The Good Woman Of Setzuan

German playwright Bertolt Brecht began writing The Good Woman of Setzuan in 1938 but did not finish the play until 1941, when he was living in exile in the United States due to Nazi rule and World War II. The play first opened in Switzerland in 1943 with a score by Huldreich Georg Früh, but the most commonly produced and studied iteration of the play featured music by German composer Paul Dessau. Brecht’s career came to prominence during the Weimar Republic, a brief period (1918-1933) in Germany following World War I in which there was a flourishing of art, science, and democracy. When Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich seized power in 1933, the Weimar Republic was replaced with dictatorship and much of its art and artists were marked as anti-German. Like many German artists, Brecht fled Germany in 1933 to avoid persecution.

Like most of Brecht’s plays, his Marxist ideals heavily influenced The Good Woman of Setzuan. The play is about a young prostitute named Shen Te in the Chinese city of Setzuan. When a trio of gods appear in the city, they are on a journey to find a good person to demonstrate that humanity is worth saving. Shen Te shows that she is good by being the only person willing to take them in for the night.