first poster for production of Die Dreigroschen Opera (1928), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. I take Brecht and his notion of "epic theater" and the "alienation-effect" as my example of the genre of drama. Brecht also used the elements of drama--language (tone, word choice, pun, irony, rhetoric, imagery), gesture and physical movement, costume, lighting, scenery, and props--to create stagings of his numerous plays, such as the Three-penny Opera. Brecht developed "epic theater" as a type of "didactic theater," which would teach the audience to think for themselves about the social issues in Germany and the world with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power, through the war, and after the war with East Germany's state-sponsered arts. The "alienation effect" involved the idea that the actions on the stage should be exposed as theatrical actions, that the "suspension of disbelief" should itself be eliminated, and that the audience should think critically about the actions they view on stage, to evaluate how the representations relate to the reality of the external world.
See review of the staging of the 2006 production of Three-penny Opera:
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