Dramaturgy from Caucasian Chalk Circle
This is from a 2010 production of Caucasian Chalk Circle I worked as dramaturge for. It discusses the ramifications of omitting the prologue. Looking back it sounds uber-pretentious, but it is a rock solid argument for aspects of epic theater and Brecht that just don’t work with modern, western audiences.
Brecht Journals
7-30-2010
Having already decided to omit the Prologue of the play, I came across a piece written by Eric Bentley concerning this. According to Bentley the Prologue has almost always been omitted in U.S. productions, with the exception of a few performances, and he believes this is due primarily to the communist aspects of the play. He does point out that during the McCarthy era of the late 1940s to late 1950s that plays such as Chalk Circle, as well as other Brecht works, were “discouraged” by the general tone of the times.
So, what, if anything is lost from the omission of the Prologue of Caucasian Chalk Circle? We have two rival communist groups arguing over land. Though buried in banter and dialogue that I am not sure the audience will get, and even I had to read a couple times before I saw the point, is the general question of who really does own land?
Old Man
The valley has belonged to us for all eternity.
Soldier (Left)
What does that mean – from all eternity? Nothing belongs to anyone from all eternity. When you were young you didn’t even belong to yourself. You belonged to the Kazbeki [Caucus] princes.
Later the groups begin debating over who owns the songs they sing. Brecht is introducing his philosophy to us as the argument of ownership. First the ownership of the physical, in this case land, then the ownership of the intellectual, the songs, and the biological, children and ourselves, which will become the crux of the argument and the entire play.
Though it may introduce the arguments, it does so in such a veiled manner that the audience, or even the reader, is not likely to make the connection with until the plot has been completely played out. Add to this confusion that is likely to exist due to U.S. audience’s lack of knowledge of the Caucus regions of Russia (even our own academics for this production struggled to understand why this play was called the “Caucasian” Chalk Circle), and an overall ignorance of Russian history in general, the Prologue seems completely different and separate from the rest of the play. It is due to this confusion that I think the Prologue becomes unnecessary, and perhaps even pointless, if the audience will be unable to make these connections.
But this does lead us to question Brecht’s point in writing the Prologue. Perhaps to Germans, and Eastern Europeans in general, of Brecht’s era, a bygone era passed some fifty years now, this history may have been more widely known. However, it begs the question of who exactly this play was being written for. I would argue that there is a sense of elitism to take the approach that audiences ignorant of these historical aspects are therefore unable to grasp the overall message of the play. It would be no different than writing a play completely in technological jargon and expecting the audience to know and understand the play and the terms, and those who don’t are simply out of luck. Brecht has always dealt in realism (as a theatrical term) and in doing so I would argue that he was trying to ingratiate himself with the masses, the proletariats, and not the elite. If one is to play to the masses, the common, even lay, masses, then one cannot play over their heads.
Ultimately Brecht as commandeered an Eastern legend for the sake of philosophical discourse. One does not have to be a zen master to comprehend the parable of the Chalk Circle, nor does one have to be a history, or even a philosophy, major to understand Brecht’s adaptation of it. Even the Biblical parable of King Solomon (Kings 3:16-28) has been made readily accessible and understandable to Jews and Christians alike. Therefore, given the spirit of adaptation and retooling, it seems almost mandatory that the production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle for a contemporary audience of 2010 would require omission of the Prologue, as well as reimagining, or in the case of this production’s approach, contemporizing the play to make it more accessible to the audience. The Prologue will definitely be playing over the heads of the majority of our audience, which will consist largely of student who are there to learn, rather than expected to already know. By resetting the play in a modern or futuristic setting, we are already taking steps to give the audience something to relate to and make the message that much more accessible.
The following was a pre-production piece for a university program. Brecht is uncommon, to say the least, in theater programs these days. So, it was necessary to create some lectures, presentations, and written pieces based on my research.
On the use of Alienation in Caucasian Chalk Circle
There is a distinct intent and philosophy in almost everything Brecht wrote. He was a very philosophical man, so this may seem to go without saying. However, Caucasian Chalk Circle is a strange beast because unlike Mother Courage or Good Woman of Setzuan, the philosophy of Chalk Circle is not so readily apparent. But, there is a profound philosophical statement in Chalk Circle. This is part of Brecht’s epic theater, and in the epic sense, there is always some philosophical message at play. This is no mere underlying message either, that might possibly be pushed aside or glossed over as might be possible with a romantic play. Instead, the message is the play, and everything else, to some degree, must always come second. This is the sole purpose behind alienation. The audience can never be so lost or caught up in the story that the message gets lost or buried under the flowering drama. And in this case, the message is tied directly to historical context.
So, what is the message of Chalk Circle? Well, simply put, we must say “ownership.” Who has the right to own anything? Can anything be truly owned? And if something can be owned, and in turn have an owner, cannot that owner then be owned as well? To those of us raised in the age of rampant capitalism, in material democracy, these seem like pedantic questions. However, to a communist, of which Brecht truly was, from an era in which the winds seemed to be eddying, and in which direction they would blow, capitalist or communist, was unsure, this way of thinking and these very questions were of the utmost importance.
Putting all political leanings aside, these are the questions at hand and the central theme of Chalk Circle. And though we may not be expected to deliver the answers to these questions as an ensemble, we must at least weigh them in our minds with an intent to better understand what it is we are doing with this play. It is too easy to think that by alienation it means the actor mustn’t try too hard, that method, sense experience, and “living in the moment” have been thrown out the door. In fact, I would argue that it is still very much a part of the actor’s repertoire of tools to draw upon. Where alienation can truly come into play here, I believe, is to have wrestled with some of these questions, and to at least know for yourself what you think the answer is. Simply put, this is not a play one can simply learn their lines and act. Instead, this is a play that one has to learn so intimately, they are living it, and in doing so they know exactly when that audience is dropping off, and when they need to be awakened with the passion of your message.
Passion in alienation? Isn’t this an oxymoron? Why no, it’s not. In fact, not infusing this play, a play about an abandoned child and a surrogate mother who is willing to risk life and limb to protect him with every ounce of passion the actor can summon is a failure. One way to achieve alienation is to be so overly passionate about it that it becomes unrealistic, shocking, something that even in our most vulnerable moments we are still unwilling to exhibit to the world around us.
Remember the love of youth, or for that matter, youth in general. Things are always so much bigger, so much greater to the young. Teens get into physical fights in the name of love, they throw the most emotional tantrums over events that adults know are just the first of many for them. Their passions are so inflamed with a distinct inability to control them, to maintain their composure, to behave properly; to act civilized. Brecht’s point is that there is nothing proper about a woman who abandons her own child, nothing civilized about war. The passions of youth, like so many other things, is wasted on them. The time to behave this way is in the face of the issues in Chalk Circle. The audience must be grabbed up by their shirt collars, shaken violently, and the message screamed in their face. But, we are actors and players, not thugs, and must do this with our own passion, in our own voices.
Alienation is problematic in much of today’s theater. It is far too easy to slip into hamming and jackassery. In instruction, and I am as guilty of this myself as anyone else, we always show examples of musicals. Of course it’s easy to create alienation in Sweeney Todd, Three Penny Opera, or Repo: The Genetic Opera. Musicals are inherently alienated because people don’t dance around singing their conversations in real life. This is a mistake I have come to see in my own understanding of alienation, because I realize now I had not recognized alienation in anything I had seen before. It was upon reading Augusto Boal that it finally clicked for me. Just a chance encounter, opening Theater of the Oppressed to a random chapter, and Brecht’s name leapt off the page at me. There it was, so simply put, yet, so exact that I felt dumbfounded for not seeing this before.
At no time does Brecht speak against emotion, though he always speaks against the emotional orgy. He says that it would be absurd to deny emotion to modern science, thus clearly indicating that his position is entirely favorable to that emotion which is born of pure knowledge, as opposed to the emotion which is born out of ignorance. Before a dark room from which a scream is [heard], a child becomes frightened: Brecht is against any attempts to move the spectator with scenes of this type. But if Einstein discovers that E=mc2, the formula of the transformation of matter into energy, what an extraordinary emotion! Brecht is totally in favor of this type of emotion. Learning is an emotional experience, and there is no reason to avoid such emotions. But at the same time, ignorance causes emotions, and one must oppose emotions of this kind! (Boal 103)
Imagine Einstein standing in his workroom, staring at a chalkboard covered in the scribbles of equations and physics, and at the end of it all there are five little symbols “E=mc2,” five little symbols that have grown to represent one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history, staring at this board, for the first time ever, he sees absolute truth in the universe and has defined it. It must have been like touching the hand of God, and if he didn’t fall to his knees and weep, it was only because some voice in the back of his mind told him it would be uncivilized.
See now the class system of your world torn asunder in a single instant with the knowledge “war is coming.” The panic ensues; the aristocrats abandon everything, even their children. There before you lies a baby, left behind, forgotten. What emotions dominate in this very moment: rage, love, pity. Rage at the violence of the world that has erupted around you, anger at those elite who started the war, pity for those proletariats who must suffer under it, and love; love for a child who has been abandoned, forsaken. How can any actor not be so emotionally moved by this experience as to not pour that emotion all over the stage? Alienation will be achieved, because in that one instance, the actor will act improper and uncivilized.
Yeah, I’m not going to lie, doing a deep dive on Brecht can do things to your state of mind. I have no idea where the rest of this paper is or if it even got written. At any rate, I came across this and its a pretty good piece of writing. It deals with Brecht’s use of the word “montage” as part of the epic theatre landscape. It makes sense the way I explain it. Your welcome. It also stats to position Brecht in the theater landscape of the era, which was dominated by realism at the time.
Character Aspects of CCC
The word montage is primarily a technique of filmic quality. Essentially it is a series of quick-cut scenes placed together in a sequence to delineate a passage of time. In visual art and photography a montage is a collage of images. It would seem this is a word does not find its place easily in the realm of theory, which exists solely in the present, lacks the ability to compile imagery into a collage, and the various other constraints we can name and debate. However, “Brecht often used the term ‘montage’ to contrast modern with traditional art” (Mueller 67). Given this notion, the concept behind a play such as Caucasian Chalk Circle (CCC) begins to seem all the more logical.
Initially I personally had a hard time trying to put my finger on CCC. What is this play? Realism seems the most obvious choice, but here are too many aspects of it that seem to defy realism, perhaps most obviously is that it has happy ending. Is it a fairy tale? Having just recently finished a production of Sheila Callaghan’s Kate Crackernuts I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps I was just suffering residuals and flashbacks to a play that had consumed both my life and my mental state of being for quite some time. And also there is the idea that we can probably find a certain amount of fairy tale qualities in a great deal of theater. After all, it is a world of make-believe. In many ways I see classical Greek elements to this play, though I would not put this in the category of Aristotelian theater due to the absence of hamartia and peripeteia in the main character of Grusha and her actions. We can see some qualities of Renaissance theater here, especially in terms of the ending and what can easily be viewed as dues ex machina. Azdak’s actions in the end, and the allusions we can draw to King Solomon, are comparable to the actions of Kings and Queens in Moliere’s plays.
Upon learning of Brecht’s use of the term montage, I began to understand what CCC was; the contrast of modern and traditional theater. Everything about CCC centers on the concept of infusing classical, almost fairy tale-like, theater with realism. He has taken classical theater, and stocked it with realistic characters. And much like the photographic or filmic concept of montage, he has created a collage of characters that all represent various aspects of society, good or bad. It is the goal of this paper to examine each character closely for what elements of the world around us they may represent, and how and why Brecht chose to use them.