The Caucasian Chalk Circle
A servant girl rescues a governor's abandoned child during a revolution and raises him as her own. When the biological mother returns, a drunken judge devises a test. Brecht rewrote the Solomon story with a Marxist twist: the child belongs to whoever is useful to the child. The judge Azdak is one of the great comic characters in modern drama.
The famous prologue, Soviet farmers debating who should get a valley, reads to many as flat agitprop, and productions have trimmed or dropped it since the play's early years, first to dodge McCarthy-era politics. Brecht didn't trust an audience to feel anything without a lecture attached, so the Singer keeps stopping the play to explain the play. The chalk-circle test lands anyway; Grusha lands anyway. You just have to cross a certain amount of theory to reach them.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
