THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411080101
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater review
SOURCE: MONTAGUE GAMMON III
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Productions of Bertolt Brecht's plays are a little more common in local theaters than radical socialists are in contemporary American politics. The scarcity of each may be interrelated; Brecht's leftist philosophies have lost the popular appeal they had in the late '60s and early '70s.
Brecht's dramatic theories also can mitigate against the popularity of his plays. His concept of alienation in drama, subject of innumerable undergraduate papers, aims to block the audience's emotional involvement with the production so that they may instead receive the content on an intellectual level.
Brecht's considerable historical importance to all theater, combined with the political and dramatic underpinnings of his work, makes academic companies the usual venue for his scripts. So it is that Virginia Wesleyan College is staging his most widely known piece, ``The Threepenny Opera.''
It's been almost 40 years since a popular version of this musical's song ``Mac the Knife'' could be heard regularly on Norfolk's jukeboxes, and more than 65 years since Brecht wrote this tale of the early Victorian London underworld.
Marxism had dissolved, and liberal activism is in flight. Yet the roots of Brecht's social discontent and of his call for radical social action are the same which support one stalk of the conservatism that now occupies America's stage.
The common top root of those apparently divergent viewpoints is a wholesale distrust of established institutions. Brecht drew parallels between the career criminal Macheath on one hand and the captains of industry and politics on the other. His anti-hero was a gangster, a robber, perhaps a murderer and a rapist, and Brecht saw business, military political leaders as an alliance of robbers, murderers and swindlers.
That same scorn, usually voiced with less vehemence, surfaces about this time every other November in the ``throw the bums out'' movements that have varying degrees of success.
One hopes neither the political nor the dramatic lesson is not lost on the students who perform in ``The Threepenny Opera,'' or who work backstage or see it, because it is for their education that this show and all academic theater exists.
That is why Professor Rick Hite, who does a fine job as the on-artists' commander Mr. J.J. Peachum, belongs on the same stage with his inexperienced students. The young performers obviously aren't in his league, but they can learn far more from sharing a scene with an accomplished veteran than by watching him, or themselves, act.
There are certainly students whose potential is unmistakable. Juliet Hutchens distinguishes herself as the innocent Polly Peachum who marries Macheath and then assumes control of his enterprises when he absents himself. Jason Stiles has the right feel for the bandit captain, and Tom Dean is genuinely funny as the silly and corrupt Police Commissioner.
In smaller roles Steven Filer Murray and Susan Waskey have the sharp touch that sets them apart, though all the cast members invested commitment and hard work in this show.
In the same weekend that VWC opened ``Threepenny Opera,'' Norfolk State revived ``Selma,'' a musical about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. ODU premiered ``Burning Azaleas,'' about an adolescent radical, and the Governor's Magnet School provided a look at the politics of an epidemic with ``The Living.''
What a very interesting weekend! Is there a trend here, or is the number of political themes just a coincidence? by CNB