Infotainment, circa 1928
Seth Colter Walls describes Threepenny Opera:
“The play has a double nature,” Brecht said during a Stockholm lecture in 1939, adding: “Instruction and entertainment conflict openly.”
Brecht’s honesty about nonfiction art being “instruction” is refreshing. The instinct to advance a version of the truth is an academic impulse—a preacher’s impulse. And, as Brecht says, the emotions come from the friction between the world we’d like to inhabit and the one we do.
Walls also includes a short guide to the best Threepenny recordings.
