A Puzzle Solved

Dan Friedman responds:

Given Jonathan Kalb's significant contributions to the study of Heiner Müller's body of work, we at the Castillo Theatre are honored and gratified that he has made the effort to engage our 2001 American premiere of Müller's last play, Germania 3 Ghosts at Deadman.

For better or worse, we were unaware at the time of our production of Germania 3 of the tussle in the German courts that Professor Kalb writes about between Müller's and Brecht's estates over the passages from Galileo and Coriolanus and Müller's rewrite of Brecht's poem, "I need no gravestone."

We were working from a translated text by Carl Weber, before it was published in A Heiner Müller Reader (The John Hopkins University Press, 2001). The excerpts from the Brecht plays were indicated by act and scene number and similarly the Brecht poem was named but not included in the text.

Our decision to cut the rehearsal scenes had to do with their length and what we believed were their tertiary relevance. The critique of Brecht and Weigel, we felt, was quite explicit in the scene "The Measures Taken 1956," within which the "rehearsals" take place. (According to the text, the rehearsals are heard by the "Three Brecht Widows," and presumably, the audience, over an intercom.)We put considerable time and energy both during our workshop and rehearsal processes to finding a way to stage the "rehearsals." In the end, we decided that they weren't worth the effort.

As for the Brecht poem, our text only named the poem. So we found it in German and had it translated by a German student intern working with Castillo at the time. If we had known of Müller's rewrite, we would surely have used it; it is very funny and definitely adds to the spirit and "point" of the scene.

The first we at Castillo learned of the controversy in Germany was after Professor Kalb saw our production and telephoned to ask me why we had cut the rehearsal scenes. I told him at that time privately, and repeat now publicly, that we were never contacted by Barbara Brecht-Schall or any other representative of the Brecht estate. We may or may not have made the right political or aesthetic choice in cutting the rehearsal scenes, but that decision was in noway motivated by a desire to line up with Brecht's posse against Müller's, as Professor Kalb implies.

We find the Brecht estate's mercantile and controlling attitude toward his work to be highly offensive. It's one of the reasons that we have done only one Brecht play in 20 years. Fred Newman, Castillo's artistic director and the author of 30 plays and musicals, refuses to copyright his scripts and feels very strongly that they should be part of the public domain.