By Albert Amateau
Volume 79, Number 24 | November 18 – 24, 2009
West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933
Friends remember Stefan Brecht,
poet, actor and the son of Bertolt
Friends and fellow artists of the late Stefan Brecht, poet and performer in the new theater that flourished in the Village in the 1960s and early ’70s, celebrated his life and work in a memorial program Sun., Nov. 8, at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery.
The celebration included performances created for the occasion by Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater and the playwright Robert Wilson. Jim Neu, who performed with Brecht in early Wilson plays, read a Brecht letter. Other readings of Brecht’s poems marked the celebration, in addition to his photos and projected footage from his performances 40 years ago with Charles Ludlam and Wilson.
Brecht, who died on April 13 of this year at age 84 of a form of Parkinson’s disease, which affected his ability to speak and write since 2001, was the son of the renowned German playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Stefan Brecht wrote a multivolume history of the alternative theatre in New York City and “8th Avenue,” a book of photographs of the very pavement he trod on in his frequent walks in 1985 from his West Village home to his writing studio in the Chelsea Hotel. His “8th Avenue Poems,” published by Spuyten Duyvil Press, also reflects the hard life of the people he observed on the avenue. His account of Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric Theatre is to be published in 2010.
Brecht’s first wife, Mary McDonough Brecht, who made theater costumes, died in 1999.
His second wife, Rena Gill, whom he married four years ago, and his son, Sebastian, survive.
