He pursued further study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.
[2] After moving to New York City in about 1966 with his wife, costume designer Mary McDonough Brecht (now deceased) and their two children who were born in Paris in the early 1960s, Brecht became immersed in the radical theatre, which was just beginning at the time and started writing what he projected would be a series of seven books, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies.
Descriptions of performances by Jack Smith and Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and others formed the core of Queer Theatre, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1978.
A fourth book in this series, on the origins and early work of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, is being prepared for publication in 2010.
[3] At the time of his death he was married to Rena Gill,[4] a longtime friend whose Victoria Falls clothing store was a 1970s landmark in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City.