When Brecht Goes Bad: Race, Fictions, and the Fight for Humanity in the Classroom

My students blew me away today.

We read Dea Loher’s Innocence, which was produced in 2012 and has remained a German theatrical example of one of three productions that attempted to use blackface that year.

The play by itself was confusing without context or description supporting the theatrical techniques Loher was using. Although I had never read Brecht directly next to Loher, it’s clear that this author’s use of scene headings, characters speaking to the audience, and its overtly political nature, was contributing to the wealth of Brechtian theatre. Brecht introduced these elements into his theatre to create distance between the audience and performers— he intended to alienate the spectators so that they would be forced to think on what they were seeing, so that they would not reproduce the biases and assumptions of the playwright, but think for themselves. As a result, I assigned Brecht’s non-fiction “A Short Organum on the Theatre,” along with a few other essays. This certainly helped to give context, explain the non-conventional theatrical devices, and allow them to discover meaning innate to the play on their own.

The last reading I assigned for this unit was “Reclaiming Innocence” by Black British mother, activist, actress, author, and editor Sharon Dodua Otoo, who offers the only real critique I’ve read thus far on this production that does not in the end tacitly approve of the play’s existence. Conversely, it places the performance in a genealogy of raced theatre making. Although I was excited to provide my students reading that would allow them to make even more connections with the text, what happened next, was unexpected.

My students’ commentary included :

“We all just want to be seen as human.”

“Labels get in the way.”

“Brecht’s alienation technique was designed to awaken sensibilities to the political state of the world, but in this play it works to reproduce the order of things and make the audience complicit.”

What an observation. Quickly, they identified contemporary theatre makers using Brecht in a way he never intended. As a result, they identified power that seeks points for having control over conversations on race, while accidentally reproducing that which they claim to stand against. I’ve been a part of the conversation on this play for so long that it took me by surprise when they made this connection. It was riveting to experience these students renew my vision on these events. They introduced hope for me that young people increasingly see injustice far easily than the rest of us.