"Mother Courage" at Berkeley Rep
*Up Against the Wall, Mother** */Play Review: /“Mother Courage and her Children,” /by Bertolt Brecht,
at the Berkeley Repertory Theater./
War, Von Clausewitz tells us, is just “diplomacy by other means.” Not
so, says Bertolt Brecht, the maverick Communist titan of early 20^th
century theater, in his preface to “Mother Courage” – war is actually
"business by other means."
Maybe this message is due for a reprise these days, for Brecht’s
repertory classic is enjoying a coast-to-coast spate of revivals this
season. Meryl Streep opened (to mixed reviews) last month in the title
role in New York. An /avant garde/ troupe in Los Angeles just staged a
hip-hop rendition. And now the Berkeley Rep treats Northern California
to its own brisk and literate adaptation with an all new musical score.
Brecht’s title character crisscrosses Northern Europe dragging her
hand-pulled canteen cart behind the ravaging armies of the Thirty Years’
War (1618-1648). Nowadays, the soulless Halliburtons of the world have
given war profiteering a bad name, but there’s actually a lot to admire
in Mother Courage: her tenacity, her unflinching realism, her fierce
determination to protect her brood.
Her three children are just about all (aside from profits) that she
cares for. Yet, one-by-one, the war swallows them up until she’s left to
shoulder the wagon yoke alone in her (literally) staggering
determination to “get back to business.”
This denouement moved crowds to tears when the play premiered in neutral
Switzerland in 1941. Brecht couldn’t oversee the production – he was
busy fleeing the Nazis via Sweden, Finland and Siberia en route to the
U.S. But, when he learned of the sentimental opening night reaction, he
was furious.
The last thing he’d sought was to make audiences “lose themselves” in
empathy with the characters. As a good dialectician, he wanted people to
retain enough objectivity to think through the underlying contradictions
of his subject.
So he rewrote the play to deliberately distance the public from the
onstage emotions. In the process, he pretty much invented the whole set
of stage conventions that define his “Epic Theater” movement.
He chopped up the action into disjointed episodes. To diffuse any
suspense build-up, he synopsized each scene in advance through narration
and text placards.
Cabaret-style songs were strewn like speed bumps throughout the
storyline. And, just to underscore the “unnatural” artifice of the whole
endeavor, he stripped the stage down to its bare walls and made do with
minimal props, no sets and stark, white lighting.
In lesser hands, this sort of Epic Theater could prove grimly didactic.
But, for a dramatic genius like Brecht, it offers endless opportunities
to fake-out the audience with abrupt mood shifts: from slapstick to
bathetic to epigrammatic and all shades in between.
The revised “Mother Courage” finally debuted in East Germany in 1949
(Brecht having fled America after run-ins with the Hollywood blacklist
and McCarthyite inquisitors). The production, under the author’s own
direction, starred Helene Wiegel (i.e. Mrs. Brecht) as its gutsy heroine.
It became the showpiece of Epic Theater, much revived in the
English-speaking world in the “definitive” Eric Bentley translation with
the original, bombastic Paul Dessau score. It takes a fair bit of nerve
to depart from this canonical version.
Yet that’s precisely what director Lisa Peterson has dared in the
Berkeley Rep rendition. For her script, she’s bypassed Bentley and opted
for the less declamatory David Hare translation. And she commissioned a
spare, new score by Gina Leishman, who backs her singers with a
minimalist combo of piano, accordion and tuba – “the meeting point
redux,” as she describes it, “of circus, military and cabaret music.”
By way of sets, scenic designer Rachel Hauck offers only some moveable
door frames, ladders, catwalks and pulleys, plus the bare stage walls –
all painted black, the better to chalk the many text blurbs that Brecht
includes in his script. Nothing gets erased, so, by the end of the play,
the grafitti have piled up into an unintelligible palimpsest – a nice
21^st century touch.
Ivonne Coll, in the starring role, plays up her Latina roots – an
inspired bit of casting, in a way. On the one hand, she brings an apt
and attractive Hispanic stoicism to the role. But her dialect-tinged
diction might have been better suited to the broader Bentley-Dassau
version than to Hare’s spun-out riffs or Leishman’s free-form,
recitative-like musical settings.
Coll is ably supported by the two men in her (onstage) life – a
sniveling leech of a chaplain (Patrick Kerr) and a past-prime gigolo of
a camp cook (Jarion Monroe). As Yvette, the camp-following
whore-with-a-heart-of-tin, Katie Barrett brings off exactly the right
mix of vulnerability and grandiosity. With her classical vocal training,
she manages to sing just flat enough to crack up an audience in her
show-stopping cabaret numbers.
Mother Courage’s two sons, the swaggering hero Eilif (Justin Leath) and
the honest dimwit Swiss Cheese (Drew Hirshfield), convincingly trigger
their share of maternal sorrow. But the real heartbreaker of the brood
is the mute altruist Kattrin.
In the climactic scene of the play, she mounts a farmhouse rooftop to
warn a nearby sleeping town of an immanent genocidal raid. She sounds
the alarm, frantically beating a drum until she’s shot down from her
perch. Katie Huard plays the role with all the eloquence of an
accomplished mime.
Classically, Mother Courage is a sturdy old VW of a play – a quirky, but
indefatigable vehicle for its cargo of ideas. Instead, the new Berkeley
Rep production offers us the raffish elegance of a second-hand Benz. The
gears may not always quite mesh, but the quality of the components is
high enough and the whole ensemble weighty enough that it gets us where
we need to go.
Labels: Reviews
