GALILEO by Bertolt Brecht at Waterfront Museum – Brooklyn, NY

By the early 1930s, Bertolt Brecht was one of Germany’s most celebrated playwrights. Works like The Threepenny Opera helped redefine modern theater. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, his plays were banned, and he fled Germany, eventually settling in the United States. Here he substantially rewrote Life of Galileo. After the atomic bomb, the play took on a new question: What responsibility comes with knowledge?

Galileo received its first American production in Los Angeles in 1947, starring Charles Laughton. Just months later, Brecht appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and left the United States the following day, never to return.

Nearly eighty years later, Galileo still asks the questions we’re wrestling with in 2026: Who decides what’s true? What happens when evidence challenges authority? And what responsibility comes with knowledge?

Those questions are at the heart of why we’re producing this play. Brooklyn Stage Company is dedicated to developing new work by emerging playwrights, while each season presenting one play from the great theatrical canon. Last year, that was Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie, performed aboard this very barge.

Galileo marks another first: Brooklyn Stage Company’s first production of Bertolt Brecht. It’s especially fitting that it’s here at the Waterfront Museum Barge, a National Historic Landmark, and the home of the company’s very first production in 1992.

Returning to this space with Galileo continues the tradition that has always defined Brooklyn Stage Company: presenting timeless plays that speak directly to the world we’re living in today.