Stefan Brecht

Stefan Sebastian Brecht (November 3, 1924 – April 13, 2009) was a German-born American poet, theatre critic, and scholar. Born in Berlin to playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel, he went on to build a multifaceted career spanning performance, academic philosophy, and an extensive body of writing on avant-garde theatre.

Brecht enlisted in the United States Army on September 26, 1944. When his family returned to Europe in 1947, he chose to remain in the United States, pursuing higher education at UCLA and Harvard University under the G.I. Bill and ultimately earning a doctorate from Harvard. He subsequently taught philosophy at the University of Miami and conducted further study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. He had a son, Michael Böhm, born in Germany in 1954.

Around 1966, Brecht relocated to New York City with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht, and their two children, who had been born in Paris in the early 1960s. His arrival in New York coincided with the emergence of radical theatre, and he became deeply engaged with that scene, performing alongside Charles Ludlam and with Robert Wilson during the 1960s and 1970s. His Broadway credit dates to 1975, when he appeared in A Letter for Queen Victoria.

His immersion in the New York avant-garde led to an ambitious scholarly project: a projected seven-volume series titled The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies. The volume Queer Theatre, which examined performances by Jack Smith, Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and others, was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1978. That same year, Suhrkamp published The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson, which was later translated into an abridged German edition in 2006. A third volume, Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre, was published by Methuen in 1988 and documented the early history of that company, including detailed accounts of performances and street parades from the 1960s and 1970s. A fourth volume, focused on the origins and early work of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, was in preparation for publication in 2010.

Brecht also maintained a parallel career as a poet. A self-published collection from 1976 was acquired by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights and released in 1977 as Stefan Brecht: Poems in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. A collection of German-language poems, Gedichte, was published by Aufbau-Verlag in 1984. In addition to his own creative and critical work, Brecht served as the United States administrator of his father's literary estate.

At the time of his death on April 13, 2009, Brecht was married to Rena Gill, a longtime friend whose clothing store, Victoria Falls, had been a notable presence in New York's SoHo neighborhood during the 1970s.