The Fear and Misery of the Third Reich

Brechtian theory is all the rage with your smart act these days, and it is reliably reported that one cannot so much as whistle a few bars of "Mack the Knife" in the Square without some pomaded hood appearing from a crevice to explain the finer points of Alienation and Epic Theatre. That David Wheeler and his Theatre Company of Boston have decided to do Brecht their own way is, in itself, refreshing. Describing his brilliant production of Galileo in San Francisco, Herbert Blau wrote, "In approaching Galileo quite differently -- after years of pondering Brechtian notions -- my trust is that to be irreverent is to be more faithful." Probably so, but Wheeler's approach is not so much irreverent as insipid.

The Fear and Misery of the Third Reich is less a formal play than a collection of twenty-four scenes of life in the first half-decade of the "Thousand-Year Reich" -- nine of the vignettes were cut out of this production. Not all of the episodes are little masterpieces, but at its best the play, with its violent juxtapositions of theatrical styles, is a nightmare vision of the author's homeland going off its collective nut.

The problem is that, either by choice or technical incompetence, Wheeler and his actors don't vary their dramatic diction from scene to scene. The result is heavy-handed and curiously flat. We are left with the impression that Brecht is haltingly trying to say that it's hard cheese when Big People, like SS officers, make things tough on Little People, like Jews and Communists. I think the play is worth more than that. It is always simple-minded to present Brecht as a Champion of Liberal Causes, or to make his works play like second-rate Odets. But this production resembles nothing so much as an excursion into the Group Theatre of the thirties, and the cries of "No! No!" with which Wheeler has chosen to end the play haven't even the dramatic intensity of the Workers' decision to "Strike! Strike!" at the conclusion of Waiting for Lefty. As far as I could tell, the entire production was geared to a sort of "Lest We Forget" sentiment, complete with a quote from William L. Shirer in the program notes. Such a sentiment is hardly enough to motivate a dramatic experience, and it is dangerous for other reasons, I think -- because of its tendency (in plays like The Diary of Anne Frank) to blur into something than can only be called nostalgia.

The actors themselves were a pretty dreary lot with the exception of that brilliant clown Paul Benedict and the more-Aryan-than-Thou Larry Bryggman. Jo Lane was tedious in the virtuoso role of "The Jewish Wife" and Ted Kazanoff inadequate as the perplexed Judge in "Quest for Justice." Granted it was opening night, I wonder if that is any excuse in a professional company for the inordinate number of missed cues, dropped lines, and fumbled props. The one bright note was the new translation by the Harvard Graduate School's own Kenneth Tigar and Clayton Koelb, which sounded superior in many ways to the old Bentley version.

Still, one wishes that Tigar and Koelb had been able to avoid such anachronisms as "high muckamucks" and "better dead than red." And I confess to a sneaking preference for Bentley's title, The Private Life of the Master Race, which so perfectly suggests the wealth of Brechtian irony this production missed.