The American Spectator

Live From New York

Mother Streep in the Park

By Yale Kramer on 8.22.06 @ 12:47AM

Mother Courage and Her Children
by Bertold Brecht
Produced by the Gang That Couldn't Think Straight: The Public Theater.

NEW YORK -- There must be a war on. Every time there's a war on a gang of actors and producers get together and put on Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children because they think it is an anti-war play.

As I walked briskly down the path toward the Delacorte Theater at about 6:30 of a cool August weekday morning last week I noticed a line of sleep-ridden, bedraggled figures a quarter of a mile in length along the path. They could have been homeless derelicts, except that most of them were young and well furnished with air mattresses, laptops, I-pods, Blackberries, and text-messaging cell-phones. Half of them were still asleep, the other half were groggy and trying to organize themselves.

I was on my way to the Seniors' Bench in front of the theater where, if I was lucky, I would be rewarded with two "free" tickets to the Public Theater's production of Mother Courage and Her Children that evening. The production was in its fifth day of previews and not scheduled to "open" for three days. There is much theatrical buzz about this production because it features celebrity stars Streep and Kline, and celebrity writer Tony Kushner -- author and prophet of the gay theatrical world since his epic six-hour play Angels in America.

Oh, the ironies, the ironies! Piled one on top of the other like the apartments along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West looking down on the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Who would have believed that in New York, one of the richest cities of the world, the center of capitalism in America, the center of capitalism in the world, where apartments sell for $1,000 per square foot and more, where statistically every tenth person is a millionaire (at least in real estate values) -- who would have believed that a play written by the poet of the proletariat, by an unrepentant communist till the day he died, the recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, would be playing in a million dollar production in this jewel of a park.

The ironies seem positively Brechtian in their political cynicism and layered hypocrisies, starting with Brecht himself. Born into the high bourgeoisie, his father a director of a paper factory, Brecht was pampered all his life by his parents and pretty little housemaids who encouraged his sexual development. He wore the finest hand-made clothes, smoked the best cigars as an adult, and as soon as he gave up his adolescent imposture of the tough, impoverished, bohemian poet, he lived comfortably by exploiting his mistresses and wives, and lived the last eight or nine years of his life like a prince, or rather a commissar, behind the Iron Curtain. He scorned the company of the working classes, never worked a day of his life as a laborer and was never poor. Perhaps Marieluise Fleisser, one of Brecht's many, many mistress/collaborators, said it most clearly: "In the final goal he wanted to help human beings. But in daily practice he was a despiser of humankind."

THE AUDIENCE FOR THAT EVENING'S PERFORMANCE, about 1,800 people, appeared not to be members of the proletariat either. As they lay or stood along the path waiting to be rewarded with a pair of free tickets, they appeared prosperous, well equipped with electronics, and to be members of the leisure class since it was a work day and the working classes were rushing to get to work on time. Even though the play was about the little guys of the world, the poor and the exploited, none of those were recognizable in that evening's audience as it sprawled on the park grass.

If the proletariat was not present in the audience to hear this political wake-up call to the working classes of Germany and Europe in 1939, it was even more absent amongst the movers and shakers of this production, who were, according to the New York Times, Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, George C. Wolfe, the play's director, and Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, millionaire film stars. Without the latter, it is doubtful that the play would have been mounted in this expensive venue. Ordinarily Mother Courage, almost never produced commercially because of its heavy-handed political message, is seen in sparse off-Broadway productions or university theaters where costs can be kept down.

This production has a cast of 25 actors, 7 musicians, 6 directors, 5 designers, and approximately 90 members of the production staff. How much must that cost for a New York City production with gunshots, explosions, actors falling off ramparts, theatrical rain and snow, among other spectacles. We're talking in the hundreds of thousands, aren't we? Cheaper than the Thirty Years War perhaps, but not by much.

Everyone is getting good money for all this -- the six-figure bureaucrats who run the Public Theater, the actors, and the supplementary staff. So who's paying?

Well, the producers, have no risk in this enterprise. Like good capitalists they have cleverly transferred the risk to the taxpayers of New York City, New York State, and the United States of America -- at least in part. From the taxes paid by people like Joe Boski who lives in Astoria and cleans boilers and never heard of the Delacorte Theater, much less what's playing there. And Shirley Strauss, a widow who works half-time as a nurse's aid in Skaneateles, New York, and has never been to the theater in her life. And John Marks, who works at the Bangor Broom Factory making straw brooms for two dollars over the minimum wage and who shoots rabbits on Saturdays to put meat on the family table. Bertold Brecht? Who's he? Each of these folks contributes a few dollars to the budget of "Mother Courage" at the Delacorte Theater without knowing it.

If Brecht knew what was going on here, what would he say?

The rich are still busting my balls
only they're stars now not queens,
and they need to get their political rocks off.

Who's still riding on whose back?

The problem with the Public Theater is that even though the taxpayer supports it he has no input into the kinds of plays that are produced, unlike the commercial theater where the audience members have something to say about the quality of what they see. Where the marketplace has no input the ideology of the bureaucrats determines what is financed and presented. And over the last thirty years that has turned out to be largely attuned to the sensibilities and politics of the left -- gays, feminists, and black minorities. So the real beneficiaries of this system are the denizens of Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side and not the "Public."

There's a bit of an East German Workers Paradise mentality once you fall within the orbit of the Public Theater. The ticket distribution system is a case in point. Once you become a waiter-in-line you are treated very strictly and lectured frequently about where you may or may not stand or sit or lie down; when you may go to the bathroom and for how long; what you may eat and where you may eat it. All these rules, you are told, is because they must treat everyone the same. Worker efficiency, competence, courtesy are devalued, and you, the person paying for all this, become the supplicant since they've set it up so that they hold all the cards.

The notion that the tickets are "free" is nonsense. In order to get them you have to spend many hours doing the work of waiting. Lines were part of life behind the Iron Curtain, because nothing worked efficiently. Now the Public Theater has managed to set the economics of entertainment back fifty years.

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