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| Tom Crawley, Jerry Mayer, Jim Carrington, Chris McCann, Susan Topping. |
THE MEASURES TAKEN
[Drama/China/German/Politics] A: Bertolt Brecht; TR: Eric Bentley; D: Leonard
Shapiro; M: Hans Eisler; P: New York Shakespeare Festival; T: Public
Theater/Little Theater (OB); 10/4/74-5/18/75 (102)
This was the first professional New York production of
Brecht’s 1930, 70-minute, agitprop drama. I myself, as an undergraduate, had
directed it at Brooklyn College in 1962, in what may have been its first
English-language staging anywhere. The present production was by the Shaliko
Company, founded by a group of New York University students devoted to
experimental theatre. u
The play is about the official investigation by the
Communist Party into the killing of a Chinese communist agent by his four
comrades during a 1919 mission in Mukden. This offbeat work was given a decent
rendering at the Public, where Shaliko had been provided with a residency. During
part of its run, the play was performed in repertory with Ibsen’s Ghosts, reported on in a previous
entry.
Called a lehrstücke or “teaching piece” by its author, The Measures Taken had limited appeal to a New York audience of 1974, especially in its overtly Marxist didacticism. Yet its controversial theme—whether the killing of a party member whose compassionate ideas were at variance with the strict party line was justified or not—still held much interest. To further intensify involvement, the production incorporated audience participation by requesting its opinion, a notion that did not always sit well with some of those attending.
Clive Barnes would have preferred
a “more interesting” staging instead of the drily intellectual event he
witnessed. The lack of an effective choral approach to the singing of Hans
Eisler’s music disturbed Martin Gottfried, and Douglas Watt was unhappy with
the “noisy and tiresome” proceedings. However, Jack Kroll said the actors “hurl
themselves into this locomotive of a play with blazing ardor.” None of the
critics appreciated the device of questioning the audience, although Watt was “somewhat
startled to hear some of [his] fellow reviewers respond.”
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