Theatre in Review: The Mother (The Wooster Group/Performing Garage) In The Mother, the artists at The Wooster Group have not only embraced Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect; they've doubled down on it. One of Brecht's Lehrstücke, or "learning plays," The Mother was performed around Berlin's working-class neighborhoods in 1932 with the intention of teaching audiences about the power of organizing against oppressive factory conditions. Brecht noted with pride that it reached as many as 15,000 women, who were likely inspired by the heroine's travails. Based on a novel by Maxim Gorky, The Mother traces the radicalization of Pelagea Vlasov, who fusses at her stove and worries about the communist activities of her son Pavel. Illiterate and unschooled in politics, she wishes Pavel would stay out of trouble; she is especially distressed when his comrades show up at her tiny apartment to print subversive leaflets. When Pavel, at no small risk to himself, agrees to pass them out at a factory during lunch hour, she steps in for him, using her apparent ignorance as a bluff: After all, who would expect this humble soul to be a fellow traveler, sowing discontent among the labor force? Following this purely maternal act, Vlasov becomes more and more committed to the cause, even when Pavel is killed, and her life becomes infinitely more difficult. Describing the play as "anti-metaphysical, materialistic, and non-Aristotelian," Brecht noted, "Its concern is to teach the spectator a most definitely practical conduct that is intended to change the world, and for this reason he must be afforded a fundamentally different attitude in the theatre from that to which he is habituated." In other words: Don't tear up at Vlasov's struggles; take notes on her resistance tactics. Read today, The Mother is, nevertheless, deeply moving, a bulletin from a world in distress for reasons that plague us today: profound economic inequality, exploitation of workers, social unrest, the suppression of women's voices. Adding to the poignancy is the text's certainty that communism would be a cure-all, a dream that didn't pan out -- and that's putting it mildly -- as Brecht was forced to face during his final years in East Germany. The Wooster Group production, adapted by the company and staged by Elizabeth LeCompte, understands that time has irretrievably altered how we see the original text. "What's wrong with Communism?" one characters ask, earning a nervous laugh from the audience. (Where does one start?) But the company's hyper-analytic approach means that the play is viewed through a dizzying number of cultural filters, so many that it may be difficult to see anything at all. According to the program notes, the sources include Kukla, Fran, and Ollie (!); Pee-wee's Playhouse (!!); the YouTube videos of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek; the 1958 Berliner Ensemble production of The Mother starring Helene Weigel, who originated the title role; Hollywood gangster films; Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven; Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; 1970s East German architecture, various books about Brecht, and interviews with Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's frequent collaborator. It's fair to say that any work, no matter how assuredly written, might teeter under the weight of so many reference points. Whether much (or any) of this research can be detected in the production is debatable. In any case, The Mother is performed in a manner reminiscent of other Wooster Group productions, with flat-affect line readings; big, almost cartoonish, gestures; and a constant awareness of the audience's existence. For example, Jim Fletcher, cast as the apolitical teacher who provides Vlasov with a refuge, steps out of the action to provide bits of historical context, comment on the action, or to note that certain scenes have been interpolated. In the last case, since two characters have been talking about moving to LA for pilot season, we could have guessed that. At another point, the action pauses for a few minutes, allowing the actors to clean up after a particularly violent scene; that's something I've never seen before. Altogether, this is less a revival of The Mother than a play about the play, which yields surprisingly little in the way of analysis. In addition to an acting style that puts air quotes around each line of dialogue, the action is tracked to a jazzy, borderline atonal score by Amir ElSaffar; the music is so striking (and pitched at such a level) that it often diverts one's attention from what the actors are saying. This is especially true when Gareth Hobbs, who plays Pavel, adds to the recorded score with live performances on an electronic keyboard. It's a case of production elements fighting each other, with clarity losing out. Still, whatever else you might say about The Mother, it has been rigorously conceived and executed. You might disagree with the company's approach, but you cannot say they don't know what they're doing. Certain moments startle with their power -- when Fletcher, playing a policeman, enters Vlasov's apartment, violently ransacking the joint, or when Kate Valk, as Vlasov, unleashes a cry of pain that must rattle windows up and down Wooster Street. Also impressive is Irfan Brkovic's video design, which includes a series of wide-screen images of a Depression-era factory that go a long way toward explaining the social conditions underlying the action. The rest of the cast, including Ari Fliakos (talking like a mug in a '30s crime drama) and Erin Mullin, are in tune with the production's overall tone. The Mother is, on its own terms, an accomplished piece of work but, overall, it baffles. Applying an extra layer of 21st-century irony to Brecht's didactic detachment results in an arm's-length theatre experience that practically dares you to be bored. (Brecht didn't always live up to his own theories about alienation; as Fletcher points out to us, one musical number is sufficiently stirring to make a liar out of the playwright. But the production seems to be actively against any form of engagement.) It's not easy to discern what the members of the company see in this text, why they want to present it now, and how are we supposed feel -- if we are to feel anything -- about it. There may be many good reasons for this revival of The Mother. If so, I wish I knew what they are. --David Barbour 
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