Read/Discuss: "Saint Joan of the Stockyards" by Bertholdt Brecht
Details
In our Tuesday play-readings, the text is screen-shared. No experience in reading aloud or advance preparation necessary. We assign roles by scene and try to assign the reading evenly.
Over the course of several months, we focus on a particular playwright. This will be our last Brecht play before we start in on G.B. Shaw's "Saint Joan".
In this session, we will start with Section 9(h) and complete the play. A speed recap will be provided for those joining for the first time.
Note: newcomers who arrive late may not be admitted. If you are a regular, then no worries. This event is a cross-post, so there will be more readers then you see here.
(Wiki:) Saint Joan of the Stockyards (German: Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe) is a play written by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht between 1929 and 1931, after the success of his musical The Threepenny Opera and during the period of his radical experimental work with the Lehrstücke. It is based on the musical that he co-authored with Elisabeth Hauptmann, Happy End (1929).[1]
In this version of the story of Joan of Arc, Brecht transforms her into "Joan Dark", a member of the "Black Straw Hats" (a Salvation Army-like group) in 20th-century Chicago. The play charts Joan's battle with Pierpont Mauler, the unctuous owner of a meat-packing plant. Like her namesake, Joan is a doomed woman, a martyr and (initially, at least) an innocent in a world of strike-breakers, fat cats, and penniless workers. Like many of Brecht's plays it is laced with humor and songs as part of its epic dramaturgical structure and deals with the theme of emancipation from material suffering and exploitation.[2]