Stefan Brecht
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Stefan Sebastian Brecht (November 3, 1924 – April 13, 2009) was a German-born American poet, critic and scholar of theatre.
Life and career[]
The son of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel, Stefan Brecht was born in Berlin. He chose to stay in the United States when his family, who had arrived in Santa Monica, California, in 1941, returned to Europe. He joined the United States Army on September 26, 1944.[1] He studied at UCLA and Harvard on the G.I. Bill, and after receiving a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard he taught philosophy at the University of Miami. He pursued further study of Hegel and Marx at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. A son was born in Germany in 1954.
After moving to New York City in about 1966 with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht (now deceased) and their two children born in Paris in the early 60s, he became immersed in the radical theatre just beginning then and started writing what he projected as a series of seven books, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies. Descriptions of performances by Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, among others, formed the core of (Suhrkamp, 1978). He performed with Ludlam and also with Robert Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s; The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson was published in 1978 (Suhrkamp) and is being translated into German in abridged version for publication in 2006[citation needed]. Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre (Methuen, 1988) includes the early history of the theatre and describes in detail many performances and street parades of the 1960s and 1970s, with comments on Schumann's masks. A fourth book in this series, on the origins and early work of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is being prepared for publication in 2010.[citation needed]
A collection of poems, self-published in 1976, was picked up by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights and appeared in their City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1977 as Stefan Brecht: Poems. A small collection of poems in the German language, Gedichte, was published by Aufbau-Verlag in 1984.
8th Avenue Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006) is a collection of poems written as he walked to and from the Chelsea Hotel, where he wrote, from the mid-1970s to 2001; his photographs of 8th Avenue pavements, taken to accompany the poems, appear as 8th Avenue, an artist's book from onestar press, Paris (2006).[citation needed]
Brecht was the US administrator of the estate of his father.[2] At the time of his death he was married to Rena Gill,[3] a longtime friend whose Victoria Falls clothing store was a 1970s landmark in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City.
Selected publications[]
- The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (1972)
- Stefan Brecht: Poems (1978)
- Queer Theatre (1982)
- Bread and Puppet Theatre (1987)
- 8th Avenue (2006) (Poems)
- Bedlam Days: The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company (2019)
References[]
- ^ "Index Record for Stefan S Brecht WWII Army Enlistment Records", (Army Serial Number 39729193), Fold3 by Ancestry.com website. Retrieved November 9, 2020.
- ^ Welt-online (April 16, 2009). "Bertolt Brechts Sohn Stefan stirbt in New York".
- ^ Weber, Bruce (April 22, 2009). "Stefan Brecht, Theater Historian, Is Dead at 84". New York Times. Retrieved September 12, 2009.
External links[]
- 1924 births
- 2009 deaths
- American theater critics
- German emigrants to the United States
- German people of Jewish descent
- People from Berlin
- Harvard University alumni
- University of California, Los Angeles alumni
- University of Miami faculty
- University of Paris alumni
- Journalists from New York City
- Family of Bertolt Brecht
- United States Army soldiers
- American expatriates in France