Press

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Mother Courage Soldiers On

In Mother Courage and Her Children, The Justice Theater Project has "given themselves a tough assignment". Adman Sobsey, The News and Observer

‘Mother Courage’ soldiers on
By Adam Sobsey - Correspondent
Published: Tue, Oct. 28, 2008 12:00
CHAPEL HILL—The theme for the Justice Theater Project’s 2008-09 season is “Human Dignity.” “The dignity of the human person,” states the company’s recent news release, “underlies the belief that every one of us has the ability to live life to the fullest.”

For the season’s first production, Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” they’ve given themselves a tough assignment. Mother Courage must be one of the least dignified protagonists of the modern theater. The play’s thesis is that war is interminable and inescapable and in the end ruins everybody. It’s why no one lives life to the fullest.

Bringing the play out here and now amplifies the war fatigue of “Mother Courage”—especially through the English playwright David Hare’s 1995 adaptation, which is loaded with mordant, pithy aphorisms: “War is like love: It finds a way.” “If you’re clever, there’s no need to be brave.”

DetailsWhat: “Mother Courage and Her Children” by The Justice Theater Project
Where and when: Through Sunday at Swain Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill; Nov. 13-16 at Cardinal Gibbons Performing Arts Center, Raleigh.
Cost: $15, $12 for students and senior citizens
Contact: 264-7089, http://www.thejusticetheaterproject.org

The difficulty with “Mother Courage” is that it becomes unpalatable if played too straight, swallowed by its hopelessness and cynicism. It’s Brecht’s radicalism and weirdness that give his plays energy, and the best parts of Joseph Megel’s generally restrained, modest staging for Justice Theater Project are the oddest ones.

Some of these are probably not quite intentional: anachronistic costumes that may have been chosen out of impecuniousness; the quirky surprises in Derrick Ivey’s choreography (he also brings his fierce gravitas to the character of the Cook); a few brazenly strange character choices (and challenging accents) for some of the smaller roles, played by a large, diverse ensemble that ranges from seasoned local performers to high-school students; and especially the gifted Thomas Mauney’s ingenious set design, which pulls off Brecht’s war epic on what appears to have been a five-dollar budget.

But the play stands or falls on the performance of its lead actress. Mother Courage, that “hyena of the battlefield,” is a huge role, and Elisabeth Lewis Corley is undaunted by it.

She hacks her way through the physical mess and moral muck of the war like a machete, her chesty, deep voice delivering the Brecht-Hare bad news with steely imperturbability. When on occasion emotion peeks out—at the death of one of her children, for example, or when she sings in her surprisingly sweet voice—it’s jarring.

That was surely Brecht’s intent, and Corley can fulfill it more often—as can the production as a whole—with a heightened sense of excitement. Despite the demoralization of a long war, the spirit of battle is actually intense and rousing—theatrical, in fact. At 2 gloomy hours, which is awkwardly divided into a 90-minute first act, intermission, and a 40-minute second act, “Mother Courage” sometimes drags.

Surely part of that drag owes not to Mother Courage’s fatigue but to ours. More than six years into the Iraq war, we are less demoralized by it than desensitized.

And with the deepening global financial crisis, it’s hard not to crack a resigned, tired smile near the end of “Mother Courage,” as the cast shoves open the big loading-dock doors to some unseen escape route, and someone says, “You live off the war. We all do.”

Return to Press...