The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  During his lifetime—and well after—Brecht’s theories took on a life of their own, growing from simple guidelines into oversized rules. Verfremdung, which accurately if clumsily translates as “defamiliarization” or “making strange,” most often appears simply as “alienation” or “estrangement.” The concept lost more than meaning in translation. Members of Brecht’s ensemble later acknowledged that his theories did not meet his own standards for practicality. In a word, they did not work. Lenya said so. Eisler told him so to his face. Even Lorre gave voice to the same thought after Brecht’s death. Gerhard Bienert, who appeared in the 1932 Berlin production of The Mother, maintained that actors cannot distinguish between “being” and “pretending” to play a role. Roth also believed that Brecht eventually “realized that you can’t prevent the audience from developing a relationship with the actor.”

  Just how seriously Brecht took himself and his theories is as hard to say today as it was in 1929, when “you never knew what he meant,” said Roth. “He said one thing and meant something else. You had to get to know him…. I took it literally what he said very early until I learned to listen in between. And he said, ‘Don’t take it so god-damned seriously. Who cares, anyhow?’”

  Certainly not Gerhard Szczesny, who, in his book The Case Against Bertolt Brecht (1969), maintained that “what Brecht called his theories were on the whole very superficial and mechanical attempts to apply a simplistic Marxism to the dramatic structure of the pre-existing vaudeville theater of types.”

  Apparently, his ensemble of actors didn’t care either. “I am so tired of hearing that [Verfremdung],” said Lotte Lenya. “At that time there was no sign of alienation. It was just good acting or bad acting…. And I don’t think that alienation ever entered in—neither when we did Threepenny Opera. I don’t think Brecht paid much attention to that alienation. Later maybe.”

  Brecht himself may not even have cared. After the war, when Lenya was rehearsing the song “Surabaya Johnny” with Brecht, she “stopped for a second and said, ‘Brecht, you know your theory of epic theatre—maybe you don’t want me just to sing it the way I sang it—as emotional as “Surabaya Johnny” has to be done?’ … He said: ‘Lenya, darling, whatever you do is epic enough for me.’”

  Brecht’s co-workers also agreed on his practice without theory. Lorre thought him a great director. While Bienert rejected his idea of standing next to his part, he found Brecht a pleasure to work with as a director who helped awaken his actors’ artistic abilities by demonstrating for them the full range of emotions—“enigmatic, demonic, full of humor, crafty, to the point.” Roth, too, marveled at his capacity for deriving productive use from “whatever he learned from everywhere.”

  What role Lorre played in the development of Brecht’s ideas on stagecraft is open to discussion. As much as he liked “strange faces, strange types,” Brecht had an eye for talent and knew what to do with it. “He didn’t want actors at all, but people on the street,” claimed Roth. “Bring those people in,” joked Brecht during times of high unemployment. “We can offer them twelve marks.” Actually the dramatist sought out trained actors who looked and behaved like ordinary people. Oskar Homolka had butcher written on his face. Ernst Busch looked like and had been an untrained metal worker. To breathe political conviction into Die Mutter (The Mother), Brecht even suggested hiring unemployed workers.

  Bentley believed that Lorre had a significant influence on Brecht: “Brecht followed the performers and when he saw a performer that offered him something, he studied it very closely.” He found much about Lorre’s style that gave form to his developing ideas about “the right kind of acting.”

  “Brecht found Peter such a new kind of talent,” said Marta Feuchtwanger, who attended many of the playwright’s rehearsals. “He tyrannized everyone to get his will into them. Peter did not need this. He immediately knew what the part meant. There were no fights between them. Peter and Brecht understood each other without words. Where there is such understanding, no influence is necessary.”

  Probably Lorre’s most appealing feature was his duality, which nicely fit Brecht’s theories of opposites. Balanced contrasts and contradictions, after all, underlined the “other possibilities” of human behavior and argued for man’s capacity for change. “Brecht was fascinated by the doubleness in Lorre’s performances,” said Bentley, “in the two elements, in the clashing of characteristics … the peculiar combinations in his personality between the naive and sophisticated or between comic and grim, or not comic.” Co-workers sensed an unconscious “split” in Lorre’s stage persona that was consistent with

  a type of acting in which the feelings don’t directly come out in a flood but in some way are veiled or kept at a distance…. Because of the gap between the suffering in the creature, the real feelings, which are usually suffering in a person, and the expression in voice and gesture, but very noticeably in voice in his case, there’s an emotional block or lack of flow of communication in himself…. For example, the feelings don’t get expressed in the voice. If the character is a fiend, the voice will sound like a little child and innocent…. Lorre could have played the Hitler of Brecht, where his idea was not to present the demonic Hitler with barbaric forces from the depths and strange pathological developments, but to show him as a strange buffoon whose buffoonery has destroyed millions of people. There’s something in Lorre that isn’t there. It’s comic, but it’s not really, but on the surface, yes, it makes you laugh, but then underneath, boy…. This quality of being at a distance from your own emotions might come from your studying Brecht’s theories, but it might just be that you were born that way. I tend to think the second is true of Peter Lorre, and it fascinated Brecht because here is someone whom nature made the way he thought an actor was supposed to be in any case, a natural Brecht actor.

  “It might be that this style suited Lorre because of his own personality make-up,” suggested Zerka Moreno.

  We live in two dimensions; I call them objective and subjective reality. If the objective reality becomes too lacking in emotional nurture, the child will withdraw into the subjective one and there be once again all-powerful. This is the matrix for later psychotic, deeply neurotic, drug, alcohol and criminal experience. We have all sensed these parts in us…. [Lorre] may not have been ill, but he may have been more evidently split when he came into Moreno’s arena. It is even possible that acting, or at least the training he received from Moreno, help put some of the parts together.

  Whatever the source of Lorre’s duality, Brecht looked only at the result, including what Feuchtwanger called Lorre’s “natural gestures.” One of the most important means to Brecht’s “epic” ends was his concept of the “gestus.” In language that tends to put people off, he defined it as “the most objective possible exposition of a contradictory internal process.” Theater historian John Willett, who collected Brecht’s theoretical writings under one title—Brecht on Theatre—brings us a step closer to understanding by explaining that it “means both gist and gesture; an attitude or a single aspect of an attitude, expressible in words or actions.” In simpler terms, “showing” rather than “being” a character enables an actor to distill the essential meaning of an incident, a scene, or a role. By adopting a “socially critical” attitude—rather than an illustrative or expressive one, wrote Brecht, an actor “can show what he thinks of [the character] and invite the spectator … to criticize the character portrayed.” In this way, he turns his performance into a discussion between actor and audience.

  Already trained in putting the gesture before the word—something Lorre continued in Hollywood, where he preferred showing to telling his feelings—the actor bridged theory and practice by instinctively expressing the idea underlying his roles. This he accomplished in a style—clear, controlled, economical—consistent with Brecht’s criteria for good acting as well as his own personal standards. “He used freedom with great concern for honesty and psychological truth,” said Hollywood director Joseph Pevney,
echoing Brecht’s theoretical writings. “Peter battled pomposity, dishonesty, and had little patience with stupidity. He adored sensitivity but debunked sentimentality. As an actor he laid bare man’s cupidity.”

  With his collaborative experience at the Theater for Spontaneity behind him, Lorre adapted well to the everyday realities of Brecht’s working methods. Pacing back and forth, waving his cigar, the playwright solicited suggestions from everyone, even the cleaning lady at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater, but mostly his co-workers—Hauptmann, Neher, Lenya, Busch, and Lorre—and transferred their input to a blackboard. “When an actor said I have an idea,” said Lenya, “Brecht said, don’t talk about it, show me…. If I like, I take it.” Collaborative give and take appealed to Lorre, who later “recalled how [Brecht’s] actors would invent bits of business and even dialogue in their efforts to create the playwright’s special brand of ‘epic’ theatre. It was, he said, essentially a group enterprise, with an extraordinary rapport among its participants.” The actor cultivated a similar rapport with Hollywood filmmakers. As a director himself, he not surprisingly stressed the importance of a kind of teamwork—Mannschaft—that harked back to the “harmonious cooperation which has a creative counterpart in the ‘ensemble’ of the European theatre.”

  Fun is not one of the key words associated with Brechtian theater. Unfortunately, it saw more play in theory than in practice. According to Roth, however, the dramatist prized humor above all. “If there’s not laughter in the theater,” he told him, “you should not be in there.” Brecht wanted to liberate audiences by provoking them to think with their heads and not with their hearts. As a result, “they might well simply see theatre—a theatre, I hope, imbued with imagination, humour and meaning.” At rehearsals, remembered the set designer, they “worked hard, but it was fun, a very creative fun.” Beginning with Brecht, on through Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, and Rouben Mamoulian, Lorre did his best work for directors who shared his sense of humor. It is not surprising that Roth credited the actor’s aptitude for comedy as his greatest contribution to epic theater.

  However you translate it—A Man Is a Man, Man Is Man or Man Equals Man—Mann ist Mann got its start as early as Galgei, a poem about a butter vendor forced to assume the permanent identity of another man after falling “into the hands of bad men who maltreated him, took away his name and left him lying skinless.” Completed and renamed Galy Gay or Man=Man in late 1925, it premiered as Mann ist Mann the next year in Darmstadt and opened at the Berliner Volksbühne in 1928. By the time Brecht directed a revised version at the Staatstheater in 1931, his political outlook and theories on the theater had come together, enabling him to introduce a new, and to him superior, “human type.” Once its hero, Galy Gay, surrenders his personality and ceases to be “a private person,” wrote Brecht in an introductory speech for a Berlin Radio broadcast in 1927, “he only becomes strong in the mass.”

  In her notes on his work, Elisabeth Hauptmann wrote that “Brecht declare[d] that Man is Man is altogether a classic comedy.” Relinquishing his “precious ego” and eliminating his individuality does not harm Galy Gay, maintained Brecht. On the contrary, “It’s a jolly business.” If the inhumanity of human nature seemed less amusing than Brecht had anticipated—Galgei‘s “monstrous mixture of comedy and tragedy” sat uncomfortably with him—he allowed that “possibly you will come to quite a different conclusion. To which I am the last person to object.” As his Marxist studies had conditioned Brecht’s subordination of the individual to the collective, so the rise of fascism cried for an updated interpretation. In keeping with the changing times, Galy Gay now became a “socially negative hero” and the play’s theme “the false, bad collectivity (the ‘gang’) and its powers of attraction.”

  On the face of it, Mann ist Mann is a parable about the mutability of man. The place is Kilkoa, India. Galy Gay, a simple, poor Irish dock worker goes out to buy a fish but instead agrees to purchase a cucumber that he does not need. When a machine-gun unit of British Tommies—in the 1931 production, standing on stilts and wearing false noses and hands to effect, according to Brecht, the depersonalization of the actors and enforce the need for external gestures—that has lost its fourth man realizes that here “is a man who can’t say no,” they propose a business deal. If Galy Gay will agree to replace their missing comrade, they will sell him an elephant at a bargain price. “For about any kind of deal I am your man,” says Galy Gay, who soon disavows his wife, his name, his past, altogether his sense of identity. Because “one man’s as good as another,” the soldiers take Galy Gay apart like a car and reassemble him bit by bit. To complete the transformation, the soldiers arrest him when he tries to sell the fake army elephant and convict and sentence him to death. “I’m not the man you’re looking for,” says Galy Gay, throwing himself on the ground. “I don’t even know him. My name is Jip. I swear it.” The soldiers smell progress. Time is up. Galy Gay walks to the place of execution “like the protagonist of a tragedy” and stands against the “Johnny-are-your-pants-dry-wall.” At the shout of “three,” he faints. Entreated to prepare the former Galy Gay’s funeral oration—since “you knew him—better than we did, maybe”—the reconstructed Jip sings “The Song of the Both” (“What’s a Man? Something and nothing.”) before delivering his own eulogy. The conversion of the weak-minded, soft-hearted docker into a human fighting machine—armed with pistol, rifle, hand grenades, and a knife between his teeth—is complete.

  Mann ist Mann opened on February 6, 1931. Thirty-one years later, Lorre told an interviewer for Newsweek magazine that “the only compliment I’ve ever had about my acting that meant anything to me was from Brecht. In the notes to ‘Mann Ist [sic] Mann,’ he talks about me for several pages.” Negative reaction to Lorre’s performance by confused critics prompted Brecht to address a clarifying letter titled “The Question of Criteria for Judging Acting,” which was published in the Berliner Börsen Courier, March 8, 1931. Opinions fell into two categories. Some rejected his way of acting. Others judged it consistent with the playwright’s “new point of view.” Brecht used the controversy as a platform to defend Lorre’s performance within the context of his epic style, focusing on Herbert Jhering’s criticism that the actor had summoned sufficient charm for the early Galy Gay but lacked the decisive prerequisites—“clarity and the ability to make his meaning clear.” In rehearsals, Lorre had turned in a traditional performance. On opening night, however, the “hallmarks of great acting faded away,” wrote Brecht, “only to be replaced, in my view, by other hallmarks, of a new style of acting.” To the objection that Lorre had “acted nothing but episodes,” he explained how “his manner of speaking had been split up according to gests,” which, for the long speeches or “summings-up” had seemed to hinder their normal meaning. Lorre shouted and mumbled, withdrawing sentences and preventing the spectator from getting “caught up” in the contradictions. Thus the theatergoer “was not led but left to make his own discoveries.” If this seemed peculiar, epic theater had “profound reasons” for such a “reversal of criteria.” By pacing the tempo by mental processes rather than emotional ones, Lorre had “delivered his inventory” in a “truly magnificent way.” Just how well he managed “to mime the basic meaning underlying every (silent) sentence” struck Brecht when he saw Carl Koch’s 16mm film of the production: “The epic actor may possibly need an even greater range than the old stars did, for he has to be able to show his character’s coherence despite, or rather by means of, interruptions and jumps.”

  During rehearsals of Edward II in 1926, Brecht had quizzed his assistants on how soldiers looked before battle. They shook their heads. Asked the same question, comedian Karl Valentin said simply, “They’re pale, they’re scared, that’s what!”—which gave Brecht the idea of instructing his actors to chalk their faces. Though Lorre hadn’t formed the idea, he used it to great effect in 1931. Four masks, wrote Brecht, marked the phases of Galy Gay’s development: “the packer’s face, up to the trial; the ‘natural’ face
, up to his awakening after being shot; the ‘blank page,’ up to his reassembly after the funeral speech; finally, the soldier’s face.” After long consideration, Lorre chose to whiten his face for the third mask. Said Bentley, who heard it from Brecht: “He had put his head in his hands as he turned away from the audience and his hands were covered with white paint, so he just rubbed off all the white paint on his face. When he turned back, he was as white as a sheet.”35 Rather than allow his acting to be “influenced by fear of death ‘from within himself,’” Lorre chose the “fear of life … as the more profound.”

  “Brecht laughed over that,” said Bentley. “He thought it was just terrific. It was the use of an external device to get the effect.”

  Lorre, who, according to Eric Bentley, could discourse on Brecht’s theories by the hour, understood what was expected of him and filled in between the lines of his rules on epic stagecraft. “Peter’s quietness, subtle humor and his ability to underplay were his strengths,” observed Marta Feuchtwanger. “Brecht liked this.” The actor delivered an emotionally restrained performance that contrasted favorably with what Bentley would later label “the Hitlerite actor … who sounds for all the world like the late Führer addressing a mass meeting.” At the same time, his rational, socially minded, and credibly alienated Galy Gay gave concrete form to Marxist doctrine.

  Apparently sensitive to the idea that critics perceived his theories to be not only confusing but also monotonous, Brecht called for more “fun” in the theater and appreciated Lorre’s suggestions, which checked and balanced the comic-tragic nature of the drama. Like Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whom Brecht later singled out for balancing his pictorial contrasts without merging them into one another, Lorre practiced “the separation of comic and tragic; his tragedy contains a comic element and his comedy a tragic one.” In later interviews about his film portrayals, Lorre said the same thing, in almost the same words. By mixing and matching comedy and villainy (or tragedy), he undercut audience expectations, though even those contradictions eventually stamped his distinctive style.