Wendy Ishii is the actor who puts the mother into “Mother Courage and Her Children.”
Anna Fierling is one of the most difficult acting challenges of the 20th century, the quintessential war profiteer most women portray merely as a callous saleswoman and irredeemable mommy dearest. And why not, for the deaths of her progeny are all somehow brought on by her divided attention between blood and spilled blood.
That, after all, was author Bertolt Brecht’s stated intent. He so disdained the possibility that audiences might sympathize with a woman he says “learns nothing,” he only later added the play’s now seminal, concluding line: “Back to business.”
But Ishii reveals a far more complex, conflicted and even lyrical Anna for Fort Collins’ Bas Bleu Theatre Company. And through today’s prism, that also makes her far more interesting. Yes, literature’s most indestructible cockroach remains blunt and even laughably cruel. But the tone of Ishii’s voice and the guttural expressions of her pain reveal an Anna emblematic of real motherhood in any time of chaos.
Her browbeating and belittlement seem an instinctual tough-love strategy to better her progeny’s chances of survival, Dr. Phil be darned. She’s not a good mother, but she is still very much a mother, one who understands the occasional necessity for ruthlessness.
In her worst moment, Anna barters with the army for the release of her condemned son Swiss Cheese, rather than simply paying the full ransom. At the instant this “business miscalculation” is heralded by the sound of a gunshot, Ishii’s Anna is wrecked, guilty, broken. But just for a second, before she does what any mother must in wartime: She gets up and moves on.
“Mother Courage” is a massive, cynical, anti-war musical epic spanning 1624-36, though it might as well be set in 1931-45 or 2001-06. Brecht’s point is simply that war in any era is a business like any other – one with a very large profit margin.
Anna, his protagonist and corrupt villainess in one, follows behind each battle with a cart of supplies that’s pulled like oxen by her sons Eilif (Eric Corneliuson) and Swiss Cheese (Scott Bailey). Wartime means inflated prices, but Anna’s bill eventually comes due.
David Hare’s 1995 translation is laced with astute contradictions. The only character to better herself through all this is a whore (Andrea Woodley). Anna’s mute daughter Kattrin (Brenna A. Freestone) never speaks but ultimately makes the most noise. And the same barbarism that makes Eilif a hero in wartime gets him put to death during a sliver of a cease-fire.
Director Eric Prince’s earnest and academic production is true to its Epic Theatre roots. A narrator emerges with house lights still on and asks the actors to take their places. You are never sold the notion that what you are about to see is in any way real.
Ostensibly, presentational theater offers audiences a cool intellectual detachment from present-day reality, allowing them to connect their own contemporary dots. Brecht emerged during the rise of Nazism, so this distance from overt realism likely saved his life. But today, the decades provide detachment enough, and in this era of megaplexes and plasma TVs, presentational storytelling has become off-putting. Audiences need help with their dots. That’s why I’d love to see ” Courage” told once as a realistic war drama, sans music.
And yet, the original music by Barbara Clark is this staging’s most daring conceit. It’s lovely, string-based folk, evocative of early 1900s Americana. But the songs feel tangential, partly because each begins with a long intro that slows the storytelling momentum. And while the music is of high quality, the individual singing is clearly not.
The 15-member ensemble varies widely in its command of this rich, difficult material. Two terrific highlights are Bailey, a total natural as Swiss Cheese, and especially Freestone as Kattrin, whose final act is a powerful, anti-Anna statement of noble sacrifice.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
*** | “Mother Courage and Her Children”
MUSICAL DRAMA|Bas Bleu Theatre, 401 Pine St., Fort Collins|Written by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Ware|Starring Wendy Ishii|THROUGH APRIL 1|7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays|2 hours, 45 minutes|$10-$19|970-498-8949
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-John Moore
