Setting the Stage, Staging the Voice: On Directing Weill and Brecht's Der Jasager

Pilgrims become students; the spiritual leader becomes the teacher; the temple disappears; the mountain ritual becomes the research mission or the quest for doctors, medicine, or teachers (depending on whether it is the first or revised version of Der Jasager); the boy goes on the journey not to pray for his mother but to bring her medicine; the mother is proletarian; the killing of the boy acquires a utilitarian rationale; and so on.4 Brecht's most significant alteration to the Noh play concerns his emphasis on consent, reflected in the use of the title Oer Jasager in place of Taniko.hinting that all the proceedings have something of the preordained sacrifice about them, that the killing on the mountain slope had already been decided at home). The costumes further schematize the characters, erasing the differences in the body's contours, effacing gender, distinguishing characters solely on the basis of role ("teacher," "student," and so on), adding an abundance of black to the already monochrome color scale of the stage.