The American Spectator

Live From New York

Mother Streep in the Park

By Yale Kramer on 8.22.06 @ 12:47AM

(Page 3 of 3)

Helene Weigel, Brecht's last wife, played Mother Courage in the 1949 East Berlin production, directed by the master himself. This production became the gold standard by which other productions and performances came to be judged over the years. About it Brecht wrote, "Weigel's way of playing Mother Courage was hard and angry; that is, her Mother Courage was not angry; she herself, the actress, was angry. She played a merchant, a strong crafty woman who loses her children to the war one after another and still goes on believing in the profit to be derived from war....Mother Courage learns nothing from her misery...even at the end she does not understand. Few [who saw the play] realized that just this was the bitterest and most meaningful lesson of the play." Try telling that to the Gang Who Couldn't Think Straight.

Brecht went further. He wrote in 1954, a couple of years before he croaked (as he himself would have put it):

[Despite its success] I do not believe, and I did not believe at the time [1949], that the people of Berlin -- or any other city where the play was shown -- understood the play. They were all convinced that they had learned something from the war, what they failed to grasp was that, in the playwright's view, Mother Courage was meant to have learned nothing from her war. They did not see what the playwright was driving at: that war teaches people nothing...The audiences of 1949 and the ensuing years did not see Mother Courage's crimes, her participation, her desire to share in the profits of the war business; they saw only her failure, her sufferings. And that was their view of Hitler's war in which they had participated: it had been a bad war and now they were suffering.

And late that night Brecht's ironic prophecy came true once more. Neither actors nor the audience understood the real meaning of the play. Streep played Mother Courage as the long-suffering indomitable hero as she felt she was in those final moments, left standing alone on the stage triumphantly. And the audience loved her. They stood, shouted, applauded, whooped as though she were Meryl Streep, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, and Joan of Arc rolled into one. It was a love fest. It could have been an East German Workers Collective but it was only the Upper West Side of Manhattan joining hands with celebrity to hate war and George W. Bush together.

And was it a trick of my imagination that I thought I saw a figure hovering over the trees of Central Park during the shouts and applause shaking his head and grinning cynically?

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