Brecht on Broadway: Reconsidering Political Theater

Abstract

Bertolt Brecht’s encounter with the American political theater in 1935 points us to a profound aesthetic discrepancy at the heart of political theater by revealing the existence of a vital, non-modernist tradition of articulating a leftist cultural critique. Theatre Union’s adaptation of his epic drama The Mother evinces the characteristics that were typical for many New Deal productions and can therefore be considered emblematic of the predominant leftist aesthetics of the time. The visible clash of its vernacular aesthetic with Brecht’s inherent modernist approach in the final production of Mother, moreover, triggered ardent debates among leftist critics over the form and function of political art in the United States—discussions that were to shape other New Deal productions as well. For these reasons, I deem Brecht’s experience with leftist Broadway crucial to understanding the praxis of New Deal theater as a whole as well as the cultural logic of its time. In what follows, I shall examine the aesthetics and politics of Theatre Union’s production of Brecht’s play more closely. Besides playing out the conflict between the two conceptions of political theater, I will also consider what kind of questions this encounter poses for our understanding of political theater as such.