When I received the invitation to speak at the fourteenth IBS Symposium in Porto Alegre, I was asked to talk about my research on Bertolt Brecht's learning plays. I want to be clear on the placement of this research, which belongs to the field that today we call Pedagogy of Theater.

Although enshrined in a Léxico de Pedagogia do Teatro (Lexicon of Theater Pedagogy) and constituting a research area in the graduate program of the Dramatic Arts Department at the University of São Paulo (USP), the question “What is Pedagogy of Theater?” carries a certainty that should always be questioned.

The Marxist analyses of the fifties and sixties evaluated the Lehrstück (known in Brazil as Peça Didática) as a one-way street or detour. Could the learning play be a phase that was overcome during the development of Brecht's dramaturgy?

The consensus of specialists affirmed that the learning plays belonged to a transitional phase in Brecht's thinking, followed, at the end of the thirties, by the mature phase of dialectical Epic Theater. The learning plays were studied on the side or aesthetically dismissed, based on artistic and/or political points of view set a priori that impeded access to their poetics and pedagogical practice. These plays, scorned because of the rigidity of the dramatic action, have been characterized as a “megaphone of the Zeitgeist” or “personification of ideas.” The learning play as a “grey rationality” that “hid a nihilist anxiety of senseless authoritarianism…discipline and belief” has found few defenders. Willett also states, “Deprived of a sustaining ‘plot,’ we are thrown back on the bare words and the bare ideas, and these lead us to an (ostensibly) firm judgment and an (apparently) clear-cut conclusion.”

Starting from a philological study conducted by Steinweg that gathers and critically elaborates on the extant material in the Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv on the Lehrstücke, I was able to follow the debate that countered the generally accepted concept that the learning plays were an expression of a vulgar Marxist transition in Brecht's thinking with the thesis that it was not the Episches Schaustück (epic spectacle play), but rather the Lehrstücke that led to a model of teaching and learning that points to the theater of the future, to use Steinweg's expression.