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"epic theatre": a play should in his opinion not make you put yourself in the position of the persons on the stage, but make you think about their actions. For this purpose, he employed the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), e.g. actors talking to the audience or actors showing that they are acting (and not impersonating the person they are playing). He was famous for putting up signs with the writing "Glotzt nicht so romantisch!" ("Don't stare that romantically!") in one of his first stagings. This way of producing has proven both fruitful and confusing to those who try to produce his works or in his style. His theory of theatre has heavily influenced modern theatre although it is believed that the effect of the epic theatre wears off after watching a few plays of this style. Some of his innovations, though, have become so commonly taken on that one hardly remembers the lack of them before him.
Although Brecht's work and ideas about theatre are generally thought of as belonging to modernism, there is recent thought that he is the forerunner of contemporary postmodern theatre practice. This is particularly so because he questioned and dissolved many of the accepted practices of theatre (at the time) and created a uniquely political theatre that involved the audience in meaning-making. Moreover, he was one of the first theatre practitioners to incorporate multimedia into the semiotics of theatre.
Reading
Writing available on the net
Commentaries
collected plays (tr. 1970) and collected poems (tr. 1980), ed. by R. Manheim and J. Willett; his Journals (tr. 1994); biographies by F. Ewen (1967), M. Esslin (rev. ed. 1971), R. Hayman (1983), and J. Fuegi (1994); studies by J. Willett (rev. ed. 1968), W. Haas (tr. 1970), J. Fuegi (1972), R. Speirs (1987), P. Brooker (1988), and P. Thomson (1989).
Quotations
Notable quotations: see Bertolt Brecht (http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht) at Wikiquote.