The Good Person of Szechwan

[citation needed] It has been argued that Brecht's use of the literary device of the split character in this play is a representation of the antagonism between individual-being and species-being that underlies bourgeois societies.

The play opens with Wong, a water seller, explaining to the audience that he is on the city outskirts awaiting the foretold appearance of several important gods.

They give her money and she buys a humble tobacco shop which they intend as both gift and test: will Shen Teh be able to maintain her goodness with these newfound means, however slight they may be?

Though at first Shen Teh seems to live up to the gods' expectations, her generosity quickly turns her small shop into a messy, overcrowded poorhouse which attracts crime and police supervision.

In a sense, Shen Teh quickly fails the test, as she is forced to introduce the invented cousin Shui Ta as overseer and protector of her interests.

At the end, following a hasty and ironic (though literal) deus ex machina, the narrator throws the responsibility of finding a solution to the play's problem onto the shoulders of the audience.

Andrei Serban directed the Great Jones Repertory Company in productions of The Good Woman of Setzuan with music by Elizabeth Swados at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1975,[7] 1976,[8] and 1978.

[10] Composer/lyricist Michael Rice created a full-length musical version with Eric Bentley which premiered in 1985 at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, directed by Cliff Baker.

Arvind Gaur directed another Indian adaptation by Amitabha Srivastava of the National School of Drama in 1996 with Deepak Dobriyal, Manu Rishi, and Aparna Singh as lead actors.

[14] As a means to critique and subvert the "cultural appropriation that pervades the play,"[15] Jain set the story in a "Fictional Pan-Asian Narnia"[16] incorporating multiple components from many Asian cultures — for example, one review took stock that "Shui Ta (played by Bi Jean Ngo) speaks a combination of Vietnamese and English, announcements and signs are written in Cantonese, [and] Wang the water-seller (Jungwoong Kim) speaks Korean and is interpreted in English by those around him,"[17] though stage-mounted digital signs provide the script in English throughout, essentially serving as both closed captioning and subtitling (at different points) for the audience — while the Three Gods are white, American, "surfer bro" archetype[18] tourists, complete with whiteface, "loud" Hawaiian shirts and "bro tanks", sunglasses, fanny packs, and exaggerated Californian accents.

[17] The Broad Street Review notes of the latter portrayal that, "[i]t's played up for laughs while also serving as a multifaceted, pointed criticism of white tourists in Asia, western indifference and exotification, lack of accountability, and, of course, prompting the audience questioning the characters' authority and legitimacy as 'gods'.

"[17] Dramaturg Kellie Mecleary notes that this portrayal of the Three Gods also serves to represent "the actions and effects of American imperialism on [Jain's] family's country, the Philippines.

[19] In addition to helping them achieve their goal of a zero-waste production,[19][20] the source of the material also provides a stark contrast in viewpoints between the Western audience and the reality that exists in many developing Asian nations, such as the Philippines, from which Jain's parents immigrated.