Of Necessary Distance

THREE FIGURES ceremonially link hands on the shoulders of a kneeling fourth, chanting revolutionary phrases. One draws back his hand into pistol shape: the kneeling figure shouts "yes"; the other fires. All four slump forward; the audience groans; and the play has started.

So begins The Measures Taken, with an intense, direct event. But from this point on, the play acquires distance, sets up a complicated perspective, provides considered justification for the shocking measure which has just been taken.

A chorus-jury files in, and the four figures turn into leaders explaining their reasons for the execution of a certain "Young Comrade." A series of scenes portrays Young Comrade's repeated betrayals of the group. Brecht never takes long to come to the point, and soon the moral is clear: pity for the oppressed is not always in order, revolutionary action is not always in order, doing what is human is not always in order. What is necessary for the Revolution is distance: heroes cannot make the Revolution; only the party can, through the objective truth of its ideology. "The individual has only two eyes; the party has a thousand."

In sheer dramatics as well as theatrics, Brecht is the great modern master of distancing, the inventor of the so-called "alienation effect," which seeks to keep the auditor from mere emotional involvement, which rationalizes the theater in order to teach rational lessons. He sets his plays in a real but simpler world. The setting here is Mukden, the revolutionary leaders come from Moscow; yet the focus is not on these real-world places but on the wider-reaching lessons involved.

The language of The Measures Taken, ceremonial and ideological at the same time, grows distant in repetition and aphorism. "The rope that cuts our backs lasts longer than ourselves," chant the boatmen that Young Comrade pities. "We must be blank pages on which the Revolution can write itself," say the leaders.

From the first moments, the action is set off as a play within a play. Each scene played by the agitators, moreover, is set off by their explanations, and directors Martin Andrucki and Frank Kinahan are careful to have each actor preserve the particularity of each of his different roles. Brecht is a master at building convincing symmetry into a play, and here the recurrent exclamations and questions of the chorus, either individual or collective, are set into dialogue with the group of leaders.

But the chorus-jury is more important as a sort of model audience teaching the real audience how it should be reacting to the leaders' reenactments. At times it shows pity, at times anger, but the leaders are always able to return it to reason, simultaneously persuading the real audience.

YOUNG COMRADE, the central figure of the play, is acted by each of the four leaders in turn, each donning a blue wool cap to indicate the role. Thus Young Comrade could have been male or female, heavy or thin; the role remains an abstraction, undiluted by personality. Seen from a distance, in multiple portrayals, heroes disappear and abstract characters take their place.

Brecht is best produced with the simplest of scenery, as the current production illustrates amply. The stage takes on two foci: the massed chorus and the red box which the leaders use as a multi-purpose prop for their scenarios. Three objects make up a sort of backdrop. A sign-board carrying the number and title of the current scene expresses the movement of the play and places each scene in the whole. A map of Mukden and environs locates the action in space. A poster of Lenin indicates the dominating ideology, and shows that the whole dramatic inquest is taking place after the success of the Revolution.

Uniform costuming of the chorus in white shirts and dark pants draws them together and recalls the dress of marching Young Pioneers. The four leaders' interchangeability in political and dramatic roles is embodied by their blue work clothes; black masks become their political disguises. Could there be an easier way to put on a role than simply putting on a cap, as the four leaders do to play Young Comrade?

BECAUSE Brecht builds distance into his plays, because dramatic language has become propaganda and ironic formula, acting can more effectively be recitation than it can be effusion. "The word has become a weapon in the class struggle," one leader says. This might also mean that it is hard to mis-act a Brecht play, since the current production, only fairly acted by normal standards, succeeds splendidly both as theater and as lesson. Produced by Humanities 96v, The Measures Taken represents a bona-fide learning experience. For the work of a playwright who sought always to give perspective, to express totality, to give distance, and above all to teach, this is only appropriate.