Brechtian Acting Style

Great work yesterday everyone! A couple concerns that were mentioned to me yesterday I'd like to address here. First of all, people seemed confused about how they should perform characters in Brecht. There was some fear that, because in Brecht actors don't try to hide the fact that they're actors, that the text would be presented in an unemotional monotone. This isn't the case at all! Brecht didn't want to bore the audience, he just didn't want actors to try to be "realistic." He believed we shouldn't try to fool audience members into thinking that they were watching real people on stage (because he didn't think they'd be fooled anyway, no matter how good the acting was), but instead to say to the audience "Ok, we're going to pretend to be these characters, and everyone knows we're pretending, so lets have fun with it." That sense of fun is incredibly important in Brecht. The text should be delivered with great energy. Many of the characters (the Fat Prince, the Governors Wife, the Corporal) require over the top characterizations, almost like a cartoon. This is because Chalk Circle is, among other things, a satire, underlining the problems of society by exaggerating them. Those characters are written to be monstrous, and should be played with mounstrous abandon, because it's in that sort of overstatment that we see just how awful their counterparts in reality can be.

Ian