Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece Mother Courage and Her Children is one of the great examples of Brecht’s epic theatre style, and the Juniata College production (directed by Chris Staley) put Brechtian alienation techniques at center stage. In its rather rough self-consciousness, the performance would almost certainly make Brecht proud.

The play tells the story of a peddler named Mother Courage who tries to make a living selling wares during the Thirty Years War. She has three children, Eilif, Swiss Cheese, and Kattrin, whom she wants to keep alive as she makes profit. But she’s also the archetypal penny-pinching small bourgeois capitalist—and her lust for money sometimes costs her dearly, the most prominent example being when soldiers are preparing to execute Swiss Cheese and Mother Courage tries, and fails, to negotiate down the bribe to keep him alive. Mother Courage is an interesting figure because her two principle impulses—to make as much money as possible and to keep her children alive—often come into conflict. Of course, this is part of Brecht’s theatrical style, because we as the audience are meant to ask what we would do in such a situation. But over the course of the play, Mother Courage gradually loses all of her personal ties as people leave or die.

Brecht was famous for developing the distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt in German), which prevents the audience from willingly suspending their disbelief to imagine that what is on stage is an actual series of events, as opposed to an artistic representation. This was essentially a reaction against realism.

The Juniata production did a fantastic job deploying distancing effects to highlight the constructedness of the performance. The set (shown in the photo above) was unpainted plywood, with the tech people and pianist easily visible. None of the actors ever actually left the stage, just hanging around the fringes of the main performance space whenever they weren’t on, frequently gathering in closer to listen to a song or something during the course of the show. One of the most overt distancing effects was labeling characters. On the helmets of minor characters were Velcro patches that the actors would use to affix character tags, which helped keep track of who was playing what character, since most of the actors doubled, tripled, etc. how many characters they were playing and there were no costume changes (except a few different hats). For instance, the same actor who plays Mother Courage’s temporary companion Yvette Pottier also played the Older Soldier, and Kattrin played the Young Soldier in the scene where Mother Courage goes to complain about her wagon being damaged by soldiers—the only thing that really distinguished them from their more major roles was helmets labeling them “Older Soldier” and “Young Soldier.” All of these are effective Brechtian elements that prevent the audience from being sucked into the illusion of theatre.

While the individual performances were, on the whole, excellent, the one distancing effect I didn’t really care for was that the cast read from scripts. Staley, the director, explained at the beginning that the production was part rehearsal, part experiment, and part performance, which explains why every actor carried a binder with the photocopied script. But I would have preferred a slightly more polished version not dependent on the text. There wasn’t any other aspect of the performance that couldn’t have been maintained by the cast actually memorizing the lines.