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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2021
“And what baseness would you not commit could you rid the world of all baseness?”
-Brecht.For the Shaliko Company, rehearsals for The Measures Taken, which began in January, 1974, became a way of “studying the paradoxes of radical commitment.” Leonard Shapiro, the director, commented that “Patty Hearst was kidnapped at about the same time we started to work on the play, and that certainly influenced the way we worked at it.” The Brechtian Lehrstück, he felt, was directly related to the problem of political terrorism. “In 1930,” Shapiro explained, “everything was falling apart in Germany. The need to pull together behind the Communist Party seemed like the only thing that could have saved the country from Hitler.” The problem illustrated by the play about the political necessity of killing a comrade was at that time related to the problem of obedience to the party.
The title photograph by Joan James is of the opening scene in The Measures Taken as performed at the Public Theatre in New York City.