After Going to See Mother Courage!

At long last!  Today (6/7) I was able to see Mother Courage at the Clark Street Playhouse in Virginia.  I have wanted to see Brecht's play for a while.  My husband and I were actually supposed to go last Sunday, but the matinee was canceled...due to a bike race.  

The picture above is of Colleen Delany (Kattrin) and Nancy Robinette (Mother Courage).  By the way, the Post gave Ms. Robinette quite a rave review:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303294.html

Here's a picture of the theater.  It is incredibly hard to find either on foot or by car, so it's no wonder that the bike race could cut off access to it.



The inside of this playhouse is just as funky, which fits Mother Courage, a play set on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War.  Also, Mother Courage is not intended to be a painfully historical or realistic play.  Even though it is set in the 17th century, historical and geographical details are not that important.  Mother Courage and her children might as well be on a treadmill as the years go by.   I would also say that Scena Theater's production was particularly austere.  Compare these two productions below.  The first is from a 2004 production that appeared in several cities in the UK and was set in modern-day Africa.  Another is from Cambridge (MA)'s American Repertory Theater.

 

However, an elaborate set or central idea is not always a sign of a fantastic production:

http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N11/Mother_Courage_.11a.html

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/theater/documents/00630946.htm

In Scena Theater's production that I saw, the play was staged on a concrete floor while the audience sat above in bleacher seats...ok...not quite bleacher seats.  The seats had backs.  The actors used all of the stage and more.  In fact, as the play began, the two army recruiters sat among the audience and spoke the first of their first lines there.  It was not until Mother Courage's sons Eiliff and Swiss Cheese pulled her cart out from the wings that the recruiters joined them on stage.  The cart was quite sizable, by the way.  It opened up so that Mother Courage and Kattrin could stand inside serving drinks in one scene.

Imagine the truck above without its engine and with a long pole with a long handle instead.

But what was it like to hear and see the actors performing the play?

I think that a performance of Mother Courage moves more quickly than one thinks if one has only read the play.  The scenes really fit together in performance.  Of course, this production showed information about each scene as well on screens well above the actors' heads.  However, watching the play, I saw how much the characters' situation changed and how much it remained the same.

Surprisingly, the songs did not jump out from this presentation, which detracted from more than one scene.  To compare, here is a link to Antaeus Theater's version of Mother Courage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUmpBu_qkD0

Probably the actors at Antaeus were miked.  Or Scena's taped music overwhelmed the singing of the live actors.  Or the Clark Street Playhouse is a little too intimate, which discourages the actors from projecting.  Mother Courage has been performed in more formal settings as in the picture of the University of Denver's production from 1985 (see below).  I'm not sure which.  It may even help to carry a tambourine as the actors at Antaeus do.



A number of scenes play differently in real life.  The scene right before Kattrin's death is a lot less sentimental than I imagined it.  The peasant woman telling Kattrin to pray is basically telling her to get lost.  Nancy Robinette's Mother Courage also seems to love her children more than I imagined her to, which affects the scene in which she is bargaining for Swiss Cheese's life or when she is reunited with Eiliff or when she responds to the attack on Kattrin.

However, as this picture from Yale University's production shows, actors do represent Mother Courage as more emotional and less hard-bitten -- despite playwright Bertolt Brecht's strictures.



My impression of various characters changed as I saw them in performance.  Joe Baker's Eiliff seemed more hostile and less stiffly heroic.  Rashard Harrison's Swiss Cheese was more bumbling.  Of course, since she is mute, Kattrin's role enlarges in performance.  I was really surprised by how much she aged in this production.  At the beginning, she was very sprightly and childish, but by the end, she was quite weary and moved very slowly until of course she broke away from the peasants to beat the drum warning the villagers.  If I were to watch this or another company's performance, I would play closer attention to the actor playing Kattrin.   (I couldn't find another picture of Colleen Delany as Kattrin, but here is a picture of Hilary Burns, a British actor, in that same role.

I happened to see someone videotaping the production.  Perhaps some scenes will end up on YouTube.  They would be useful for someone wanting to see a professional yet less distracting version of Mother Courage.  I wish that I had been able to go to Charlottesville last year or to the American Repertory Theater back in 2001.