The Threepenny Opera

The Threepenny Opera was written in Germany during a period of recovery from social and economic turmoil following the First World War. The dynamics of labor portrayed in it, of women being exploited by pimps and people experiencing poverty being trafficked, were inspired by the scenes that playwright Bertolt Brecht saw around him in the wake of this war.

In Great Britain as of 1902, the time period within which The Threepenny Opera is loosely tied, the British Empire was fighting four different wars. War itself is believed to be a profitable industry for the economies of countries waging it, but in reality it is a socially and economically devastating event that drives hyperinflation, class stratification, and a normalization of violence. This is ignoring the influence of war upon the colonized or occupied countries that Great Britain waged war upon at that time, which deserves an entirely separate but connected conversation in itself.

In the United States, we have been living in a two-and-a-half decade long state of perpetual war, now with its scope widening internally to include all people who live within its borders as targets of ICE and the federal government. Coerced labor is widespread inside of detention facilities run by corporations such as CoreCivic and GEO Group, violating local and federal minimum wage laws by not compensating detainees who have committed no criminal offenses and sexual abuse going unreported.

When planning to work on this show just under a year ago, I don’t think that any of us expected events in the United States to escalate as they have. The Threepenny Opera belongs to a didactic theatre practice known as Epic Theatre, which was pioneered by Bertolt Brecht in his collaborations with philosopher and social critic Walter Benjamin. The Epic Theatre is at its base rooted in dialectical materialism and the belief that nothing which occurs in history is tragically inevitable. The content of Threepenny was meant to horrify audiences, but as our production progressed I couldn’t help but think that the mounting violence within this country far outshone the script and its expository investigations into each character in Threepenny’s horrifyingly exploitative business practices. At this point in time, I realize I was becoming desensitized to violence by watching the graphic scenes that have been occurring in the US and abroad at its hands.

Taking into account the current national context in which our production is taking place, the different instances of trafficking that Threepenny focuses on may, by contrast, seem mundane to many viewers. But it is important to realize that when nobody is sensitive to these kinds of exploitation and stands up for the victims in the show or in the present day, it creates complicity that enables ICE raids and concentration camps at home and abroad. The idea of this sort of labor exploitation being tragically inevitable on any scale is something rooted in fictional tropes, not everyday reality. Overwhelming people to believe that the rise of fascism is like a natural phenomenon is a part of the fascist playbook.

While you watch the show, we invite you to be sensitive and to not withhold your emotional and logical reactions. Try to identify instances in which different characters display usages of force, fraud, and coercion. Do you identify with parts of different characters in this show? How would you behave differently were you in their shoes?

Lastly, how can we break these cycles of exploitation and change our world for the better?