Written after the success of The Threepenny Opera in 1928.
Saint Joan of the Stockyards was Bertolt Brecht's first major political drama for the commercial theater, but it was never staged during his lifetime. A masterpiece of parody and pastiche, the play was a response to the worldwide economic crises of 1929-32 and updates the story of Jeanne d'Arc to the stockyards of a mythical Chicago.
In Brecht's telling, Joan Dark is a virtuous lieutenant in a Christian army of salvation. She battles Pierpont Mauler, meat king and philanthropist, for the heart of business and the soul of labor. As Joan becomes Mauler's unwitting mouthpiece, it quickly becomes hard to tell who is using whom in this scathing examination of capitalism and idealism.
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St Joan is one of Brecht's less well-known plays. Set in Chicago, it is the story of Joan Dark and is the modern version of the biblical story, Joan of Arc. Joan is a leader of a religious group, the Black Straw Hats.
Throughout the play, she preaches to common-folk and the "meat kings" of Chigago, namely Mauler, Cridle and Lennox. Although criticised, her support for the needy is much appeciated. The play consists of lots of monologues, linked by short sections of dialogue.
Joan uses biblical phrases and terms in her preaching such as "Oh ye of little faith" and words like "ordain" and "salvation". The structure of this play makes it ideal to be used for monolgues, after a bit of editing.
Scene 9. Joan's Third descent into the depths:
The Snowfall
Listen to the dream I had one night a week ago.
Before me in a little field, too small to hold the shade of a middle-sized tree, hemmed in by enormous houses, I saw a bunch of people: I could not make out how many, but there were far more of them than all the sparrows that could find room in such a tiny place ?
A very thick bunch indeed, so that the field began to buckle and rise in the middle and the bush was suspended on its edge, holding fast a moment, then quivering: then, stirred by the intervention of a word ? uttered somewhere or other meaning nothing vital ? it began to flow.
Then I saw processions, streets, familiar ones, Chicago! You! I saw you marching, then I saw myself: I, silent, saw myself striding at your head with warlike step and bloodstains on my brow and shouting words that sounded militant in a tongue I did not know; and while many processions moved in many directions all at once I strode in front of many processions in manifold shapes: young and old, sobbing and cursing finally beside myself! Virtue and terror!
Changing whatever my foot touched causing measureless destruction, visibly influencing the courses of the stars, but also changing utterly the neighbourhood streets familiar to us all.
So the procession moved, and I along with it veiled by snow from any hostile attack transparent with hunger, no target not to be hit anywhere, not being settled anywhere; not to be touched by any trouble, being accustomed to all. And so it marches, abandoning the position which cannot be held: exchanging it for any other one.
That was my dream.
The play was broadcast on radio for the first time in 1932.
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