(Left to right) Sarah Aziz '01 and Kasey Kresconko '04 in The Good Person of Setzuan.

Fifty years after the 1951 MHC performance of The Good Woman of Setzuan, history is being repeated with an anniversary production of the critically acclaimed play by Bertolt Brecht. Holger Teschke, a leading interpreter of Brecht and Five College Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theatre Arts, is directing the The Good Person of Setzuan (the title being used for this production), which opens April 19 at Rooke Theatre.

Brecht, a Marxist, wrote The Good Person of Setzuan between 1939 and 1941. The play had its world premiere in Zurich in 1943, while he was in exile in Finland after fleeing Germany. In 1941, Brecht went into exile in the United States, where he remained until 1947 after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Only four years later, in November 1951, one of the first productions of the work was performed in this country. That performance was at the College's Laboratory Theatre. "In 1951, under those political circumstances, I think it was courageous to do the production," said Teschke. "Fifty years later, we are bringing it back." Teschke's production is the adaptation by Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America.

The Good Person of Setzuan is a parable of a woman torn between her needs and those of her friends and neighbors. When three gods appear in the slum of Setzuan, only Shen Te, an earnest prostitute, will take them in. They reward her with money, which she invests in a tobacco shop, but her innocence and poor business skills make her a target for unscrupulous locals. To save her shop, she assumes the guise of a shrewd, entrepreneurial male cousin, Shui Ta.

Although the play poses a central philosophical question, Why is it so difficult to be good? Teschke notes that the story is interwoven with questions about gender and identity. Teschke says he is "interested in investigating the layers beneath the initial interpretations of this work. Why does a woman choose to turn into a man who succeeds through greed? How does someone change as a consequence of making choices that defy personal convictions? Teschke suggests that despite its moral tone, the play is in many ways a comedy. "It's unlike much of German theater, which has a justified stereotype as being dark and heavy without any kind of humor. Both the cast and I recognize that this is a funny play."

From 1988 through 1999, Teschke served as director, dramaturg, and author at the Berliner Ensemble, the internationally renowned Berlin theater company formed by Brecht in 1949. He has served internationally as a lecturer and director of numerous productions of Brecht's works. As well as translating and adapting the plays of other dramatists, he has written his own plays, most recently, Berliner November (1998).

Teschke arrived at MHC in 1996 when, in addition to teaching a class in theater directing and lecturing on German theater, he directed Georg Büchner's Leonce and Lena. While dividing his time between Germany and the United States, he continues his work as lecturer and director at MHC.

Bertolt Brecht perhaps is best known as the German poet and playwright who used the theater as a forum for social critique and whose dramas include Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera. He may be less familiar as an avid reader of mysteries. For Brecht, the English-language detective novel represented both a source of entertainment and a study guide. It is an interest the German-born Teschke shares. As an admirer of the work of Kinky Friedman, Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, and Robert Parker, Teschke also relied on mysteries to develop his English-language skills.

Significantly, for Teschke, as for Brecht, the detective genre has a dual meaning. "Brecht felt that the detective novel reflected the combination of intelligent entertainment and social insight and critique that he was looking for on the stage," Teschke observes. "It's this combination that I believe is really the goal of theater."

Teschke likens the process of directing to the red-herring-spiked mysteries he so admires. "Directing is like an adventure in a way," he says. "You start out thinking precisely how you want to tell the story, but with every rehearsal you discover that you're going somewhere else."

The Good Person of Setzuan will be performed at MHC's Rooke Theatre April 19–22. See the CSJ calendar for details.