Intrepid Loser

By T.E.Kalem

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN by Bertolt Brecht

Mother Courage is one of the permanent plays of the 20th century; yet it rarely receives a fully satisfying production. One trouble lies in the title role. Mother Courage is as big as war. She is a one-woman field of combat, and few actresses have gone through that bone-deep ordeal or lived en garde with death.

Nor is that all. The tone of the play is one of relentlessly evenhanded irony, both tragic and comic, a very elusive mood to sustain. Finally, there is Brecht's thesis, that war is a continuation of business as usual. He strips its so-called heroes and victims of their epaulets of duty, honor and grief and exposes them as avaricious brokers on the floor of a bloodstained international stock exchange.

The action takes place during the Thirty Years' War. Mother Courage (Mary Lou Rosato) is an intrepid trader with a sassy tongue and a saucy past. She leeches off the advancing and retreating armies with the goods in her hand-drawn wagon. But her losses bitterly outweigh her profits. While she is haggling over the sale of a belt buckle, her favorite son Eilif (Kevin Conroy) is dragooned to the wars by a sly recruiting officer. Eilif dies. While she tries to shave the price for the release of another son (Jeffrey Hayenga), he is executed. Finally, her mute daughter Kattrin (Frances Conroy), raped as a child by a soldier, is shot down while Mother Courage is away on one of her bartering expeditions. In the end, only her spunk and the wagon have survived.

Courage, Mary Lou Rosato surely embodies, but the heartrending passion of a mother is somehow lacking, possibly because Director Alan Schneider focuses unflinchingly on the acid worldly wisdom of the play. Brecht said he wanted play goers to judge Mother Courage, not to weep for her; and The Acting Company, which tours the entire U.S., deserves credit for trying it that way.

-T.E. Kalem

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