For contents, see Author Catalog.

The two works collected in this volume sprang from the same fruitful collaboration that gave rise to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. Both are set in America, but an America of myth. In The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Brecht's parable of greed and indifference, Mahagonny is a boom-town fusing Miami with Sodom and Gomorrah. Founded on the principle that it is easier to prospect gold from people's pockets than from the earth,...

Polly Peachum and 'Mac the Knife' Macheath, a career criminal, have a rocky relationship, considering how Mac may be already married and Polly's father, a racketeer who controls and exploits London's beggars, would like to see Mac hanged. Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, it is set in Victorian England's Soho at the time of Queen Victoria's coronation but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic.

"This selection from Brecht's notes and theoretical writing is meant to give English-language readers the main texts and set these in chronological order so as to show how his ideas evolved, gradually forming a quite personal aesthetic which applied to other spheres besides the theater. Too often the theory is treated as if it were a coherent whole which sprang from Brecht's head ready-made. The endless working and re-working which it underwent, the...

Brecht has adapted for the stage this story written by the great Russian writer, and sometime revolutionary, Maxim Gorky. The story line in both cases is fairly straight forward. A working class mother with roots still on the farm is fearful that her son's Bolshevik revolutionary activities will bring disaster on him and the family. As the story unfolds and the son's commitment grows in line with the government's repressive policies the mother starts,...

The people of two farms in Georgia (Republic of Russia) debate over land ownership in a socialistic society. The play raises the question of private property; of who bears the right to ownership. Should something (someone) be owned by the one who possesses it? Or, by the one who can make the best use of it?