When we first sat down to choose this year’s production, we kept coming back to one uncomfortable question: Is it enough to be a "good person" in a broken system? David Harrower’s lean, muscular adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Soul of Szechuan doesn't offer us the comfort of a hero’s journey. Instead, it offers a dilemma. Through Shen Te, we see the exhaustion of radical empathy. Through Shui Ta, we see the cold logic of survival. By forcing these two identities to inhabit one body, the play holds a mirror up to our own lives.
At UWC, we are often told that we are "change-makers." We speak of peace, sustainability, and equity as if they are simply choices we make. But Brecht reminds us that morality is often a luxury of the secure.
For our community, this play is a challenge to move beyond "performative" goodness. It asks us to look at the structures—the "tobacco shops" and "pilots" of our own world—that make it so difficult for people to thrive without stepping on one another. We chose this play because it doesn't lecture; it interrogates. It asks us to consider that if we want people to be "good," we must first create a world that makes goodness possible.
