at their most general.” This is in no small part due to the lasting poignancy of the parable. Brecht suggested, “The chalk circle test in the old Chinese novel and play, as well as its Biblical counterpart, Solomon’s sword test, remain valuable as tests of motherhood (by discovering motherliness) even if motherhood is to be determined socially rather than biologically.” Interpreting the par-able’s moral through a contemporary socialist lens, Brecht continued, “what matters is not the right of the maid to the child, but the right of the child to a better mother. Grusche’s fitness, her reliability and her usefulness, are well proven by her reasonable hesitation in taking on the child. At first sight, one could interpret her attitude thus: kindness has its limits, there is an end to it.” As we have seen, however, there appears to be no limit or end to the chalk circle story itself.

SOURCES Bertolt Brecht, Baal, A Man’s A Man, and The Elephant Calf: Early Plays by Bertolt Brecht (New York: Grove Press, 1989); ibid., Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934–1955 (New York: Routledge, 1993); ibid., Bertolt Brecht Short Stories 1921–1946 (London: Methuen, 1983); ibid., Bertolt Brecht Collected Plays Volume 7 (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); ibid., “On The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” TDR: The Drama Review 12, no. 1 (1967) 88–100; Paul G. Brewster, “Solomon’s Judgment, Mahosadha, and the Hoei-kan-li,” Folklore Studies 21 (1962) 236–40; T. W. Rhys Davids, trans., Buddhist Birth-Stories (Jā taka Tales) (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd, 1878); N. B. Dennys, The Folk-Lore of China: And Its Affinities with That of the Aryan and Semitic Races (London: Trübner and Co., 1876); Wenwei Du, “The Chalk Circle Comes Full Circle: From Yuan Drama Through the Western Stage to Peking Opera,” Asian Theatre Journal 12, no. 2 (1995) 307–25; James Laver, trans., The Circle of Chalk: A Play in Five Acts Adapted from the Chinese by Klabund (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1929); Antony Tatlow and Tak-Wai Wong, eds., Brecht and East Asian Theatre: The Proceedings of a Conference on Brecht in East Asian Theatre, Hong Kong, 16–20 October 1981 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1982).


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textual origins of the caucasian chalk circle

the judgment of solomon (1 kings: 16–28) Now two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. 7 One of them said, “My lord, this woman and I live in the same house. I had a baby while she was there with me. 8 The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us.9 “During the night this woman’s son died because she lay on him. 20 So she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. 2 The next morning, I got up to nurse my son—and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn’t the son I had borne.”22 The other woman said, “No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours.”

But the first one insisted, “No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine.” And so they argued before the king.23 The king said, “This one says, ‘My son is alive and your son is dead,’ while that one says, ‘No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.’”24 Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought a sword for the king. 25 He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.”2 The woman whose son was alive was filled with compassion for her son and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!”

But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!”27 Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.”28 When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice.

mahosadha jātaka (“the birth as great physician”)A woman, carrying her child, went to the future Buddha’s tank to wash. And having first bathed the child, she put on her upper garment and descended into the water to bathe herself.

Then a Yakshinī [an evil being with magical powers and an appetite for human flesh], seeing the child, had a craving to eat it. And taking the form of a woman, she drew near, and asked the mother:


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“Friend, this is a very pretty child, is it one of yours?”And when she was told it was, she asked if she might nurse it. And this being allowed,

she nursed it a little, and then carried it off.But when the mother saw this, she ran after her, and cried out: “Where are you taking

my child to?” and caught hold of her.The Yakshinī boldly said, “Where did you get the child from? It is mine!” And so quar-

relling, they passed the door of the future Buddha’s Judgment Hall.He heard the noise, sent for them, inquired into the matter, and asked them whether

they would abide by his decision. And they agreed. Then he had a line drawn on the ground; and told the Yakshinī to take hold of the child’s arms, and the mother to take hold of its legs; and said: “The child shall be hers who drags him over the line.”

But as soon as they pulled at him, the mother, seeing how he suffered, grieved as if her heart would break. And letting him go, she stood there weeping.

Then the future Buddha asked the bystanders: “Whose hearts are tender to babes? Those who have borne children, or those who have not?”

And they answered: “O Sire! The hearts of mothers are tender.”Then he said: “Who, think you, is the mother? She who has the child in her arms, or

she who has let go?”And they answered: “She who has let go is the mother.”And he said: “Then do you all think that the other was the thief?”And they answered: “Sire! We cannot tell.”And he said: “Verily this is a Yakshinī, who took the child to eat it.”And they asked: “O Sire! How did you know it?”And he replied: “Because her eyes winked not, and were red, and she knew no fear, and

had no pity, I knew it.”And so saying, he demanded of the thief: “Who are you?”And she said: “Lord! I am a Yakshinī”And he asked: “Why did you take away this child?”And she said: “I thought to eat him, O my Lord!”And he rebuked her, saying: “O foolish woman! For your former sins you have been

born a Yakshinī, and now do you still sin!” And he laid a vow upon her to keep the Five Commandments, and let her go.

But the mother of the child exalted the future Buddha, and said: “O my Lord! O Great Physician! May thy life be long!” And she went away, with the babe clasped to her bosom.


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li qianfu’s HUILAN JI (CIRCLE OF CHALK), yuan dynasty (1271–1368)(synopsis by wenwei du, ASIAN THEATRE JOURNAL)Zhang Haitang, who has been a prostitute, is married to a wealthy Mr. Ma as his second wife. She gives birth to a son. Mrs. Ma, the first wife, becomes jealous and conspires with her paramour, a court clerk, to murder her husband and to blame the crime on Haitang. One day Haitang’s brother comes to beg from his rich brother-in-law’s family. Mrs. Ma instructs Haitang to give him some robes and a head ornament. Then the first wife reports the incident to Mr. Ma, claiming that Haitang has given away her personal belongings to a lover. On hearing the false report, Mr. Ma beats Haitang and then becomes sick, asking for a bowl of soup. The first wife puts poison in his soup and asks Haitang to present it to Mr. Ma. After Mr. Ma is poisoned to death, the first wife accuses Haitang of murdering her husband and claims Haitang’s son as her own in order to claim the inheritance. Mrs. Ma bribes a corrupt judge, who imprisons Haitang. The lawsuit is later brought to Judge Bao, who orders the two “mothers” to pull the child out of a chalk circle drawn around him on the floor—both at the same time. Haitang, the real mother, does not pull the child because she is unwilling to hurt him, but Mrs. Ma grabs the child’s arm forcefully and pulls him out of the circle. Thus Judge Bao is certain that Haitang, who cares for the child, is the real mother. Then the correct judgment follows and justice is finally done.

klabund’s DER KREIDEKREIS (THE CHALK CIRCLE), 1925Klabund’s adaptation of a French translation of Huilan ji entitled Hoei-lan-ki, or The History of the Chalk Circle, a Drama in Prose and Verse (synopsis by Dan Rubin)A kindly eunuch agrees to pay a hefty sum of money to enlist the -year-old Hi-Tang into his establishment of classy courtesans. Hi-Tang’s working-class father has just committed suicide because he could not pay off his loans to the wealthy Ma; Hi-Tang’s impoverished mother sees no other solution than to sell her only daughter. On her first day, Hi-Tang’s beauty attracts not only the wandering Prince Po, but also Ma, the brute responsible for her situation. The two men get into a bidding war over Hi-Tang, and Ma eventually wins. He buys her and brings her home to become his second wife. She bears him a son, Li, and grows to love her husband as her presence softens the once-ruthless capitalist. Ma decides to divorce his evil-spirited (and barren) first wife, Yu-Pi, so he can live solely with Hi-Tang and their son; but before he can do so, Yu-Pi poisons him. She accuses Hi-Tang of the murder and claims Li (heir to Ma’s fortune) as her own. The authorities cart Hi-Tang off to the local court, where a corrupt judge named Chu-Chu convicts her of homicide and attempted kidnapping.


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As Chu-Chu sentences our protagonist to death, word comes that the emperor has died and Prince Po has taken the throne. In an effort to end widespread corruption in the country’s judiciary, Emperor Po has ordered a personal review of all capital hearings. Hi-Tang’s case comes before him, and he applies the chalk circle test to discover Li’s true mother: he orders both women to pull the child towards them, and Hi-Tang refuses: “If the child can only be won by pulling out his arm, only she can pull him out of the circle who has never felt the pains of a mother for her child.” Po declares Hi-Tang the mother, and Chu-Chu and Yu-Pi are punished for their crimes. Emperor Po takes his long-lost love as his wife. He also explains that Li is in fact his son: the night after Ma took Hi-Tang home, Po followed them and impregnated Hi-Tang in her sleep. Hi-Tang recalls the incident as a pleasant dream and is overjoyed everything has worked out as it has.

bertolt brecht’s THE ELEPHANT CALF, OR THE PROVABILITY OF ANY

AND EVERY CONTENTION, 1925 (selected scene)banana tree: Take a piece of billiard chalk and draw a good solid circle right on the middle of this stage. Then take a plain ordinary piece of rope in your hand and wait till this mother—stricken to the very heart, as she is—steps into the circle which you have now finished drawing, if rather badly. Place this rope—with care—around her snow-white neck . . . You—the alleged Pal Jacky—take the other end of this rope of justice and stand outside the circle opposite the Moon [her accuser]. Right. Now, woman, I put a question to you: Have you given birth to a murderer? No answer? Well then, I only wanted to show you, gentlemen, that the very Mother, whom you now see before you, turns away from her fallen child. But in a minute I’ll show you even more than that. For now the fearful sun of justice will shine into the secret depths . . . Pal Jacky, for the last time: do you still contend that you are the son of this unhappy creature here?

pal jacky: Yes.banana tree: I see. I see. So you’re her son, eh? Not long ago you would have it you

were her daughter. But then you don’t aim at one hundred percent accuracy, do you? We go on now to the principal proof, the first and last and all-embracing proof, a proof which will satisfy you all, gentlemen. If, Jacky, you are the child of this mother, then the strength will be given to you to pull her out of the circle on that side. So much is clear . . . I shall count three. One. Two. Three.

Pal Jacky pulls her mother out of the circle.mother: Hey! Stop! God damn it! What are you up to! Ouch, my neck! . . . Help!pal jacky: Out of the circle! She’s out of the circle!


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banana tree: Well! And what do you all say to that? Have you ever seen such brutal-ity? All I can say is: here unnatural deceit gets its deserts. Elephant Calf, you have grossly deceived yourself. By this brutal pulling, you have proved, not what you intended, but something else, namely, that never never never can you be the son—or daughter—of this unhappy, martyred mother. You have pulled the truth into the light, Jacky my pal!

bertolt brecht’s “der augsburger kreidekreis” (“the augsburg chalk circle”), 1939 (selected scene)Only now did the girl [Anna] realize the danger she ran should she be caught in the street with the Protestant’s child. With a heavy heart she laid it back in the cradle, gave it a little milk to drink, rocked it to sleep, and made her way towards that part of the city where her married sister lived. At about ten o’clock at night, accompanied by her sister’s husband, she elbowed her way through the throng of soldiers celebrating their victory to go to the outskirts and find Frau Zingli, the mother of the child. They knocked on the door of an imposing house, which, after quite a long while, did open slightly. A little old man, Frau Zingli’s uncle, stuck his head out. Anna announced breathlessly that Herr Zingli was dead but the child unharmed in the house. The old man looked at her coldly with fishlike eyes and said his niece was no longer there and he himself washed his hands of the Protestant bastard. With that he shut the door again. As they left, Anna’s brother-in-law noticed a curtain move at one of the windows and was convinced that Frau Zingli was there. Apparently she felt no shame in repudiating her child.

Anna and her brother-in-law walked on side by side in silence for a while. Then she declared that she wanted to go back to the tannery and fetch the child. Her brother-in-law, a quiet respectable man, listened to her aghast and tried to talk her out of this dangerous notion. What were these people to her? She had not even been decently treated.

Anna heard him out and promised to do nothing rash. Nevertheless, she must just look in quickly at the tannery to see whether the child needed anything. And she wanted to go alone. And go she did. In the midst of the devastated hall the child lay peacefully in its cradle and slept. Wearily Anna sat down by its side and gazed at it. She had not dared to kindle a light, but the nearby house was still burning and by its light she could see the child quite well. It had a tiny mole on its little neck.

When the girl had watched the child breathing and sucking its small fist for some time, maybe an hour, she realized that she had now stayed too long and seen too much to be able to leave without the child. She got to her feet heavily and with slow movements wrapped it in its linen coverlet, picked it up in her arms, and left the courtyard with it, looking round furtively like someone with a bad conscience, a thief.


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a play for todayOn Brecht’s Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle

by dan rubin

Bertolt Brecht’s text of The Caucasian Chalk Circle includes a prologue, but since the play’s first production directors have often chosen to produce it without the open-

ing scene. Entitled “The Struggle for the Valley,” the scene acts as an introduction to and frame for the parable of Grusche, Azdak, and the chalk circle. Amid the ruins of a village in the Caucasus (a mountainous region in the Middle East that lies on the border between Europe and Asia) at the end of World War ii, two groups debate the issue of who has the right to govern the fate of the valley: the farmers from the neighboring Rosa Luxemburg kolchos, on the one hand, successfully defended the land from the Nazis and remained throughout the war; while the goat herders from the Galinsk kolchos, on the other hand, followed orders and moved their herds to safety, abandoning their traditional home. Now both groups claim the land as their own. An accord is quickly and peacefully reached when the farmers prove that their plans to irrigate the valley will increase the land’s productivity to the benefit of all. The poet Mayakovsky is quoted: “The home of the Soviet people shall also be the home of Reason!” After the agreement is reached, a Singer is called in to seal the contract, which he does by recounting the story of the chalk circle, the point at which many productions, including John Doyle’s for a.c.t., begin.

As tame, even idyllic, as this prelude appears, Eric Bentley admitted in 9 that it was rather shocking to Western European audiences: “Here are all these Communists—Russians at that—calling each other Comrades . . . a socialist play, is this a play for socialists only?” For this reason, when Bentley produced the world premiere of Chalk Circle at Carleton College in 948, he did so without the prologue. It was not until 95 that an American pro-duction risked including the scene. The prologue received a poor critical reception in West German as well, and it was omitted from the first West German production in 955. In a 954 letter to his friend and colleague Peter Suhrkamp, Brecht lamented, “That the pro-logue displeases you I don’t quite understand, it was the first bit I wrote in the States. The questions posed by the parable must be seen to derive from the necessities of reality, and I think this has been done with an amusing and light touch. Without the prologue it is not evident why the play has not remained the ‘Chinese Chalk Circle’ . . . nor why it is called Caucasian. . . . For the dramatization I needed an historical, explanatory background.” Furthermore, Bentley contended, “the prologue will say different things to different people as to what has already been achieved and where. But to all it conveys Brecht’s belief that


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the new age is possible. What his audience is to be haunted by is not a memory, a fantasy, or a dream, but a possibility.”

But if the original purpose of the prologue was to anchor the play in the context of a world reeling from the devasta-tion of World War ii, it now shackles the play to that specific moment in history. Translator Domenique Lozano argues that, despite her affection for the scene, “It’s very specific and very limiting. It talks very much about the Nazis and the tanks in the war, so it zooms us into a

really specific historical time period.” Director John Doyle agrees: “There will be a way of beginning the story [in our production], but I don’t want the audience to get bogged down in communism, Nazism, and therefore feel alienated (in a negative way, I mean) before the story begins. I want it to be a play for today.”

A U.S. soldier comforts an Afghan child during a medical outreach in a Kuchi camp near Hutal, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Jan. 5, 2010. Department of Defense photo by Staff Sgt. Dayton Mitchell, U.S. Air Force.


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questions to consider

i. What are the stages of development in Grusche’s relationship with Michael? At what point does she accept him as her own? Who do you think should get the child?

2. Is Azdak a just judge?

3. What elements of this play and production are distinctly “Brechtian”?

4. What is the role of music and song in this play?

5. At what moments during the production is the audience required to “work”?

for further information

Bloom, Harold, ed. Bertolt Brecht. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002.Brecht, Bertolt. Baal, A Man’s a Man, and The Elephant Calf: Early Plays by Bertolt Brecht. New York: Grove Press, 989.———. Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934–1955. New York: Routledge, 993.———. Bertolt Brecht Short Stories 1921–1946. London: Methuen, 983.———. Bertolt Brecht Collected Plays Volume 7. New York: Vintage Books, 975.———. “On The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” TDR: The Drama Review 2, no. (97) 88–00.———. The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Methuen Student Editions. London: Methuen, 984.Du, Wenwei. “The Chalk Circle Comes Full Circle: From Yuan Drama Through the Western Stage to Peking Opera.” Asian Theatre Journal 2, no. 2 (995) 307–25.Fuegi, John. Bertolt Brecht: Chaos, According to Plan. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire], New York: Cambridge University Press, 987.

Hayman, Ronald. Brecht: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 983.Kuhn, Tom, and Steve Giles, eds. Brecht on Art and Politics. London: Methuen, 2003.Laver, James, trans. The Circle of Chalk: A Play in Five Acts Adapted from the Chinese by Klabund. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 929.Lyon, James K. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 980. Thoss, Martin. Brecht for Beginners. Danbury, ct: Writers & Readers Publishing, 994.Völker, Klaus. Brecht: A Biography. New York: The Seabury Press, 978.Willett, John. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang, 94.


Documents

The Caucasian Chalk - American Conservatory Theater · table of contents . Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of The Caucasian Chalk Circle 5. A Little Bit of an Anarchist: An Interview