Bertolt Brecht Dramatic Structure

For Bertolt Brecht, the dramatic structure underlying any situation reflects the structure of social forces at work in society. Since Brecht was a Marxist living in an industrial capitalist nation, he understood these social forces as competing classes (although he also dealt with historical struggles, such as "science versus church," in his play Galileo). For Brecht, any narrative either disguises and obscures the structure of social forces or reveals and exposes them. Brecht's drama aims to reveal and expose the social forces underlying everyday events.

Brecht distinguished his epic drama from the naturalist drama of the day, which he called "Aristotelean" but was actually Stanislavskian. Brecht attacked the "illusionism" of naturalist theater, which was based on the audience's empathetic response to the principal characters. Brecht believed that empathy destroyed the audience's critical capacity. He attacked empathy in theater by creating distance between the audience and the character, and between the actor and the person portrayed. He called this distance the "Alienation Effect" or "A-effect."

"It is well know the contact between audience and stage is normally made on the basis of empathy. Conventional actors devote their efforts so exclusively to bringing about this psychological operation that they may be said to see it as the principle aim of their art. [I] have made it clear that the technique which produces an A-effect is the exact opposite of that which aims at empathy."
Brecht "Short Description of a New Technique of Acting"

Brecht's rejection of empathy did not result in his draining all emotion from the theater, although many of his readers mistook his intentions on this question.

"It was only 'an unfortunate fact that [Brecht's] objection to empathy in art were taken as objections to feeling in art"
Willet "Messingkauf Editorial Note"