bertolt brecht was a revolutionary theater practitioner and the father of the “epic theater”. deeply political and grounded in brecht’s early involvement with marxism, the premise of epic was that an audience shouldn’t “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”, and should instead ask questions about how the characters ought to have acted.
brecht sometimes referred to his theater as “non-aristotelian”, but nonetheless agreed with aristotle that pleasure is “the noblest function we have found for the theater”; this simple appreciation of beauty is how we enjoy aristophanes or shakespeare. but he also felt that, in a world characterized by industry’s assertion of man over nature, “our whole way of appreciation” was out of date. our relationship with the world was different now, and this shift in power was reflected in politics, society, and economics, the realms in which decisions about industry are ultimately made.
to serve his political purpose, brecht constructed narratives that were so digestible that they seemed absurd, staged plays in distracting settings, and built direct references to pieces into their scripts by mentioning musical numbers and creating plays within plays.
all of this contributed to the verfremdungseffekt, a word brecht invented that is often referred to as the “distancing” effect. brecht implemented the effect to prompt the audience to look at the play like they might look at a watch for the first time: rather than simply seeing the hour, they should see the metal gears, the leather strap, the marble of the face, and how each of these pieces contributes to the ability of the wearer to read the time. this is what brecht meant when he said that the epic could “practically be cut up with a scissors”.
because he was a radical, in 1933 brecht fled germany. he eventually set up shop in the united states, where he later began to refer to his style as the “dialectical theater”. over time, epic has contributed to many movements in the theater, served as inspiration to bob dylan, and foreshadowed the rise of postmodern art.
see:
“a short organum for the theater” (1948)
“theater for learning” (1929)