READING: Olympia Dukakis, who you know from such films as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias, will be at Barnes & Noble tonight. She'll be reading from a brand spakin' new edition of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. She recently put down the Oscar and picked up a pen to write the forward to the antiwar classic. more ›

MOVIE: The Brooklyn Independent Cinemas series (which takes place the first and third Monday of every month) delivers two shorts tonight. First up is Nevel is the Devil, where "a supervisor at a consumer product testing lab interrogates two suspects of a devilish prank." The second is The Last Romantic, which follows Calvin Wizzig, a poet, around New York in hopes of getting published. Watch the trailer here. 7pm // Barbes [376 9th St, Park... more ›

Not long after their triumphant The Threepenny Opera (and the not-so-triumphant Wall Street crash of 1929), Bertolt Brecht and his close collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann began assembling Saint Joan of the Stockyards from the spare parts of Happy End, the critically maligned follow-up to Threepenny (both with music by Kurt Weill). The story was heavily influenced by Brecht’s first dip into Marxism, not to mention Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and Major Barbara. Set in 1920s Chicago, their version of Joan of Arc illustrates, from the workers’ vantage point, a crisis in the meat market brought on by the machinations of one Pierpont Mauler, who treats his laborers even worse than today (see Fast Food Nation). Rising up to oppose him is the sincerer-than-thou Joan Dark, a soup-and-Bible dispenser for the Black Straw Hats, a Christian charity. When Joan's attempts to arbitrate between Mauler and the locked-out workers runs afoul of her superiors in the Straw Hats, she’s cast out among the huddled masses, where she struggles to discern religion’s place in the workers’ battle for justice. (You can probably guess where Brecht thinks it belongs.) more ›

THEATER: Mike Daisey, the versatile, unpredictable monologuist (and onetime Gothamist interviewee), has revealed a lot about his own past and personality over the course of his years of performing and writing. Now, in the last entry of the season at Galapagos' "Evolve" series, he's going after new material -- a select array of "Great Men of Genius" other than himself. Last week he explored the life more ›

Bertolt Brecht is having quite a month on New York stages. First there’s the Jean Cocteau Repertory’s production of Mother Courage, in a never-before-seen translation by Marc Blitzstein – see our review of this excellent show, which will jar you in a good way, after the jump. Then there’s Ralph Lee’s adaptation of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which is playing at the Garden of St. John the Divine. Lee is a puppet artist, so his creations stalking through that beautiful setting, acting out Brecht’s retelling of a folk tale about a peasant girl who raises a baby of noble birth that was abandoned, are likely to make for a striking vision. Finally, the Creative Mechanics company is performing Edward II at the Bank Street Theatre beginning today (photo at right). Like Mother Courage, this play has to do with the effects of war on society, but here it is shown through the never-dull life of the eponymous king of England. The company’s production of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher got raves last year, so we have high hopes for this one. more ›