Erwin Piscator

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator, (December 17, 1893 – March 30, 1966) was a German theatrical director and producer who, with Bertolt Brecht, was the foremost exponent of epic theater, a genre that emphasizes the sociopolitical context rather than the emotional content or aesthetics of the play.

Biography

Piscator was born in Greifenstein.

He worked experimentally in Berlin after 1919. As stage director at the Volksbühne (1924–1927), and later as managing director at his own theater (on Nollendorfplatz), he produced social and political plays especially suited to his theories. His dramatic aims were utilitarian—to influence voters or clarify left-wing policies. He used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences. In 1926, his production of Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers (Die Räuber) appeared at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin. Piscator cut the text heavily and reinterpreted it as a vehicle for his political beliefs. He presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a Trotskyist intellectual, slightly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin in his cane and bowler hat. As Karl's foil, Piscator made the figure of Spiegelberg, often presented as a sinister figure, the voice of the working-class revolution. As he died, the audience heard The Internationale sung.

In 1928 he produced a notable adaptation of the Czech novel The Good Soldier Schweik.

He married dancer Maria Ley (died in 1999) in Paris in 1937, Bertolt Brecht attended their wedding. Piscator and Ley went to the United States in 1939. He became director of the Dramatic Workshop, which he founded at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1936, Piscator collaborated with Lena Goldschmidt on a stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, which was directed by Lee Strasberg. Under the title, The Case of Clyde Griffiths, it ran for 19 performances on Broadway.

Until her death in 1999, Ley lived in New York while Piscator had to return to West Germany during the McCarthy era in 1951. Piscator was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbühne in West-Berlin in 1962 and successfully promoted documentary theater analyzing the German Nazi past (e.g. Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy), as well as a noted production of Gerhart Hauptmann's verse tetralogy of the myth of the House of Atreus. Piscator's stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace has been played in some 16 countries since 1955, including three productions in New York City.

Piscator's influence on European and American production methods was extensive.