“The Good Person of Szechwan” by Bertolt Brecht (post 2): Why did Brecht write this as a multiple personality play, when its theme did not require it?

This philosophical comedy decries the necessity to be a ruthless businessman before you can afford to be good and charitable.

As the play begins, three gods arrive in Szechwan searching for good people. The only good person they find is Shen Teh, an impoverished young prostitute. They reward her goodness with a financial windfall, which she uses to start a business.

But she is too good, and when her charitable ways threaten to bankrupt the business, she must do something she hates to do: switch to her male alternate personality, who is a ruthless businessman. Shen Teh tells everyone that she has sent for her male cousin, Shui Ta, to help her run the business. And although the other characters think they are two persons, who never happen to be present at the same time, the audience sees her put on a mask and man’s clothes each time she switches to her male alternate personality.

Shen Teh and Shui Ta maintain their contradictory personalities consistently. That they are really only one person who has multiple personality is revealed to most other characters only at the end of the play when Shui Ta (the male businessman) switches back to his female personality in front of the surprised gods, who suddenly realize it is not a man with a paunch, but a pregnant woman.

However, this play could have made the same philosophical points without multiple personality. Indeed, as one critic said, the play might have been dramatically stronger if Shen Teh and Shui Ta had been two persons who were able to argue with each other. But as Brecht wrote it, these two alternate personalities could never argue the issues, because they could never be on stage at the same time.

Why, then, did Brecht write this as a multiple personality play? I can think of three reasons.

First, Brecht, himself, may have had multiple personality (the normal trait, not the clinical disorder), like many other successful fiction writers.

Second, if he did have multiple personality, he may have assumed that most other people had it, too, and would applaud a play that featured it.

Third, other playwrights had been richly rewarded for multiple personality plays. The Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to Luigi Pirandello in 1934 and Eugene O’Neill in 1936. (Search them in this blog.)

1. Bertolt Brecht. The Good Person of Szechwan [1943]. Translated by John Willett. New York, Penguin Books, 2008.