Theater: A Passion for Survival

Galileo. Bertolt Brecht believed that historical forces rendered the individual obsolete and, paradoxically, wrote plays in which flawed, split, and roguishly tenacious personalities like Mother Courage and Galileo exhibit a passion for survival that dwarfs history and dominates the stage. Galileo, offered last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is like a formal ballet of the mind in which the prince of science and the princes of the church dance out their accustomed roles. But for Western civilized man, Galileo's recantation before the Cardinal Inquisitor (Shepperd Strudwick) has the power and poignance of...