It's Not Easy Being Good. By Joseph Whelan “Who would not be a good and kindly person, but circumstances won’t have it so.” This glib observation belongs to Jonathon Jeremiah Peachum, the beggar boss of the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical The Threepenny Opera. It is a dramatic concern that appears repeatedly in Brecht's plays and provides the central dilemma for Shen Tei, the lead character of The Good Woman of Setzuan. Brecht’s adult life was impacted by the major catastrophes of the 20th century. He was not yet twenty-years-old when he was conscripted into the German Army during World War I where he served as a medical orderly and witnessed the horrific suffering of the battlefield. Later, he would flee Germany during the Nazi’s rise to power and go into an exile that lasted fourteen years. Nonetheless, on a very fundamental level, Brecht remained an optimist. Unhappiness was not a result of individual failing so much as a consequence of the individual trying to negotiate a world in which bad behavior is rewarded. The critic Richard Gilman explains Brecht's position this way: “Human beings plan moral universes or systems of ideal behavior which are brought to
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ruin by the inimical structure of the actual world; we are not allowed to be what we might be.” In other words, the fault is neither in our stars nor ourselves, but in the social structures—chiefly economic—that determine how we live and are often in conflict with those values we associate with “goodness.” This is precisely the problem that confronts Shen Tei, a poor and kindhearted prostitute who, with the help of three traveling gods, comes into an economic windfall. The gods have been on a long search throughout the world to find one good person. They arrive in Setzuan tired and hungry and hoping to find a place to stay. No one will take them in except Shen Tei because she is good to everyone. The gods reward her with 1000 silver dollars, enough for her to buy a small tobacco shop. Soon Shen Tei’s neighbors and friends are taking advantage of her largesse to the point that she faces imminent ruin. Her solution is to assume an alter ego, a male cousin Shui Ta, who acts with a certain ruthlessness and eventually takes up full-time residence in the shop in order to stop the financial loss. What became of
the kindly Shen Tei is a question posed by the now disgruntled and soon to be suspicious neighbors and friends. What becomes of her is a question she—and by extension the playwright and audience— must ask. It will be up to the gods to decide. In addition to his many acclaimed plays—The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and her Children, and Galileo, among others— Brecht was also well-known for his Marxist principles and dramaturgical theories. He sharply criticized much of the theatre of his day, labeling it “culinary theatre” that was designed to placate