'Mother Courage and Her Children' at Ensemble Theatre is a Gritty Portrayal of the Grisly Business of War

Credit: Photo Credit: Lindsey Beckwith Photography.

It takes some balls to decide to stage Bertolt Brecht’s classic opus Mother Courage and Her Children, since this bleak look at the ravages of endless war doesn’t have the usual rest stops for an audience that most plays provide.

Sure, there are characters, but in true Brechtian fashion they are kept mostly at arm’s length emotionally, so you really can’t get all sentimental about them. There is also humor, especially in this translation by Tony Kushner (Angels in America), but it is of the twisted and cynical variety. And finally there is music, but the heavily message-driven tunes are rough, muscular and not particularly well-sung in the traditional melodic sense.

That said, this almost-three-hour production at Ensemble Theatre has much to recommend it, if you’re up for it. Co-directors Ian Wolfgang Hinz and Rebecca Moseley have staged all the action on a runway stage, with the sole scenic element being the cart Mother Courage (the semi-ironic nickname of her character name, Anna Fierling) uses to sell booze, food and necessary items to soldiers involved in the Thirty Years War. That conflict generated up to 8 million casualties in the 17th Century and was fought over, you guessed it, religion.

This play only covers a dozen of those years, but none of the battles is clearly identified so we never know who’s winning what. That is a distancing device in service of Brecht’s goal to achieve alienation, exposing the artifice of theater along with the terminal absurdity of war itself.

Considered perhaps the most powerful anti-war play of the 20th century, Mother Courage provides plenty of reasons to be disgusted with humanity’s love affair with battles, along with the famine and disease that always follow. After all, there is money to be made by both the huge armaments suppliers as well as those tiny enterprises, like that of Mother Courage, who feed on the scraps. And since war is and will always be with us, this play never loses its tragic currency.

In the title role of Mother, Laura Rauh performs with immense strength, stamina and focus. Although her early scenes are a bit flat, she settles into the miasma of mayhem that Brecht envisions as her world. She is at the pivot point of the moral dilemma, using her hard-scrabble wiles to keep herself and her family alive.

Unfortunately, Mom’s relentless pursuit of piddling profits ends up dooming her three mostly-grown children—Eilif (Santino Montanez), Swiss Cheese (Michael J. Montanus) and mute Kattrin (Kierstan Kathleen Conway)—to a variety of terrible outcomes. Each of those three actors have their moments but ultimately it is Conway, the one who never speaks, who most poignantly embodies the tragedy that is central to the play. The tragedy of war that is, sadly, a continuing side-narrative in all our lives.

Mother Courage and her family are well supported by other characters, including Leah Paige Smith as the trollop Yvette, a saucy bundle of nastiness who’s always on the lookout to squeeze a coin or more out of a soldier. As the go-along-to-get-along Cook, Joseph Milan delivers some amusing lines and contributes accordion accompaniment to a couple of the songs. And Dan Zalevsky crafts a Chaplain whose devotion to the bottle surpasses any spiritual pursuit.

Towards the end, peace suddenly breaks out and while some celebrate, Mom frets since she had just restocked all her supplies. But not to worry, as we all know the next war isn’t far away and soon she’s back pushing her cart to the next carnage.

Mother Courage illustrates the fragility of human values, the ones we cherish and hold onto in the grim hope they will save us. Heroism and courage are real, of course, but they are also our favorite comic book fantasies of war. And this trenchant production reveals them for what they also are: Comfortable costumes that hide the greed, corruption and the grisly business of war that governments and money-making entities of all kinds find irresistible.

Mother Courage and Her Children
Through February 25 at Ensemble Theatre, Performing Arts Center—Notre Dame College, 4545 College Rd., South Euclid, 216-321-2930, ensembletheatrecle.org.

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