Playwrighting

First, let me suggest  The Subtext. 

AMERICAN THEATRE magazine, a podcast where playwrights talk to playwrights about the things usually left unsaid. In a conversation that dives into life’s muck, we learn what irks, agitates, motivates, inspires and—ultimately—what makes writers tick.

I am not so much into podcasts - I am not keen on sitting still listening.

Bertolt Brecht | Techniques and Facts summarizes Brecht's techniques. About his general style are these paragraphs:

Brecht wanted his audiences to remain objective and unemotional during his plays so that they could make rational judgments about the political aspects of his work. To do this he invented a range of theatrical devices known as epic theatre.

Epic theatre is a type of political theatre that addresses contemporary issues, although later in Brecht’s life he preferred to call it dialectal theatre. Brecht believed classical approaches to theatre were escapist, and he was more interested in facts and reality rather than escapism. Epic theatre doesn’t attempt to lay down a tidy plot and story, but leaves issues unresolved, confronting the audience with sometimes uncomfortable questions.

Far removed from Brecht is David Mamet who is interviewed in David Mamet and the ‘Stupid F***ing Words’. I read American Buffalo in prison and was impressed, I have his movies and enjoyed them to, do not care for his politics, but meeting him in this interview was stimulating - and amusing, if you like curmudgeons. (I do, being one).

And even further out is a review from The Bulwark, Moliere, for Love and Laughter.

The four-hundredth anniversary earlier this year of the birth of Molière—one of the pillars of French culture and one of the greatest playwrights in the Western literary tradition—was not a date met with great fanfare in the United States. Nonetheless, it was marked with a literary event that deserves ample acclaim: the publication by the Library of America of a two-volume collection of Molière plays exquisitely translated by the great twentieth-century American poet Richard Wilbur (1921–2017).

And Molière is worth reading and seen. I have done both. He still skewers humanity's foibles with only one competitor - Shakespeare.

sch 5/27/22