Theater: Eros Degraded

Baal is Bertolt Brecht’s first play, written in 1918, and in later life he had no illusions about it. Just prior to his death in 1956, he said: “I admit and I warn you—the play lacks wisdom.” What the play has is wildness, chaos, raw youthful exuberance, an ardent desire to shock, and a compulsion to spew up nausea in the accents of lyric delirium. One line sets the tone of the play: “I see the world in a mellow light: it is the Lord God’s excrement.”

Baal (Mitchell Ryan) is a poet who sees the stars only when he is wallowing in the mud. He is modern, and not quite human. He is really a child of myth and philosophy. His symbolic antecedents are the Biblical false gods of ancient fertility rites and orgiastic sensuality, and the neopagan doctrines of Nietzsche’s Dionysian antiChrist. What Brecht conceived of was not so much a free soul as an animal will, ruthlessly, amorally, narcissistically possessed by his creature instincts.

A kind of erotic robber bar On, Baal squeezes the juices of life, love and lust out of other men’s wives, friends’ mistresses and such virgins as the one played by Flora Elkins— and then casts them aside with savage contempt. He is always raving drunk and ravenously sex-hungry, at one point taking two sisters to bed at the same time. Between these bouts of insane carnality, he cheats, lies, steals, and spouts some embarrassingly inflated rhetoric at the sun, trees, sea and sky. The only being he seems to care for is a homosexual composer of Masses (James Earl Jones), and he ultimately murders him.

Baal dies without the play’s ever having come wholly alive. Despite the spirited work of a proficient cast, the drama is a historical curio that contains something of Brecht’s sardonic mood but little of his subsequent theatrical-mastery. Seemingly hailing the life force, Baal paradoxically suggests Brecht’s fear of it, as if the worship of life could only lead to sensual derangement. If ever a playwright had a split personality, it was Bertolt Brecht. In later plays, he seemed to revel in decadence and cynicism while mourning purity. His intellect was at war with his heart. His tongue sneered while his lips prayed. Embracing the tyrannical collectivity god of Communism, he remained his own prickly, mocking, individual self. He was his own most ambiguous creation, elusive by nature and by craft, for, as he says in this play, “Tales that can be understood are just badly told.”