War, in “Mother Courage and Her Children,” is not an abstraction or an environment. It is a voracious, implacable, almost palpable and inevitable force of destruction.
There are no battle scenes in Bertolt Brecht’s drama. Mother Courage, the dauntless marketeer who aims to profit from the ruins of war, keeps her lumbering cart of junk merchandise on the fringes of the conflict, traveling endlessly through Europe in the wake of horror in a 12-year period from 1624 to 1636.
A tough, shrewd old bird, she is determined to keep herself and her three children from death; but time and war, the two overriding factors in the drama, will not allow it. She finds that her definition of war, as an insatiable monster, which consumes and excretes men, and then “finds a thousand more and starts again,” is all too true.
Written in 1939, on the brink of World War II, and premiered (in neutral Switzerland) in 1941, “Mother Courage” displays Brecht’s Marxist view of war as a plaything of “popes and emperors,” throwing peasants into the meat grinder of their conflicts. Patriotism and religion are shams, preached by charlatans, as Mother Courage well knows. “As long as there’s corruption,” she says, hoping for a bribe to do its work, “there’s hope.”
Beyond doctrinaire lecturing, however, and beyond cynicism and sarcasm, Brecht showed the grief and the pity of war-making.
His was a war of long ago, remote from our new war of the 21st Century, but its lessons of the price of inhumanity, and the terrible fragility of humanity, are with us still.
Along with “Galileo,” “Mother Courage” represents Brecht at the peak of his “Epic Theatre” style, a challenge for any company attempting it.
The new production at Steppenwolf Theatre, directed by Eric Simonson from David Hare’s 1995 English adaptation for the National Theater of Great Britain, is contained in an impressive physical design of sight and sound. But, except for a few isolated moments, it misses the vivid presentational style required for the play’s Epic Theater qualities.
The framework is there, but, either through lack of time or understanding, the production has not fully realized the power of the drama.
Lois Smith, in the title role, as Mother Courage, is, at this point, for all her valid instincts, an actress in distress. Uncertain of her lines, hesitant in her delivery, she cannot convey the relentless, unflinching drive of her character. She becomes secure only in her songs, and in the final moments of the play, in which she is left alone and weighed down with sorrow.
A few supporting players in the cast of 24 actors get it right: Jay Whittaker as a young officer literally jumping with fury, Larry Yando as a boastful commander teetering about in a drunken, lustful orgy of sentiment.
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Simonson’s command of stage space asserts itself in the opening prelude, which shows, rather like a scene from the ballet “The Green Table,” a long procession of soldiers marching like zombies in lockstep.
Brecht’s defiant lyrics for the bold arias that pepper the story have been superbly set to new music by T. Bone Burnett and Darrell Leonard, with musical director Mark Weston’s five-piece band playing from the orchestra pit.
And finally, when Mother Courage, bereft of all friends and family, picks up the burden of her battered cart and heads toward the next war, shouting, “Hey! Take me with you!” to the soldiers ahead, the true power of this epic drama slams home.
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“Mother Courage and Her Children” continues at the Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St., through Nov. 4. 312-335-1650.