Erwin Piscator

Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator was a German theatre director and producer and, along with Bertolt Brecht, the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the sociopolitical content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of the audience or on the productions formal beauty.

Erwin Friedrich Max Piscator was born on December16017, 1893 in the small Prussian village of GreifensteinUlm, son of Carl Piscator, a merchant, and his wife Antonia Laparose. His family was descended from Johannes Piscator, a Protestant theologian who produced an important translation of the Bible in 1600. The family moved to the university town Marburg in 1899 where Piscator attended the Gymnasium Philippinum. In the autumn of 1913, he attended a private Munich drama school and enrolled at University of Munich to study German, philosophy and art history. Piscator also took Arthur Kutschers famous seminar in theatre history which Bertolt Brecht was also later to attend. He began his acting career in the autumn of 1914, in small unpaid roles at the Munich Court Theatre, under the directorship of Ernst von Possart. In 1896, Karl Lautenschlger had installed one of the worlds first revolving stages at that theatre.

Source: Wikipedia