Rachel's Notes From First Rehearsal

From Rachel:

The Play & Production

The play follows the journey of a shrewd businesswoman and mother of three over the course of her war profiteering career.

It is written in classic Brechtian style—an epic story told through a sequence of scenes and songs depicting events from Courage’s life. Brecht rejected the traditional narrative structure of plays; he believed theatre should present ideas to the audience with the goal of inciting action.

Guiding principal of epic theatre is “one thing after another”  - not focusing on the building, inevitable causality of events to a fated end, but that events happen one after another and there exists the possibility of another action, one that can be taken but is not.

A quote from Brecht on Theatre (p 71): 

“The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: “yes, I have felt like that too—Just like me—it’s only natural—it’ll never change—the sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable—that’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world—I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.

The epic theatre’s spectator says: ‘I’d never have thought it –That’s not the way—that’s extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop—the sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary—that’s great art: nothing obvious in it—I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.” 

Mother Courage is one of his most notorious subversive calls for social revolution. The play has the feel very easily of an epic (ie grand) narrative tracking Courage’s struggle, demise, or perseverance.  But this was not Brecht’s intention.

dog & pony dc’s Courage is “an political theatre revival”—a melding of Brecht’s production aesthetic with the structural elements of old-time revivals.

• Revivals were designed to awaken and renew the faith of believers as well as gain new members, the “converts.”
• A revival’s overall presentational structure was designed to evoke a strong audience response throughout the event and the centerpiece was always the sharing of ideology and doctrine through a sermon.
• While traditional religious revivals were several consecutive meetings occurring over multiple days, Courage condenses the structure into several consecutive events occurring in one night.
• Courage is an interactive, episodic theatrical event intended to “convert” the audience to an artistic and political message: be an active participant in your life and world—take action.
• “Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.”

dog & pony dc’s Courage focuses heavily on engaging the audience as an integral part of the execution of the production. Even the actors’ objectives in performance are articulated in terms of persuading and winning over the audience.

Music

Milo composed eight original songs, drawing from Brecht’s lyrics as translated by David Hare from his Mother Courage.  Kurt Weil, Tom Waits, and Gogol Bordello as well as Shape Note and hymnals inspired the orchestrations. The commonality between them is the sound of “everyday people singing.”

Performers draw found objects from Courage’s wares to use in larger musical numbers; audiences can pull from this “instrument stock” to play along as well.

Audience will be incited to rise, dance, sing along; lyrics will be distributed for audience, and the chorus of one song will be wildly repeated to draw audience into the act of singing.