Oskar Eustis-Public Theater- Bertolt Brecht - New York Times:
The story of how Brecht’s face ended up on a Meissen porcelain plate in 1975 is a piece of lesson theater unto itself. So is how the plate ended up displayed on a Brooklyn bookshelf as the prize possession of Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater.
The plate was given to Mr. Eustis by his mother in the late 1970s when he was about 20 and visiting her in East Berlin. A longtime Communist, she had left Minnesota, where she had raised Mr. Eustis, and gone with her second husband to teach at Humboldt University in East Berlin.
At first, Mr. Eustis was charmed by the notion that the East German regime would put an intellectual hero like Brecht on a commemorative plate. (Would the Franklin Mint put Tony Kushner’s face on one?) But as his knowledge of Brecht grew and the East German government fell, Mr. Eustis learned that there is more to kitsch than decoration.
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