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| | village voice > theater > Baal by Alicia Solomon |
 | | There's an anti-nationalistic undercurrent to Baal, too, one that surges up from time to time through allusion and implication: Brecht's first audiences would not only have known Johst's play and the long line of starving-artist dramas it emblematized, but also that Grabbe was an ultra-nationalist and virulent anti-Semite, and that Johst was, too. |
 | | Indeed, Brecht has his cake and eats it: Baal's scatological, sex-crazed poetry is strangely beautiful, as sharp and glimmering as broken glass—qualities that are well-captured in Peter Mellencamp's pungent and playable new translation. |
 | | Insatiable, self-absorbed, and as wasteful and spewing as an industrial giant, Simpson's Baal is naughty and natty in pleated pants, suspenders, and double-breasted jacket—incarnating the consumerism that was unleashed in the '40s and that America has been bingeing on ever since. |
| www.villagevoice.com /issues/0032/thsolomon.shtml (658 words) |
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