The Good Person of Szechwan

In his play The Good Person of Szechwan, Brecht uses the alienation effect to break the illusion of the play. He does this by having the characters address the audience and through the songs that the characters sing. I find myself conflicted about Brecht using these devices. On the one hand, I really enjoy when a character talks to the audience. On the other, I do not really like the songs that interrupt the play.

As I said before, I really enjoy when a character talks to the audience. However, my enjoyment of this device is not limited to this play. I enjoy pretty much anything that breaks the fourth wall in order to entertain the audience. It could be a character addressing the audience like in The Good Person of Szechwan or it could be in a comic where the character uses the boundaries of the comic panels to perform some gag. It could also be a TV show like Family Guy where the characters occasionally acknowledge that they are in a TV show and make fun of themselves for it. In The Good Person of Szechwan, I enjoyed the breaking of the fourth wall for two reasons. It was sometimes funny, such as when Wang asks the audience if the gods discovered the false bottom in his water jug, and it was sometimes expositional and gave me a clearer view of what was going on.

I disliked the music portion of the alienation effect because it was more confusing than entertaining. It had hidden meanings in each verse that I had to re-read in order to understand. I would not have caught on to some of these if the play was performed and I only heard them once. I also didn’t like them because they were in prose form instead of rhyming. The play has an Asian setting and characters, so it would make sense that they use the Asian form of poetry which is generally prose. However, the lack of rhyme just mad the songs feel like they interrupted the play instead of helping it along like breaking the fourth wall did.