The Actors Repertory Theater Ensemble is closing its second summer season with a well-done drama about war and survival. ARTE's production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children" features an excellent performance by Barta Heiner and all-around solid performances by the rest of the cast.
Guest director Judith Olauson has met the challenge of staging the piece with visual interest and continuity in the story line. Even with all this going for it, though, it is difficult to enjoy while sitting on hard stone for 2 1/2 hours.I can understand a director's desire to be true to the script and the writer, but most of the songs could have been cut considerably without disturbing the flow of the story. It seems especially wearying after the two-hour mark when Mother Courage and the cook are "singing for their supper," and they add yet another verse of the dreary song as audience members are fidgeting, trying to get comfortable.
Length aside, this is a good play which has some thought-provoking things to say about war and peace - things that are as timely now as they are in the play's setting, the 1620s and 1630s in Europe. One soldier remarks that peace results in disorder and a lack of identity; with war, everyone's name is on a list, and everyone has something to do. "Corruption is our only hope" is but one of the ironic statements made in the play. "Big ideas depend on little people," says one character, asserting that war could not continue if the "little people" didn't support it.
Mother Courage, a peddler who makes her living off war, loses her children to it, one by one. Heiner portrays well the strength of a mother who will do whatever is necessary to preserve her family. Her facial expressions are particularly telling.
Son Eileff (John F. Homgren) joins the army reluctantly but is soon reveling in his "heroic" deeds. He finds out too late that heroism is relative; it is not the same in peacetime as in war. Another son, Swiss Cheese (Jonathan Tichy), has his honorable deeds mistaken for theft and is court-martialed. Daughter Yvette (Trish Reading) turns to prostitution as a means of survival, and her mute sister (Cathleen Campbell) dies trying to warn the village of an impending attack.
Roger C. Bennington plays a less-than-pious chaplain who feels his actions are justified because it's a "religious" war. Reese Phillip Purser is the military cook who finds Mother Courage again after several years and wants to team up with her. In a way, all of them are bound to each other for good or ill.
Others in the cast are J. Scott Bronson, David P. Knight, Rodney T. Elwood, Deborah Adams, Kristina McLelland, Loraine Edwards, Coleen John and David Biesinger. Other notable aspects of the production are sound effects of rain, thunder, wind and guns going off in the distance, and the effective use of tableaux as the narrator speaks.
A preshow lecture by BYU professor Tom Rogers will be presented at 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 17, and discussion will follow the Saturday, Aug. 18, performance.