MOTHER DIS-COURAGE

One of the reasons I was most excited about the festival was the chance to finally see work by some of the many small independent theater companies in town I've been hearing about. One of those was the Subversive Theatre Collective. Its founder and artistic director, Kurt Schneiderman, is also the unofficial Grand Poobah of the festival, and I've gotten to know him pretty well over the last several months of planning meetings, which made me even more eager to see a show of his own design after missing every one of them for the last few years.

And now, at last, I've seen one--surely not the last I plan see, either. I made it to Mother Dis-Courage last Saturday, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. The show is fast, funny, and smart, staged with ingenious economy given the small budget and venue. (Small is good! Small is beautiful! Small is where the action is!)



As always, you'll have to forgive the crappy image quality of my snapshot. Pictured from left to right we have Michael Karr (here, the talking/kazoo-playing head of a hospital staffer, but more prominently featured elsewhere as the ghosts of both George Orwell and John Lennon), Mary Mobius as the title character, Rick Lattimer as her son (stepping in a mere week before opening night!), and Sarah Orloff as Britney Spears, the narrator of the show.

Actually, Britney shares narration duties--and, uh, poetry--with the ghost of Bertolt Brecht (Keith Elkins). As the title suggests, the play is a riff on Mother Courage, but you certainly don't need to know that play to enjoy this one. For that matter, it steals just as heavily and openly from A Christmas Carol (a lovely theft indeed in these 90-degree days), with ample references to Orwell's novels, pop songs, and current events. The more you know where they're coming from, the more likely you are to laugh at what they do with it all--and the more likely to appreciate the ongoing commentary on the effectiveness of political theater in the face of real-world horrors.

The broad acting style owes less to Brecht than to the agit-prop street theater of the sixties (and maybe the SNL-style TV satire of the seventies and later), but it absolutely fits the tenor and pace of the script. Many of the performers are familiar from (slightly) larger, better-known companies in town, and it's exciting to see them in this context.

Unlike Mother Courage, this show probably won't live on half a century after its inception; its of-the-moment pop-culture references will probably seem dated or indecipherable in a couple of years. But that's not the point: this one is of its moment, and that moment is now. As I write, there are two more chances to catch it in town (before it heads to the NYC inFRINGEment fest in September), so don't let the moment slip away.