MOther Courage
Mother Courage is an unbraidable knot of contradictions: both fearless and feckless, wise and uneducable, maternally caring and emotionally aloof. A camp-following trader, she picks the bones of a war-withered economy to feed her fatherless children. Yet her nose for business leads Mother Courage away from those children when they need her protection, leaving them easy victims of the battlefield scavengers who prey upon the weakest of the human flock. Trapped in a system driven by greed and self-interest, war and profiteering, Mother Courage plays by itsrules with the result that she both wins and loses. She succeeds in surviving at the cost of her children.In his production, director Michael Kahn hopes to communicate these contradictions of character that make Mother Courage, in his words, "one of the most extraordinarily interesting and unique characters on stage." To this end, he has cast Pat Carroll, an actress of immense warmth, vitality and humor, in the role of the flinty-hearted tragic heroine."Mother Courage has an ironic sense of humor that, allows her to survive the most difficult situations. She is also a tenacious fighter, unwilling to be averted from her goal of prov
Kahn directed Mother Courage once before at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Her inability to extend her understanding of the past to the present is a failure she pays for dearly. The production should look and sound somewhat contemporary without ignoring the original aspect. That war, which is a continuation of business by other means, makes the human virtues fatal even to their possessors. His juxtaposition of styles is particularly Shakespearean. Set Designer Derek Mclane has been designing sets for The Shakespeare Theatre for six years and has produced many memorable sets including those for Richard III, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night. He hoped that rational investigation of social problems illustrated in the play might, lead audiences to rectify them. Where early in his career Brecht's approach was straightforwardly directed at social change, he later modified his approach. Upon returning to East Germany in 1948, he headed the renowned company, The Berliner Ensemble, for which he directed the landmark production of Mother Courage in 1949. "Recently, I was watching The Prize, the PBS television series on the history of oil. Why would a classical theatre be drawn to Brecht, whose modern style stands in high contrast to the work typically done at the theatre?"Brecht adapted two plays: Coriolanus and Measure for Measure. With the American premiere of Hanif Kureishi’s translation and a new musical score by Louis Rosen, The Shakespeare Theatre production will be one for the 1990s, not a Brechtian museum piece. Also, for a long time it wasn't done in America because America was mired in naturalism and couldn't accept Brecht’s nontraditional style. Brecht’s point in Mother Courage is that the profit motive keeps war going. "Theatre's noblest function is to give pleasure," he wrote.
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Acceptance Essays
