While reading Bertolt Brecht’s On Chinese Acting, similarly to Ketaki, I was confronted with an entirely new and fairly opposite conception of effective theater production to my own. Brecht expresses admiration of the alienation effect that he finds present in Chinese theater in which a Chinese actor is said to be “merely quoting the character,” not attempting to bring spectators to feel that they have become the character through empathetic intimacy as in Western theater, but instead creating a distance between the character and the audience that prevents a “self-surrender” and “any empathy on the spectator’s part” (132). As I mentioned Lynn Hunt’s work in a prior reading response, I have tended to believe in the power of empathy and fully “surrendering” by putting yourself in the mind of a presented character. I believe that this empathy allows an individual who may not be able to conceptualize the pain or gain of character to do so with an understanding of their shared internal emotional worlds to make sense of foreign occurrence’s in another’s life. I worried that although Brecht notes that this alienation effect in Chinese theater allows for “criticism” and “protest” on the part of the audience, which seems beneficial to discussing issues of social change, the inability to empathize may lead to ignorant, unnecessarily harmful critiques. However, in reading Brecht’s point that a Chinese actor “makes it clear that he knows he is being looked at,” I see a potential benefit for this type of acting in the realm of social change (130). In the conclusion of Brecht’s piece, he notes that a new theater must see everything from “the social standpoint” in order to rebuild society in such a way that allows for criticism of society and historical reporting. In considering that both the actors and spectators must recognize that they are being seen, everyone must recognize that they are a part of the conversation and are forced to consider their own position in such. The actor must recognize that what they say will be heard and the spectator cannot feel as though their comments are hidden behind a curtain, or computer screen analogously. By recognizing that everyone is seen as their true selves in this dynamic it becomes necessary to enter the mindset of considering the potential societal impact of one’s own statements, responses, and behaviors, which I find to be highly beneficial and vital to discussions of social change.