ABSTRACT
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), born to a middle-class family in the German town of Augsburg, is a seminal figure in the development of political theatre theories and practices around the world. Brecht was a total theatre man: director, playwright, manager, theorist, critic, and poet. He challenged Aristotelian assumptions, developing practices and theories of how acting could consciously make spectators critical observers and active participants in the creation of meaning on stage and in the audience. Through the actor’s use of “alienation,” and Gestus, the playwright’s use of “epic” structure, and the spectator’s consequent active fillingin of the links between parts, Brecht reoriented twentieth-century understanding of performance away from the authority of the playwright to the circulation of meaning among playwright, actor, and spectator.
