The Ark, Day Nine: the cart before the horse

Another script-heavy day at The Ark today, as the gang worked through three of Brecht’s Lehrstuck plays in the morning and the David Hare adaptation of “Mother Courage and Her Children” in the afternoon.

The Lehrstuck plays — or “learning plays” — are a collection of scripts that are not intended for public performance (in fact, Brecht would not give anyone permission to perform them publicly, and due to Brecht’s will it wasn’t until the scripts became public domain that they were seen in a theatrical context).  Primarily written between 1929 and 1933, they represent theatre that Brecht created “for the producers” (actors) instead of an audience.  They’re short, highly didactic, and in many instances sound a lot like the kinds of scripts and roleplays used in modern-day schools.  Brecht, in fact, intended some of the scripts to be worked by schoolchildren, and others by troupes of actors.

Of the three Lehrstuck plays we read today, I found “The Decision” and “The Exception and The Rule” to be most fascinating.  The former is the closest thing to pure communist propaganda I’ve seen come from Brecht’s pen (aside from, perhaps, “The Mother”) that earns points because it actually depicts one agitator willingly giving up her life for the sake of preserving the integrity of the “the party”.  Yeah.  The latter is even more interesting, for though it is about as didactic as I am able to tolerate, it paints a picture of injustice and asks us to question our assumptions about right and wrong.  Brecht actually recommended that a troupe of actors should take a script like this and work with it thoroughly, rotating through different roles in order to understand all the perspectives on the story — I thought that was a neat idea; a bit like how a good debate team hones its skills by having debaters prepare arguments on both sides of any issue.  Ultimately, though, I’m glad that Brecht got back to writing plays that he intended audiences to see; I think he was just as good at “teaching” in his writing without having to be as blunt as he was with the Lehrstuck plays.

This afternoon we chewed on “Mother Courage” for a few hours.  I was quite deeply moved by the reading, and once again overwhelmed at Brecht’s ability to craft powerful theatre.  Brecht’s notes on the play highlight that the point of it, a far as he is concerned, is that Mother Courage learns nothing from her experiences of war, in spite of her own profiteering and the painful loss of all of her children.  He was reportedly disappointed with many of the productions he saw of the play, and the delicate construction of the script makes this fact easy to understand: it’s easy to make Mother Courage a “victim” or “survivor” when the reality is much more complex — she, after all, makes her living by profiting from the wars that repeatedly hurt her.  Brecht thrashes the audience from one extreme of emotion to the other in the space of a few lines, and I think that any production that fails to mine and trust those shifts risks veering into sentimentality, which would make Brecht spin in his grave.

Between “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich” and “Mother Courage” — both written around 1938 — I can’t help but feel that Brecht was, as Kattrin does near the end of “Courage”, standing on a rooftop banging a drum loudly to warn the nearby town of impending war.  How terrible it must have been for Brecht and his colleagues to articulate such clear warnings of what was to come in World War II, only to see it all come to pass anyway.  My mind boggles.

Peter Hinton told us today, by the way, that Brecht saw Ethel Merman perform during his time in the States, and decided that she was Mother Courage.  Imagine what that production would have been like.  The story, as recounted by Shelley Winters in her autobiography, recounts that he managed to get a meeting with Merman in order to pitch the idea… Miss Ethel apparently responded that “the Merm doesn’t pull no cart.”  Love it.

Tomorrow: more music, and “The Good Woman of Szechuan”!

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