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BERTOLT BRECHT: ESSENTIAL READING LIST

  • Mother Courage and Her Children - One of several plays that Brecht wrote to counter the rise of Fascism, Mother Courage follows a wily canteen woman who is determined to make her living from the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Swiss Cheese, Eilif, and Katrin, to the same war from which she sought to profit.
  • Life of Galileo - Brecht deals with the themes of dogmatism and oppression in this play about the life and persecution of the great Italian physicist, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo Galilei.
  • The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui - In this satire of Hitler's Nazi Germany, Bertolt Brecht chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition.
  • The Caucasian Chalk Circle - Set against the backdrop of a land dispute following World War II, the play dramatizes a parable about two women who each claim custody of the same child.
  • The Threepenny Opera - In this musical, adapted from John Gay's 1728 operatic satire, The Beggar's Opera, Brecht and Kurt Weill offer an entertaining socialist critique of the capitalist world.
  • Baal - Brecht's first full-length play, Baal traces the decline of a drunken and dissolute poet, an anti-hero who rejects the conventions and trappings of polite society, leaving in his wake the corpses of deflowered maidens and murdered friends.
  • Antigone - Brecht's take on Sophocles' classic tragedy.
  • If you like these plays, you may also like Three Plays of the Absurd, a collection of new absurdist comedies with a dark side.

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