"The toast of Europe" during World War I, Ba"al, a young poet, is the title character of Bertolt Brecht"s first play. In an expressionistic dreamland extending from Ba"al"s inner cognition, the audience meets Brecht"s semi-autobiographical character as he wanders through the Black Forests of Ausberg, Germany searching out truth.

Beginning this Friday, "Ba"al" will be performed in the Arena Theater (this is the first time in over ten years that Brecht"s work has been produced at the University) in an atmosphere of shifting, phantasmagoric lights, smoke and nudity.

"It"s a debauched show," Murray said. "It"s a play about decadence and amorality, about alcohol and sex." And yet, through his work, Brecht sought to lift audiences of the theater up to new states of emotional elevation and cleansing. He encouraged onlookers to become participants, like the characters of the play, responsible for taking action against the social problems presented in the fiction. Ultimately, Brecht wanted his plays to leak into the life of the audience, and to do this he left the conclusion of his plays open, giving audiences room to reflect and determine their truth.

Brecht wrote "Ba"al" while he was still a university student and during a time of great personal and societal confusion, when the first, large-scale war of human destruction wrecked its havoc. The moral anxiety and paranoia of 1919 is reflected in "Ba"al" as the base society that Ba"al tries to understand and escape. Following the optimism of the nineteenth century and the relative fall of man from a civilized being to a destructive animal, people during World War I, like Ba"al, were searching for the truth of humanity. Ba"al"s flight from the city to the forest symbolizes this struggle as he attempts to strip the layers of socialized behavior and discover his natural self.

Addictions to sex and alcohol hold Ba"al back from his goal, binding him to a false escapism that pervades European society at the time throughout the play he wavers back and forth between his base body and his pure soul. Somewhat autobiographical, the struggle against addiction reflects Brecht"s own insatiable appetite for sex during his lifetime Brecht had multiple wives, mistresses and children, both legitimate and illegitimate, and it was thought that he had no less than three mistresses at any one time.

Twelve peripheral characters in the play caricature figures of the time

as either purely good or purely evil. Rather than having specific histories and motivations, they symbolize qualities such as religion, virginal innocence and capricious behavior.

Ba"al"s discovery at the play"s end, said Murray, is that "the truth about being human is much more disturbing than any of us think." And yet, as Brecht urges his audience to understand, the play"s conclusion is subjective and left up to their interpretation.

Eddie Murray has been studying "Ba"al," Brecht and other avant-garde playwrights for over a year and recently wrote a mini thesis on Ba"al itself. Through his study he found that Ba"al was the ancient Semitic god of fertility and pleasure, which Brecht kept an idol of over his bed. This god, like the play, encompassed an ambivalent pressure that seemed to pull him two opposite directions, epitomized by his creator/destroyer essence. For many Hebrew people, Ba"al is considered a false idol. Ba"al is also the name of Jewish mystical leader, Ba"al Shem Tov born in 1698, who led a life of austere piety and yet, paradoxically emphasized joy and celebration in his teachings.

"Ba"al" will be performed in the Arena Theater, Friday, Feb 23 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Saturday, Feb 24 at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.