Theaters set table for smorgasbord of works by 'Mack the Knife' team

On Monday night, five theater companies are joining forces to present an evening of little-known works by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill.

The show, called the "Brecht/Weill Smorgasbord," is part of a semester-long celebration of the two artists organized by the University of Minnesota.

The Brecht/Weill celebration is the result of a happy coincidence. The University of Minnesota's Theater Department had decided to stage Bertolt Brecht's "Threepenny Opera" the same semester that the university opera program had chosen to produce Kurt Weill's "Lady in the Dark."

Theater Professor Lisa Channer and her fellow faculty saw an opportunity to work together to explore the legacy of these two German artists.

"The big question being, why do they still matter?" she asked. "Why do we care? Or should we? Do we?"

Brecht and Weill collaborated with one another for only a few years in the late 1920s, but their time together produced some of their most successful work, most notably "The Threepenny Opera," with its endlessly adapted ballad, "Mack the Knife."

Both Brecht and Weill fled Nazi Germany and continued to produce work separately. To this day, Channer said, Brecht remains a giant in Western theater: "We all, whether we know it fully or not, we stand upon his shoulders."

Channer explained that Brecht came along at a time when audiences needed something other than bourgeois art to cope with what was happening in the world.

"World War I had happened," she said. "How do you understand that a machine gun can mow down people? Nerve gas has just killed — how much of Europe was killed with World War I? Huge swaths of the population just fell. How do you then go sit in a theater with a living-room set and watch a play about nice people, living well, having manners?"

Brecht is considered the father of "epic theater." He believed that theater should be a vehicle for social change, and cause audiences to reflect deeply on life.

He accomplished this, Channer said, by pairing tragedy and comedy. He'd get audiences emotionally involved, and then purposefully remind them that what they were watching wasn't real.

"I think that's why I love Brecht," she said. "He's the magician who's showing you how to do the tricks, and then you can make your own tricks."

As members of Theatre Novi Most rehearsed a scene for their part in the Brecht/Weill Smorgasbord, university professor and dramaturge Matthias Rothe explained that the scenes selected for Monday's performance come from works that were seldom produced — or, in some cases, never finished.

"This is a different Brecht," he said. "It's almost a surrealist Brecht. The pieces are like dreams, or nightmares. They are at the same time hilarious and very oppressive and sinister. They are a meditation on his contemporary society which I think translates very well to our current societies."

In addition to staging shows, the university faculty has organized panel discussions, bringing in such national experts as Liz Diamond of the Yale School of Drama. She said it's unfortunate that Bertolt Brecht is often remembered as a stuffy intellectual.

"Brecht is really, really deviant and funny and subversive and crazy," she said.

Diamond said Brecht believed that the comic actor is the great actor:

"Because that is the actor who can both stand outside and stand inside the role, and who can discover what you might call the Freudian slips within the individual that actually reveal the unrecognized appetite that's actually driving the ostensibly deeply thought-through behavior," she said. "And that is a beautifully humanistic, compassionate way of viewing human behavior."

The Brecht/Weill Smorgasbord takes place Monday night at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. The University of Minnesota will present Kurt Weill's "Lady in the Dark" April 14 through April 17 at Ted Mann Concert Hall.