Mother Courage and Her Children: Review by Adam Feldman
To her great credit, Meryl Streep seems genuinely exhausted by the end of Mother Courage and Her Children in Central Park. Streep is a tremendously fine actor—too fine, one might have thought, for the coarse title role of Bertolt Brecht’s scabrous 1939 epic. But instead of coasting on her starlight, she digs in like a workhorse. Onstage for nearly all of this three-hour play, she is charged with covering a vast expanse of emotional terrain, not to mention a near-constant flow of speeches, wisecracks and songs—and she really delivers the goods, pulling the show behind her like Mother Courtage’s famous wagon itself.
Streep is an astonishment, and her performance alone would be worth the six-hour wait for free tickets to this Public Theater production. But, of course, the wares she is peddling are nothing like the junk sold by her 17th-century character, a hardscrabble travelling trader who lives off the carnage of the Thirty Years War in Northern Europe. The new translation of Brecht’s German text is by the indispensible American playwright Tony Kushner, who gilds his impassioned and humane socialism with a luxury of language; the ever-accomplished Jeanine Tesori has written exciting new music for the play’s many songs, imposing strains of blues, folksong and other styles over a bent backbone of Kurt Weill-ish vamps. And director George C. Wolfe, in his return to the Public, contributes a wizardly spectacle whose many tricks include rain, snow, fire and a working military jeep.
Kushner, Tesori and Wolfe’s last collaboration was Caroline, or Change, arguably the most artistically successful musical of the past 20 years. And there are striking similarities between the two pieces, notably in the helpless intransigence of their maternally prickly heroines—the kind of mothers invented by necessity. Despite Courage’s ironic nickname (her birth name, Fierling, may be a translinguistic pun: child of fear), she makes a virtue of cowardice, scolding her kids when they risk themselves for honor or military duty. In “The Song of the Great Capitulation”—the show’s thrilling Act I finale—she lays out her disillusioned philosophy, braying with self-contemptuous defiance as Tesori’s music careens into a full mad-carnival waltz.
Unlike Caroline, however, Mouther Courage fails to fully win our empathy, despite the tremendous suffering that befalls her in the play. Her three children are taken from her one by one: first the honest Swiss Cheese (Geoffrey Arend, sweetly dopey), whose name predestines his bullet-ridden corpse; then the amoral Eilif (Frederick Weller, dashingly dumb), who has the misfortune of committing the crimes of war during a brief period of apparent peace; and finally the mute, damaged Katrin (the touching Alexandra Wailes). Her prospective romances—with the rakish army cook (Kline, sneakily straight-backed) and an ineffectual champlain (Pendleton, amiably noodling)—are dead ends. She ends the play alone, stuck on a metaphorical turntable: the cycle of war and profit that keeps her in business, answering the call when opportunism knocks.
The visible artifice of Streep’s shrewd performance—you always see her working—honors Brecht’s intention that audiences not identify too sentimentally with the bottom-feeding Courage. But Kushner’s garrulous translation softens the play’s pedantic bent with generous diversions of jokes and aphorisms, even as he sharpens some of Brecht’s dialogue to point up its modern resonance (“It’s expensive, liberty, especially when you star exporting it to other countries,”the cook explains.) The resulting text is much longer than Eric Bentley’s somewhat grim standard translation, and a leaner edit would surely benefit the play’s dramatic momentum, especially in the second act. But the writing offers ample wit and complexity to hold the audience’s attention; and in today’s climate of intellectual scarcity, Kushner’s expansiveness is the most admirable of faults.
At root, Mother Courage is a play of serious political ideas—Kushner’s as well as Brecht’s—and one hopes that Streep’s capital star turn will generate interest in them. It would be unfair to blame Courage alone for her problems, which are systemic. But Brecht does establish one pattern with ruthless repetition: When Mother Courage’s children are placed into peril, it is because she is momentarily somewhere else, conducting one of the many little economic transactions that keep her on the wagon. And the lesson is as aspt today is it was on the verge of the last world war: tragedy is what happens while all of us are minding our own business.
Delacorte Theater (see Off Broadway). By Betolt Brecht. Trans. Tony Kushner. Music by Jeanine Tesori. Dir. George W. Wolfe. With Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Austin Pendleton.
