Playwright: Bertolt Brecht,
adapted by David Hare
At: Vitalist Theatre at Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont
Phone: 773-327-5252; $20
Runs through: Oct. 22
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The concept for this Vitalist Theatre production acknowledges Brecht's precepts of intellectual detachment in its depiction of human behavior as well as the Dadaists' celebration of incongruity ( exemplified by the motif of a wheel affixed to a chair ) . But war really irks David Hare, whose adaptation rejects the self-styled 'ironic' posturing customarily imposed on the original 1941 text. As a result, the universe conjured by his revision lends itself less to the frozen-fosse-faced milieu associated with Weimer-era lehrstücke than with the Grotowskian-gritty viscerality displayed by Peter Brook in his legendary staging of Marat/Sade.
The entire back wall of the Theatre Building's boathouse-sized north stage is devoted to a constructivist collage of platforms, scaffolds, ramps and even a swing. During the course of the show, these will serve as dressing/waiting areas for actors, grottoes for clownishly-painted musicians, hanging rods for shingles and sounding boards for symphonies of orchestrated percussion. Kevin O'Donnell's original score is vaudeville-inspired, its patter-songs enlivened by soft-shoes, snake-walks and kick lines. Indeed, the kinetic model for the entire production appears to be the animated cartoons of Max Fleischer, with rubber-limbed grotesques flopping about like live-action marionettes.
Such slapstick antics could easily collapse into incoherence over the show's two hours plus, but director Elizabeth Carlin-Metz has drilled her athletic ensemble to razor-edged precision. Lori Myers, youthful physique notwithstanding, engages our sympathies as the amoral Mother Courage, while Kelly Lynn Hogan's Kattrin projects a mighty-mouse spunkiness that likewise wins our support. A company of versatile character players—Rom Barkhordar, Winston Evans, Vincent L. Lonergan, Anne Sheridan Smith, Christopher Hibbard and Jeremy Clark—zip through an array of distinctive personae and dialects so seamlessly that we are astounded, at curtain call, to see only eight people emerge to take their well-deserved bows.
'You don't ask a businessman what he believes in,' Mother Courage declares, 'You just ask him, 'How much?' They say that war destroys the weak, but I don't see the weak doing so well in peacetime, either.' If her observations seem ominously apt to our own war, this is your kind of show.