The Ethics of Wealth: "The Exception and the Rule"

For my second outside event, I saw a production of Bertolt Brecht's learning play ("Lehrstücke") "The Exception and the Rule" at the Nitery.  It was directed by Professor Rush Rehm of the Classics and Theater and Performance Studies departments and sponsored by Ethics in Society and Stanford Summer Theater.

The play is about an oil merchant who has to race across the Yahi Desert in order to close an important deal.  The merchant travels with a working-class "coolie".  On their journey, the merchant's distrust of the honest coolie erupts when the coolie offers the last of their water to the merchant.  The merchant, thinking the coolie is trying to kill him with a rock because the coolie surely harbors feelings of antagonism towards him, impulsively shoots and kills the coolie.  In court later on, the merchant is acquitted for the murder, in spite of the fact that evidence proves that the coolie was only handing him a canteen of water, because the merchant acted in self-defense and - in the moment - could not have known better.

Rehm's production - and likely Brecht's text, which I hadn't read beforehand - vehemently paints the merchant and the legal system as corrupt.  Before the incident of the murder, the merchant - driven by capitalistic greed - had systematically mistreated the coolie and even violently threatened the coolie so that he would cross a dangerous river.  The merchant himself recognized that he had given the coolie reason to hate him, reason to revolt, and this recognition is what ultimately made him shoot the coolie.  So the merchant did in a sense shoot the coolie out of self-defense, but the merchant also created the unfavorable situation in which he would have to be in a position of self-defense.  And in fact, he was blind to the fact that the coolie was not in fact angry; he couldn't understand the coolie's fundamental generosity and good will.

This play is, of course, stylistically Brechtian in that the actors never fully become the characters and the audience is never meant to see the actors as the characters.  This kind of formal remove is evident in the play's prologue and epilogue, in which all the actors, chorus-like, recite the play's main theme, namely that the system is cruel and absurd and that these absurdities are generally taken as the rule, whereas moments of humanity and goodness are counted as exceptions.  The play also features songs, which abruptly bring us out of the dramatic mode and further alienate us from a straightforward, traditional experience of the story.  Rehm also worked hard with his actors to stifle moments of sympathy, especially in the rehearsal process when the actors desperately wanted to care for the characters they played.  Rehm activated a grammar of physical, often unnatural, movements to highlight the alien quality of the players, which would ultimately allow the audience to step back from the play and analyze it and by extension its content more critically and objectively.

Although Rehm certainly achieved a kind of distance between his actors and the characters they played, the production as a whole came off as a bit silly.  I think the actors ultimately delivered their lines in a very declarative way, which, yes, can yield a Brechtian feel.  And their gestures were similarly declarative, but in a way that ultimately felt elementary and basic.  There is a way to do Brecht that is precise and carefully choreographed, which is how Robert Wilson does Brecht, that does what Rehm set out to do but in a much more beautiful, intentional, and crafted way.  Even on a limited budget, Brecht doesn't have to be simplistic.  The Schaubühne Berlin put on a great production of "The Good Person of Szechwan" that was far less high-tech than Wilson's Threepenny Opera but didn't feel as necessarily stilted as Rehm's production did.  Although "The Exception and the Rule" is a learning play, and is  perhaps more didactic than his other works, I don't think it has to feel like a school play, by which I mean it doesn't have to feel constrained by its time and place to not carry a greater aesthetic vision.

To tie this all back to narrative theory, I think Brecht offers a really strange take on narrative because he wants to suck us dry of empathy by using the formal representation of the narrative to make us consider the content of the narrative in a very analytic, distant way.  What would a novel that aims to do that look like?  I guess what the prose would have to do is force us not to get swept up into the story and the characters.  My impulse is to say that stripped down prose accomplishes this, but I don't think that's necessarily true, because short choppy sentences don't necessarily have a distancing effect.  It would probably have to be on the structural level, like be written from a weird distant perspective or in a chronologically disorienting way that constantly points to its own formal weirdness.  Probably something really annoyingly postmodern.