Cirrus@Austlit

Author's Foreword: I set out to write a play about the enmeshing conflict of the personal and the political....The play has thirteen songs; and I have always seen it as a musical....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....' (pp.5-6).