In the Thicket of Cities

"You are in the city of Chicago. You are witnessing the inexplicable wrestling of two people. Do not rack your brain over the motives of this fight, but engage in the human stakes, impartially assess the fighting style of the opponents, and direct your interest towards the finish."
This Brecht play is quite different from what one would expect from a German classic: an early masterpiece by a 23-year-old expressionist, inspired by distant America, that does not yet claim the pedagogical qualities of his later dramas. Instead, we experience – embedded in a classic black crime narrative – the confrontation of two men in the urban jungle of Chicago, who need an entire city to measure their strength against each other.
In a nearly filmic and dense narrative style, a type of person is brought to the stage for the first time, who later became a symbol of the modern (anti-)hero: the tenacious urban lone fighter, simultaneously banal and metaphysical, cynical and vulnerable, who tries to reach out to his fellow human beings through the hard shell of a thick skin.