THE MOTHER [Dramatic
Revival] A: Bertolt Brecht; TR: Lee Baxendall; D/DS: San Francisco Mime Troupe;
P: Chelsea Theatre Center of Brooklyn; T: Westside Theatre (OB);
11/20/74-12/23/74 (21)
Note: no photos of this production are available.
In the same season that saw New York’s first production of
Brecht’s 1930 lehrstücke, or “teaching piece,” The
Measures Taken, came this revival of another Brechtian political propaganda
play, 1931’s The Mother, based on
Maxim Gorky’s Russian novel. Its tale concerns the inevitability of
revolutionary action, expressed in the character of a working-class mother who
is moved inexorably to become a fighter in the class war by the exploitation
she witnesses of her radical son and his coworkers. The play was vividly staged
by the politically-oriented San Francisco Mime Troupe during its guest
residency at the Chelsea Theatre. The production was an ensemble collaboration
and no credit was given to any individual for the acting, direction, or design.
Lee Baxendall’s “stiff” translation, said Mel Gussow, was “colloquialized
and improved,” two characters were changed from male to female to develop the
play’s feminist implications, slogan-bearing placards with the words of Lenin
and Marx were replaced by the statements of contemporary figures such as George
Jackson and Richard Nixon, modern protest songs were added, and the effect was
one of greater “universality” as “a general call to arms against subjugation
and Depression.”
Theatricalist techniques allowed the actors to play multiple
roles through quick changes. Working with minimalist means, using painted,
instead of realistic, props and sets, and iconographic tableaux and movement,
the troupe led Gussow to assert, “the entire production is as sharp and
deliberate as acupuncture.” It puzzled Walter Kerr, however, since he thought
parts of it exciting and brilliantly done, while other parts were “undefined in
manner, . . . slapdash in execution.” He felt that the company’s eclectic range
of methods had let them down by encouraging the actors “to do anything to avoid a moment’s dead air.”
Kerr also thought the play and its call for the red flag of communism a dated
one, given the hindsight that history provides of the totalitarianism that flag
had come to represent.
