Ubuntu's 'Mother Courage' Dares, Soars, And Falters All At Once

The cynic always has the answers, whereas the believer is often confused, wary, inarticulate, and unsure what to do. The cynic moves with assurance; the believer, well, the believer’s quite likely to trip while carrying the bomb. The cynic rarely suffers: the believer always. The cynic can give it up—the cause, the ideals, the meal; the believer will be there at the end, fighting for scraps.

In a Bay Area Theater scene where artists and companies are quick to declare allegiance to any cause at any time in any place, The Ubuntu Theater Project has tied their hopes to the idea of true belief—in art, in the people, in the community, in a vicious examination of all values. Why else would they dedicate their 2019 season to the 20th century theologian Reinhold Neibuhr (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932), a Christian who saw little hope in Christianity or anything else. And yet faced with his own scholarly and complex cynicism, he remained a believer.

For Neibuhr and Ubuntu, there is only the struggle against one’s own corruption and the belief that we should never give up. The company’s success has come from thinking of social justice as a theatrical project, a real art. Each play is a provisional response to a never-ending problem. There is not one truth, but many. There is not one situation or conflict, but multiple fronts. There is no solution, only the fight that continues from production to production.

And that brings us to their latest battle, three hours and twenty-minutes of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war, epic, Mother Courage And Her Children. Under Emilie Whelan’s vigorous, though up-and-down, direction, the company makes a radical case for Brecht, testing the limits of his vision, what ambitious theater can do, and what Ubuntu can accomplish. Not everything is successful, but it is fascinating and bracing and unusual.

Let’s Accept Ubuntu’s Challenge And Challenge Them Right Back!

Mother Courage (a pitch perfect if not line perfect Wilma Bonet) is the ultimate survivor, a peddler of worthless goods to desperate people. Traipsing her way through the 30-year war (1618 to 1648) with her three children, the mute Kattrin, the simple Swiss Cheese, and the heroic and doomed Eiliff, she survives by adaption. And the idea of adaption is at the core of Brecht’s caustic lesson in Marxist civics: in a world without value, why would we ever celebrate the survivors? Why not celebrate the cockroach? Or is it just the cynics that we love?

The beauty of the play is the violence it does to standard perceptions of heroism and hope. Brecht is a master of indirection, of fulfilling our expectations in startling ways. We think we see what’s happening, hell, he tells us what’s going to happen before each scene, and even then we’re surprised by what we witness. In an entertainment landscape where death is often depicted with balletic grace, Brecht reminds us that there’s a real and complex beauty to shoving our faces in a corpse and not letting go.

In many ways this is the perfect Ubuntu play—antiheroic, morally outraged, aesthetically daring, tense, and a straightforward examination of social violence. So we’re watching not just Brecht’s drama, but also the drama of Ubuntu’s attempting to fulfill that vision. It’s a wild ride, of which 62% is successful and 38% drifts. I know that exact percentages seem crazy, but I want you to understand what you’re going to see—a production with real flaws, but one that keeps fighting its way to sense and gets to it more often than not.

The Drama Of Producing Is The Drama Of Our Community.

In many ways Whelan sees Brecht’s play at its most potent, an unadorned bullet of contempt at what we have come to expect of theater. The cast feels worn and exhausted, as if the performance itself came about in a frenzy of improvisation and desperate invention. And at their best they achieve a kind of hyper naturalism because of that.

Many Brecht productions offer stylized notions of the poor and, for that matter, stylized notions of the rich. That was certainly true of Meryl Streep’s star turn at the Public Theater. Take a look at the images from that production. They don’t feel as if Streep or the rest of the cast are in the midst of a thirty-year war—a successful thirty-minute jaunt to the Westchester Flea Market, yes, but not a war.

In contrast, the best part of Ubuntu’s production is how the cast feels like it’s battling to survive the play, our expectations of what theater is, and yes, one of the most brutal and devastating wars in modern history. The emphasis is on reality, on what it takes to live. Rolanda D. Bell, Kevin Rebultan, and Kenny Scott in the roles of Mother Courage’s children give performances shorn of excess. They are raw examples of what a diet of daily brutality can do to you.

As Kattrin the mute, Bell resists all temptations to “mute” it up. She gives a performance that is always receding from our view and is all the more powerful for it. You have to pay attention to catch her, as she slips behind and through the other characters or hovers off to the side of the stage stealthily crying buckets of tears.

Shane Fahy and John Mercer as the Chaplain and the Cook, ironic visions of spiritual and actual sustenance, never play the villains. They just behave the way people do and that widens our sense of actual evil. Fahy and Mercer make simple, direct acting choices and it catches us off guard. Of course in Brecht everything is a trap of perception, the cooks and chaplains of the world, the wisdom of mothers, even the spirited good will of Courage’s fun friend Yvette.

If you want to hear and see a perfect rendition of a Brecht song, get a load of Kimberly Daniels hitting wrong note after wrong note as she revels in Yvette’s joy in being Yvette in the middle of hell. This is a lunacy we rarely see in the theater and I had a feeling the opening night audience was both taken aback and unsure what they had just witnessed. But who can blame them; these days, we never expect life to enter the theater.

So Why Doesn’t This All Work?

It’s not out of lack of daring or resources or a misunderstanding of Brecht. Though part of it has to do with Whelan’s extreme vision of Brechtian aesthetics. She wants to force us to re-see, to re-think what’s right in front of us, to never let us relax and to make us re-adjust our thinking from moment to moment. She’ll stage part of a scene to the extreme right or left of the audience and then move the action either away or closer to us depending on where we’re sitting.

In the abstract that’s a fascinating directorial move, but too often it unduly strains our sense of what’s happening in basic ways. It’s jolting in the right way, but muddies our understanding of what’s happening in all the wrong ones. I would say that the production always finds its way back to clarity. But still, these problems of focus undermine many of Whelan’s best and smartest ambitions.

Yet, the majority of it works and so the aftertaste is sharp and alive, and that’s one of the most important experiences of going to the theater. Not what we think in the moment or struggle along with the production to get, but what we feel the next day, the next week, a month later. What infiltrates our dreams is what matters, not what puts us to sleep. As my wife suddenly blurted out a day or two later—“I keep on thinking about Kattrin. I can’t shake her or the actress who played her.”

The Choice

As an audience member you have a choice: imperfect art or flawless product. The flawless products are where you’d expect them to be and they will demand little of you. The imperfect art is a challenge, really a double challenge. Ubuntu’s Mother Courage is both a stunning provocation and a misstep and sometimes both at once, but it clearly possesses a great deal of the qualities we need from art.

If you are part of a Free Audience you will take the chance on this wild, uneven production. You will accept the gifts that it has to offer and be critical of where it falls short. Being an audience is not about waiting for the hits, but about being present and accounted for in an ongoing project. When a company has the soul and willingness to create actual art then we have to be there.

That’s the price of living with and for the consolations of art and we shouldn’t shy away from any of it. As the play teaches us so well, the cynics survive, but it’s the believers that we remember, as they slowly sidle their way into our dreams.

‘Mother Courage And Her Children’ runs through March 3 at Lisser Hall on the Mills College Campus in Oakland. For tickets and information click here.