You’ve got to hand it to Dubya. By reviving class war in America, the president and his coterie of plutocrats have also revived a whole vein of great Marxist literature. Who thought twice about George Orwell or Bertolt Brecht when Bill Clinton was president? A few antiglobalization agitpunks maybe, and that’s about it. But now the poor are subsidizing Halliburton with their lives, medical care is a bourgeois luxury, and if no child gets left behind it’s only because he’s being tried as an adult. Consequently there’s a 1984 at Lookingglass Theatre, an Animal Farm at Bailiwick Repertory, and the Strawdog Theatre Company is performing a wildly energetic version of Brecht’s proletarian comedy, Puntila and His Man Matti.
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This may be the one good thing to come out of the Bush presidency. We can all stand to be reminded of what a crystalline thinker, writer, reporter, and provocateur Orwell was, turning vast geopolitical situations into point-blank metaphors. Or how nasty-funny Brecht can be with his knifelike fables. Most important, we can stand to be reminded of the simple, awful, suddenly-not-so-quaint fact at the heart of both men’s writings–that, as Brecht put it, “The defeats and victories of the fellows at the top aren’t always defeats and victories for the fellows at the bottom.” No, and neither are the wars of the fellows at the top, nor their tax cuts, nor their interpretation of the American dream.
Brecht’s script is a breakneck series of set pieces illustrating this dialectic. Expansive Puntila hires, and mean-spirited Puntila fires. Good-time Puntila proposes marriage, and in the play’s single most chilling scene, hard-hearted Puntila breaks off his engagements–all four of them.
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