Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: Bertolt Brecht Leaves Los Angeles is dedicated to Mel Helstien.

Author's Foreword: I set out to write a play about the enmeshing conflict of the personal and the political. Interwoven throughout the gaudy tactics of the American battle against Brecht is a real love story...This play is an exploration. The so-called Brechtian method has become a tired orthodoxy...If Brecht stood for anything it was for a healthy, strapping cynicism. The play has thirteen songs; and I have always seen it as a musical. The masks are not an additional feature of colour, but the essential elemenet of the play. At the heart of this is the relationship between the actor and his mask [his character]. This is something I learned in Japan. In that sense I want to explore Brecht from the East rather than from the West....Finally, if I may add a personal note, this play is about someone who tries to create drama in a country in which he was not born. One of its themes is intolerance toward an individual who does not fit into the 'mainstream'. One can have many comforts in a foreign land. But nothing is worse than the personal exile that a society imposes on someone different from the outside. In that sense BERTOLT BRECHT LEAVES LOS ANGELES is a very Australian play....Roger Pulvers.