'Great Directors at Work'

by Kirk Woodward 

[Kirk, who, ROTters will know, is a longtime friend, has been a prolific contributor to Rick On Theater since its inception in 2009.  He’s written on many topics, mostly theatrical and musical (but not exclusively), and since one of his many talents is as a director, a number of his ROT posts have been about directors and directing.

[Kirk’s directorial articles for this blog include “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4 June 2010; “Directing Twelfth Night for Children,” 16 and 19 December 2010; “Saints of the Theater,” 30 December 2011; “Reflections On Directing,” 11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013; “Evaluating A Director,” 1 March 2017; “Thoughts On Rehearsals,” 26 December 2017; “George Abbott,” 14 October 2018; “On Directing Shakespeare,” 1 March 2019; “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” 25 June 2019; “The Producer and the Play,” 20 July 2023; and “A Directing Experience,” 13 and 16 October 2023.

[It goes without saying—but I will anyway—that many of Kirk’s other theater posts, in particular, his performance reports, also draw on his directorial experience.  All told, Kirk’s contributions to ROT number something over a hundred.

[Kirk’s current post, “Great Directors at Work,” is a report on the book of that title by David Richard Jones.  It’s a run-down, according to Jones’s lights, of the directorial careers and techniques of four prominent stage directors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook.  As significant as this book is—I’ve had a copy in my library for many years—Jones isn’t all that well known.  I couldn’t even find his birth year listed anywhere.

[David Richard Jones is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, where he also taught courses in the Department of Theatre and Dance.  He taught Shakespeare as well as modern and contemporary drama at UNM since 1971.  He’s also devised educational programs involving humanities lecturers and booklets for high school teachers at professional theaters in New York and New Mexico.

[Jones was the founding artistic director of the Vortex Theatre in Albuquerque (1976-78); Vortex, a purveyor of classic contemporary, and cutting-edge theater, is Albuquerque’s oldest continuously-running black box playhouse.  He was also the founding artistic director of Will Power, the Vortex Theatre’s summer Shakespeare repertory launched in 2010, and of the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival in 2014 and 2015. 

[Also a freelance theater director who’s directed over 50 productions of classics, contemporary plays, musicals, and operas in English and Spanish, including productions in Mexico and Venezuela, Jones’s directing experience includes professional, community, and educational productions of many Shakespeare plays, including three versions of Hamlet, two of As You Like It, plus King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and Much Ado About Nothing.

[In addition to Great Directors at Work (University of California Press, 1986), Jones is the editor of New Mexico Plays (University of New Mexico Press, 1989), an anthology of then-recent original dramas by New Mexican playwrights.  It presents a contemporary vision of the modern New Mexican landscape in plays by native New Mexican dramatists (plus one 20-year transplant) that all take place in New Mexico and are about subjects and characters New Mexicans might know.

[When Kirk observed, “Some productions today . . . seem to be more about the director than the playwright,” he added that “Jones does not decry this situation.”  This suggests that Jones put great store in directorial “independence and power,” which can be seen, perhaps, in the descriptions of some of his Shakespearean productions.  From the pages of the Weekly Alibi, a news, arts, culture, and entertainment newspaper and website in Albuquerque:

The Vortex Theatre’s version of the play [King Lear (2008)] takes place against the backdrop of World War II.

The Vortex version of Much Ado About Nothing [2010] is set in the Roaring ’20s.  Think flappers, bon vivants, martinis, cigarettes and lawn games.  Think The Great Gatsby.

Jones’s production [of Hamlet (2016)] incorporates modern props and dress in order to “eliminate a layer of interference between the audience and the play” and this is done holistically.  Cell phones, for example, are incorporated not as an afterthought, but as an essential vehicle to pushing the plot forward, potentially rife with meaning.

[Those notices were generally mixed: some of Jones’s directorial choices worked for the reviewers and some didn’t.  That’s about par, I’d say.]

At the conclusion of a production of Antigone by the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles (c. 497/6-406/5) about which I have written elsewhere in this blog (“A Directing Experience,” posted on Rick On Theater on 13 and 16 October), the cast gave me, as associate director, a book called Great Directors at Work, presumably not because I am one, but in order to help me become one.

In any case I have found the book to be of unusual interest. Published in 1986, its author is David Richard Jones, now professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, who has taught both English and Theatre Arts there. (It’s published by the University of California Press.)

Jones wrote his book while the prestige of the field of directing was on an upswing that continues to this day:

I am inclined to accept the historical fact that directors have become central to modern theatre and then to consider a corollary, that modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change.

Since he wrote that sentence, directors have become even more central to the theatrical experience, certainly in the United States. Jones revels in that fact:

Today’s personally expressive, independently creative directors testify to the historic reality of this drive for imaginative freedom, that is, to the most self-consciously artistic impulses within the ranks.

Some productions today – even of plays written long ago – seem to be more about the director than the playwright. [For what I consider an example of this, see my report on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie as staged by Sam Gold, posted on 8 April 2017. ~Rick] Jones does not decry this situation:

At least in the United States, it seems that the director has moved a desk into the playwright’s workroom, the better to channel inspiration from the beginning.

So “directorial authority” comes down to independence and power.

If sufficiently old-fashioned (like myself), one can argue that on the contrary “the play’s the thing,” and the Dramatists Guild would agree (sometimes in court), claiming that a director’s primary function is to make sure the author’s work itself is faithfully presented. Jones demurs:

How can a director be said to create if the assignment is merely to stage someone else’s play? That is not creating to a very meaningful degree, is it?

Jones relates the idea of “power directors” and their work to other issues:

We disagree in a muddled way about whether directing is an art, about what the art consists of, about what its kinds or “isms” might be, about its vocabulary, and about much more that is equally important to a sophisticated treatment of the subject.

For example, he pleads for a more robust vocabulary to describe a director’s work – for a better definition of “director” itself, for a canon of examples of directing that can serve as models, for precision in the use of words like “style,” “image,” and “presence.” He offers suggestions for some of these, but primarily he is more concerned that we understand that directing today is “an activity that no longer depends on preexistent literature.” He feels this is for the better:

I am inclined to accept the historical fact that directors have become central to modern theatre and then to consider a corollary, that modern theatre is no doubt more sophisticated and more artistic for that change.

With the courage of his convictions, he claims that

1880-1980 is the third great age of Western drama, an era comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare in such respects as duration, number of productions, cultural reverberation, and artistic achievement.

For me, sneaking in the words “artistic achievement” in the above quotation is begging the question. However, Jones sees the history of directing as progress:

So “directorial authority” comes down to independence and power. The independence I describe is not only from script or collaboration, but just as importantly from dead traditions and bad habits, from rotten cliches, stale thoughts, and poor assumptions about what theatrical art can or cannot be.

Perhaps. To objections, Jones says that he’s talking about the present situation, and that if we don’t like it, we should change it – which of course is easier said than done. In any case, I found much of the material in this book to be a revelation, because its “main event” is a stimulating discussion of four productions by four directors: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook.

One problem with such a discussion is that theater is an ephemeral art. Some aspects of it can be captured with video recording, but by its nature such recording is selective – it can’t include every aspect of a theatrical performance.  Jones avoids this difficulty by centering his work on his four directors’ written examinations of the plays they stage (also utilizing reviews, journals, and other artifacts).

What in the book was revelatory for me, then? In the case of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938 – Jones’ spelling of his name), the production Jones chooses to write about is the famous Moscow Art Theatre’s production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) in 1898. This production established the MAT as one of the leading theaters in Russia (and subsequently in the world).

I assumed this Seagull presentation was a Stanislavsky production. In fact he directed fewer than half the rehearsals for the play. Equally surprising, he spent a month and a half in isolation working out a detailed plan for the production. What’s surprising about that?

Today, at least in the United States, Stanislavsky’s name is associated with mental acting work, in particular the technique of emotional recall promoted by Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Stanislavsky certainly focused on similar work during much of his career.

However, in his rehearsal plan for The Seagull, Stanislavsky focused almost entirely on physical actions, to a level of detail hard to believe, except that we’ve got the written notes to prove it. For example, at the beginning of Act 3 of the play:

Jumping to his feet, he runs to Miss Arkadina; speaks boldly, forcefully, confidently. Turning round to him, Miss Arkadina looks straight into his eyes. She has understood everything. A pause. She shakes her head. Trigorin deflates completely, says in a faltering, imploring voice, ‘Let’s, please’ and sits down on a chair despondently.

Almost any actors could follow these instructions and give decent renderings of their roles, without any inner life. More precisely, “inner life” would inevitably follow as a result of these “external” instructions. Over his career Stanislavsky moved between the two poles of the internal and the external.

At the end of his life he was still exploring the effect of the physical on the emotional. Many actors shy away from this kind of work because they are afraid the results will be cliched and superficial, and certainly that’s a danger if the physical work itself is cliched and superficial. However, as Stanislavsky demonstrated, it doesn’t have to be.

Here are two personal experiences along this line. I studied acting for several years at the HB Studio in New York with Elizabeth Dillon (see “Portrait of a Mentor” by Alan Geller, posted on ROT on 30 July 2020), wonderful teacher who was thoroughly conversant with Stanislavsky’s approach(es) as she had learned them from Bobby Lewis, Stella Adler, and Uta Hagen. I brought a scene into class and I was absolutely awful in it.

Giving instructions for a repeat of the scene, she said to me, “Darling, all I want you to do is . . .” and she gave me a series of physical instructions – on this line cross to the desk, on this word pick up a pencil, and so on. When we did the scene again it worked like a charm.

Somewhat similarly, a few years ago in New York I directed a two-character one act play. One of the actors took to his part immediately and was able to take detailed character notes. The other could not “get” his role at all. So, remembering Elizabeth’s advice, I gave him physical instructions for every moment of his role. He immediately played it exactly the way I felt the playwright had intended.

To see Stanislavsky working this same way is fascinating. The use of what is sometimes called a “score of physical actions” is by no means his total approach, but it is important, and seeing his thoroughness in preparing his “score” for The Seagull is inspirational (see “Ryszard Cieślak,” 5 February 2020, and “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021; also briefly, “‘The Stone in the Soup’ – Excerpts: Part 2” by Tom Crawley, 17 April 2011 – all descriptions of an actor using a score). It encourages me to prepare more diligently in my own directing work.

On, then, to Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), well known for his plays (including Mother Courage and Her Children, first performed in 1941), his theory of the “alienation effect” (as it is often translated in English), and his thoroughgoing Marxist orientation. (For comments on Brecht’s concept and the translation of the name, see “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations: Verfremdungseffekt,” 4 July 2010.)

Jones, referring primarily to Brecht’s production of Mother Courage in Berlin in 1949, uses as his text an enormous “model book” that Brecht created for that production, called Couragemodell 1949. Brecht’s idea was to make as complete as possible an account (including the script, numerous notes, and abundant photographs) of a successful production that other directors could follow.

Whether the model book has ever been used in that way in productions beyond Brecht’s own company (the Berliner Ensemble) is not clear to me. However, it is a remarkable resource for learning about how Brecht worked, and Jones’ account of it clarifies many aspects of Brecht’s work.

In the first place, he makes it clear that whatever Brecht’s theories of theater may have been at a given time (like Stanislavsky, he was given to clarifying, expanding, or just plain changing his ideas as he felt necessary), as a director he did not promote his theories in front of his casts. He discouraged discussion in rehearsal. “Brecht would say that he wanted no discussions in rehearsal – it would have to be tried,” wrote the director Carl Weber (1925-2016), who worked with him.

What Brecht did instead of promoting ideas is fascinating: he worked in extreme detail (as did Stanislavsky on The Seagull) and he focused that detail on individual moments in the play, avoiding generalizing, and shaping each moment of the play as if nothing followed it,

freezing a motion or condition; stopping the action for a closer, longer look; isolating a detail or moment or element or shading and then expanding it into meaning, into an image.

One of Brecht’s co-workers said that Brecht achieved his results by accumulation of “a large number of details, some of them very small.” Obviously this approach takes a great deal of time to prepare a play, and Brecht knew this, writing in the model book that

The pace at rehearsals should be slow, if only to make it possible to work out details; determining the pace of the production is another matter and should come later.

Jones says that there is actually little in the model book about the pacing of the entire play, certainly no indication of whether it should be “slow” or “fast” at any point. It should be true, Brecht insisted, conforming to the reality of the moment and also reflecting (as was second nature for Brecht) its social meaning.

Meaning conveyed through specific detail was fundamental to Brecht’s theatrical art, and he insisted on it from his earliest days as a director. . . . He placed one thing after another until a final conclusion was obvious.

In other words, Brecht deeply embodied his ideas in behavior. “Without details there are no ‘concepts’ in  Brecht’s theatre, no themes, no broad intellectual perspectives or messages,” Jones writes. I and others have often referred to productions as “Brechtian” without understanding Brecht's approach, and I am grateful to Jones for clarifying this point, and a great deal more.

Because Jones’ book is so full of worthwhile information, I will not go into equal detail about the last two directors he covers in his book, Elia Kazan (1909-2003) and Peter Brook (1925-2022). However, it is worth noting that all four of the directors discussed in the book are workers of astonishing thoroughness, all highly intentional in their work.

Elia Kazan was the acknowledged leader in direction on Broadway beginning with his work with the Group Theatre in the 1930s and moving through the next two decades, until he abandoned the theater for movies.  Kazan was a director with energy and confidence:

. . . he was always his own director, always his own man. In his words, “I work on the premise that the audience will like to see what I like to make.” From the mid-1940s until the early 1960s, no American theatre director could point to a more distinguished career as justification for such artistic self-assertion.

Kazan describes his working method in three steps:

1.  “I put terrific stress on what the person wants and why he wants it. What makes it meaningful for him. I don’t start on how he goes about getting it until I get him wanting it.

2.  Introduce the actor to “the circumstances under which he behaves – what happens before, and so on.”

3.  “I will say nothing to an actor that cannot be translated directly into action.” “The life of a play is in behavior.” “I try to find the physical behavior without preconception on my part if possible, but from what the actor does to achieve his objective under the circumstances.”

One notices that, although Kazan’s tone is firm, he leaves room for what the actor brings to the role. Directors may be tempted to think that the actor can do nothing without them. Kazan did not make this mistake.

The material of my profession is the lives the actors have lived up to now.

At the same time his preparation is thorough:

Kazan has said that directing is “half conceptual, the core of it – you get into what the events mean, what you’re trying to express,” and half executive, “just work. But if you are careless with the first stage, you make something which is flaccid at its center.”

Jones uses the first production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) to examine how Kazan worked, and the story is thrilling. It includes tensions among actors, close and careful work with the author, and self-confidence when everyone around the play doubted its success.

Kazan was particularly known for the energy his productions displayed. The critic Eric Bentley (1916-2020), who had major reservations about Kazan’s work, wrote:

Things move fast in a Kazan show. So fast you can’t see them. If anything is wrong, you don’t notice. If a false note is struck, its sound is at once covered by others. One has no time to think. “Drama isn’t time to think” the director seems to be saying, “it’s action that sweeps you off your feet.”

However, Jones makes it clear that while Kazan was committed to the use of powerful strokes in his productions, he didn’t make a fetish of them, realizing that they had to be grounded in the script itself:

I tried to think and feel like the author so that the play would be in the scale and in the mood, in the tempo and feeling of each writer. I tried to be the author.

Jones recounts times where Kazan literally “tried to be the author,” particularly with the plays of Tennessee Williams that he directed, but he denied that his intention was anything beyond putting on stage what the author had in mind – in a memorable phrase, “turning Psychology into Behavior.” In his late novel The Under-study (1975) one of his characters puts it this way:

The great plays were not great because of cleverness. Today it’s all experiments in style. What counts and what endures is meaning, theme. What you have to touch in an audience is their fundamental concerns, what’s worrying them now and always will, even if they don’t know it, the mind’s despair, the heart’s hope.

In the beginning of this article I noted Jones’ enthusiasm about the idea of the director as the primary artist of the theater. In Kazan’s work we can see a certain weakening of the playwright’s claim to be the major source of inspiration of a production. Peter Brook (1925-2022), Jones’ fourth and last subject, is a major director whose relationship to “texts” is even more fluid.

The play that Jones uses to illustrate this point is Brook’s famous Royal Shakespeare Company production of the 1963 play by Peter Weiss (1916-1982) entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, usually and mercifully referred to as Marat/Sade.

(I almost wish Jones had used Brook’s famous 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I saw first in London and then in the United States. Brook set the play in a box-like set and used circus techniques as the physical “language” of the play. It was I suppose the greatest production I’ve ever seen; it was dazzling but it never lost sight of Shakespeare’s play.)

Brook’s Marat/Sade began its life as a workshop on the subject of madness. A workshop, Jones says, is “a form of research,” frequently inspired by “a widespread dissatisfaction . . . with realistic acting and dramaturgy.” Jones suggests that the questions posed by Brook’s and similar workshops are:

How could Western theatre rediscover an expressive style beyond realistic portrayal of behavior?

How could the actor’s whole human mechanism be liberated to achieve this new expressiveness?

How could theatre distinguish itself from the more popular and automatic dramatic media?

How could actors and directors relate to the audience?

The ultimate goal of such workshops could be said to be “a theatre of sound of movement,” which, note, is not necessarily the same as “a theater of plays.” The relationship of performance to text, the proponents of the workshop approach posited, was something to explore – as the director and workshop leader Charles Marowitz (1934-2014) wrote, “as material that could be reworked and rethought” –  and not something to take for granted.

Brook said that his rehearsals had two parts, “looking for meaning and then making it meaningful” – again, to create content and then to apply it to a play. The process is strenuous; Brook’s workshop for Marat/Sade led the great actress Glenda Jackson (1936-2023), then at the early point of her career, to say that “we were all convinced that we were going mad.”

The resulting production was dazzling, validating Brook’s approach at least for the play he was working on.  Brook’s was not the only approach; other productions around the world took different approaches, again suggesting the idea that the “text” of the play was just that, a framework to be filled with content.

One should note that Brook’s work was never experimental in the sense of being tentative or vague. Brook began as a “conventional” director, and Jones stresses that he knew all the tricks:

For Brook, the problems of variety and pace were great opportunities. He has always preferred contrasts to similarities and jangles to chords, and he has theorized that variety is a necessary or structural element in modernist theater. . . . Brook’s career offers many proofs of his contention that pace is the “one god whom we all serve – whether in musicals or in melodramas or in the classics.”

But it was his determination to recreate the theatrical experience from the bottom up – to start completely anew every time, every production – that made him an icon in theater circles. The “workshop” was a fundamental instrument in his attempts, and videos of some of them can be seen on YouTube, for example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCmgkfEWN6s.

Is Brook’s approach widely used today? My impression is that it is not, certainly not extensively, partly because of financial restraints. In the United States the salaries of members of Actors Equity, the actors’ union, are carefully regulated, and there is no volunteering.

At the same time a workshop by definition is not a performance, so its capability for raising money is limited, and it usually has to be financed by grants and donations, which are not necessarily easy to come by. However, Brooks’ influence is not limited to one approach, and Jones looks at his work from other angles as well.

In this review I have tried to single out some highlights of this useful and provocative book, but I have barely scratched the surface. I personally have found the book inspirational; I intend to apply many of its insights to my own work if I possibly can. I would think that any director would benefit from reading this book; so would anyone interested in learning more about the countless variables that go into a theatrical production.

[When I read “Great Directors at Work,” I had a number of responses, mostly in support or illustration of Kirk’s comments on the book and Jones’s ideas about directing.  I’ve collected some of those reader responses to append here, at the end of the posting of Kirk’s report, just to continue the conversation.

[First, however, for ROTters who’ve been following the serialization of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,” which I’ve interrupted to post Kirk’s report: I’ll be publishing the next installment, Chapter 7, “What Is to Be Done?” on Thursday, 30 November.  I hope that you’ll all come back to ROT when I pick up that thread.

[When Kirk remarks, for instance, on the rise in significance of the director after Jones's book came out (1986), I thought of the establishment of the stage directors’ union, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC – now the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, or SDC) as a manifestation of this. 

[Though SSDC was founded in 1959 and Broadway producers recognized it in 1967, it wasn’t until eight years later that the union won the important litigation establishing that its members are employees. This set the precedent on which SDC bases its authority, affording it the recognition as a significant force in the theater.   

[Coincidentally—or maybe not—at about the same time, theatrical director Geoffrey Shlaes (1951-2016) launched the American Directors Institute.  ADI, founded in 1985, was intended to inform both theatergoers and members of the theater fraternity who aren’t directors what directors do, and to facilitate networking among directors and artistic directors and give them a forum for exchanging ideas about and techniques for directing.  ADI was dissolved in 1992.  (In the interest of full disclosure, Geoff engaged me in 1986 to launch and edit its newsletter, which I entitled Directors Notes; I turned the editorship over to a successor in 1988 before I went upstate to take a teaching job at a State University college.)

[When Kirk quotes Jones on "directorial authority," and equates it with “independence and power,” I remarked that Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) wrote in Vs. Meyerhold: On the Theatre (1912; as quoted in Alma Law and Mel Gordon’s Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia [1996]) that "the director [is] the 'author' of a theatrical production."  The innovative Russian director went on to explain: “He creates the performance text, determines its overall style and himself works out every stage action.”

[One reaction I had was to a turn of phrase Kirk used that relates to a pet peeve of mine: “begging the question.”  I note it here just to record my delight in its (correct) appearance on Rick On Theater.  My note in Kirk’s text was simply “Hooray!” because almost everyone who uses this expression—it often appears on TV on both news and commentary shows and in scripted series—misuses it.  I was delighted to see that Kirk didn’t. 

[As Marilyn vos Savant (b. 1946), the super-intelligent columnist (“Ask Marilyn” in Parade), explains that begging the question is a logical fallacy “also known as ‘circular reasoning’; it refers to the error of basing one’s conclusion on an assumption, often a form of the conclusion.” 

[Kirk was referring to the statement by Jones that the century between 1880 and 1980 was “comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare” with respect to its theater, for a list of reasons concluding with “artistic achievement.” 

[It was this last criterion that Kirk branded begging the question because for Jones to include it in his list, he had to assume that there’s a universally accepted standard of judgment by which the theater of the period would merit being labeled artistically significant.  There isn’t, so it’s just Jones’s opinion, and he uses it as evidence that the century’s theater was an “artistic achievement.”  That’s circular reasoning based on an assumption.  (The other three criteria are measurable or observable.)

[Vos Savant adds that the misuse “became so common that the term began to acquire a new meaning: ‘raises the question,’ followed by a question.”  The correct use of the phrase, the columnist points out, “is a complete statement.  No question follows.”  (On 8 April 2014, I added Savant’s column as a Comment to a blog post called “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014.)

[In regard to Kirk’s remarks on the "alienation effect," I referenced my comments on the Verfremdungseffekt and the translation of the name in "Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations" (4 July 2010).  Readers can call it up themselves (Rick On Theater: Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations), but I want to reiterate my objection to the common English rendering of the term.

[Kirk notes that Verfremdungseffekt, a word Brecht made up, “is often translated in English” as ‘alienation effect.’  That’s true, but it’s really a misleading expression.  Brecht never wanted to alienate the audience in the sense of making them unfriendly or hostile.  What he wanted was to let the spectators see ideas and images to which they’d become accustomed as if they were new and unfamiliar.  Brecht devised several techniques to de-familiarize what audiences were seeing so they would actively contemplate it anew, with a untainted perspective.

[The German verb verfremden doesn’t really exist, except in Brecht’s specific usage. Ver- is a prefix that sometimes means ‘to become . . . ,’ especially when affixed to an adjective.  The adjective fremd means ‘strange’ or ‘foreign,’ so, verfremden (-ung is the German gerund suffix, comparable to ‘-ing’ in English) would mean ‘to become strange’ or ‘to become unfamiliar.’  As slightly awkward as it is, I prefer “defamiliarizing effect” as a translation for Brecht’s word.

[Sticking with Bertolt Brecht for another moment, Kirk brings up the Brechtian tactic of invoking the “large number of details, some of them very small.” in his plays.  This is also the process of hyperreal theater—though the performance style is different.  In my post on "Hyperreal Theater" (16 January 2021), I compared several specifics of hyperreal style to Brechtian practices, though I didn't include this one.  Perhaps I should have.  It’s the attention to very specific detail in the characters’ behavior as well as the physical environment that creates the illusion of hyperreality.

[When he begins his report on Jones’s discussion of the work of Peter Brook, Kirk expresses the wish that Jones had chosen to analyze Brook’s celebrated circus-infused Midsummer Night’s Dream. On 6 November 1988, theater critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (1927-2023) published an essay in the New York Times’ "Arts and Leisure" section called “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?"  In it, he examines “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays,” dividing them into “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.”

[In the essay, Brustein calls Brook’s Midsummer one of "two fine examples of metaphorical theater" (the other is his 1962 Beckettian production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company), his label for the work of directors "attempt[ing] to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent—. . . since the director 'authors' the production much as the author writes the text." (Note the near-quotation of Meyerhold’s assertion I quoted above.) 

[I posted Brustein’s essay on ROT on 10 March 2011, and previously wrote a commentary on the article, "Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage," posted on 18 September 2009.]