Unlike realistic playwrights such as Ibsen or Miller, who deal with the human spirit, Brecht shows different scenes of the world and different experiences of reality. There is not just one physical world, for good or ill, of the realistic dramatists, to which characters systematically respond, in a plot that has a beginning, middle, and end. Human reality in epic theatre evolves in response to the various environments in which it is obliged to function. In epic theatre there may be multiple environments and multiple realities of experience at work. The given universe may be moral or immoral, and indeed the found reality may foster a kind of behavior that exposes the moral (immoral) truth of that reality to the spectator. This explains why so many scenes in Brecht's plays are accompanied by scene headings that function as placards or screen projections and that so often have an ironic or jarring tone. For example, the placard in Scene Two of Mother Courage is jarring because of the combination of "the successful sale of a capon [insignificant in the scheme of history] and great days for brave son [who is not brave and whose day is accidentally great because he slaughters the enemy via subterfuge]" (Brecht 849). Indeed, epic theatre exposes the absence of abiding truths, showi

Laura's reality is of paralysis not only of body but also of spirit. Her illusion is that she can have a satisfactory life by remaining sheltered with her glass menagerie. She fails the test of the gentleman caller not least because she invests this particular man and this particular visit so much with the dream of a transformed life that she cannot conceive of attempting to cope with a new man, a new evening, an predictable world outside. One feels she will never extend herself out the doorway into the alley and will remain confined to the delicate and ephemeral world of the glass menagerie, as vulnerable to the real pressure of one disappointment as the glass animals are to one sharp blow.

War needs heroes if anyone is to be saved, but Catherine's fate shows that heroism is impotent. Although Catherine exposes the potentiality of the moral sense, ethical beauty, and purity, the human condition surrounding her is deaf to such potential whether expressed by a mute or by one who is completely articulate. The mythic wish for decency and peace cannot come true unless it is enacted at the retail le