<b>MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN</b> Tom Patterson Theatre/Stratford Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Stratford Festival
Through September 21
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN Festival Theatre/Stratford Festival

For 30 years, four centuries ago, Western Europe tore itself apart in a struggle over religion.
In the end, people tired and Europe began the long and jagged path toward mass secularism, with most people deciding they might be religious but the cost of forcing others onto the same path was too high.
The Treaty of Westphalia is a landmark in modern history, ending the war and marking modern life.
Half the population of Germany died and the cost of the wars strangled nations.
Yet, people lived through the long struggle of the Thirty Years War, having no real alternative.
Soldiers need food, clothing and booze and that’s what Mother Courage’s Canteen provides in “Mother Courage and Her Children.”
She (Seana McKenna) and her three adopted children, Eilif (E.B. Smith), Swiss Cheese (Antoine Yared) and Kattrin (Carmen Grant) drag the shabby canteen cart around, as the armies move around, opening with Sweden unsuccessfully invading Poland and moving around and around Germany.
As the number of children shrinks, the staff actually increases, adding the Chaplain (Ben Carlson), who becomes a canteen hanger-on.
This isn’t a case of backing one religion or one side, with Mother Courage having spare flags ready to make sure she can survive and support her informal family.
The portable shop moves around the heartland of the war in Germany, selling the essentials of soldiery, from brandy to war belts, dragged along by this little family because their horse is long a casualty of war.
No one comes out looking good, whether it’s Mother Courage deciding selling to hardened soldiers is the way to go or the morally oblivious soldiers fighting the war.
She sees her children disappear into the maelstrom of war and anonymous graves.
Even Carlson’s wonderful Chaplain and Geraint Wyn Davies’ Cook compromise the values they started with to survive.
The Chaplain can hardly wear his Swedish Lutheran clerical robes when the wagon is pulled through Catholic areas.
Of course, both sides are willing to kill to stay alive and both sides need the supplies Mother Courage struggles to sell and survive.
Bertolt Brecht has been dead since 1956, after a theatrical life in Germany, the U.S. and East Germany, including time working in a World War I German military hospital.
What’s become different in recent years is a gradually growing pile of evidence that Brecht had help in writing many of his best plays, like “Mother Courage,” from the women who surrounded him in his personal and professional lives.
That may explain an amazingly tender portrait of the woman and mother in a time when women had a very narrow range of allowed activities.
It could also explain the sympathetic portrait of Grant’s Kattrin and why she had become mute.
In wartime, people do things they struggle to explain afterwards, especially today when women are becoming almost as important to armed struggle as men.
“Mother Courage and Her Children” is a look at survival in war which offers lessons from a playwright who lived through two world wars and a Cold War.
Director Martha Henry has long life and theater experience and it shows in this production, working with some of Stratford’s best like McKenna, Davies and Carlson on a spare and effective set from John Pennoyer.
“Mother Courage” is often depressing and thought-provoking and a must-see show.

A.W.

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