Stefan Brecht

Stefan Brecht (November 3, 1924 – April 13, 2009) was a German-born American poet, critic and scholar of theater.

The son of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel, Stefan Brecht was born in Berlin. He chose to stay in the United States when his family, who had arrived in Santa Monica, California in 1941, returned to Europe. Brecht studied at UCLA and Harvard on the G.I. Bill, and after receiving a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard he taught philosophy at the University of Miami. He pursued further study of Hegel and Marx at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. A son was born in Germany in 1954.

After moving to New York City in about 1966 with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht (now deceased) and their two children born in Paris in the early 60's, he became immersed in the radical theatre just beginning then and started writing what he projected as a series of seven books, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies. Descriptions of performances by Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, among others, formed the core of Queer Theatre (Suhrkamp, 1978). He performed with Ludlam and also with Robert Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s; The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson was published in 1978 (Suhrkamp) and is being translated into German in abridged version for publication in 2006. Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre (Methuen, 1988) includes the early history of the theatre and describes in detail many performances and street parades of the 1960s and 1970s, with comments on Schumann's masks. A fourth book in this series, on the origins and early work of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is being prepared for publication in 2010.

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