Mother putting cart before her heart

The story of a woman who pins her financial hopes on profiting from war might be called the mother of darkly comic dramas.
Tonight is opening night for Live Arts’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,’’ and director Satch Huizenga said audience members will be struck by the timeliness of the piece.
Brecht was inspired to write his 1939 work by Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and he placed his flinty profiteer and her cart of wares in the 17th-century Thirty Years’ War. Unfortunately, greed — especially greed born of wartime opportunism — never seems to go out of style. One by one, each of Anna Fierling’s three children is chewed up by the machinery of war, and yet she chooses mammon over motherly impulses each time.
“She just marches on for the
money,’’ Huizenga said of Mother Courage, who will be portrayed by Francine Smith. “All the kids die, but as long as she’s making money, it’s all right.’’
The cast also includes Nathan Beatty, Sara Eshleman, Chris Estey, Stephanie Finn, Ron Hasson, Michaux Hood, Jen Tweel Kelly, Matty Metcalfe, Adrienne Oliver, Kat Thompson, Jennifer Tidwell, Andrew Towns and Wynter Warren.
As a team, they’ll be presenting a demanding work that doesn’t take prisoners. Actors can’t phone in their performances by relying on their emotions and imagining how they’d feel in their characters’ shoes. Audience members can’t sit back and passively expect the story to be handed to them with the click of a remote control.
“It’s not standard television realism,’’ Huizenga said. “That’s a struggle for people to be in. It’s a challenging work on many levels, and I hope it will be for the audience as well.
“As a culture dominated by television and film, we tend to be literalists. This is a different take on how to get messages across.’’
Instead of taking the easy way out and letting emotions color the story, Brecht drew on his concept of “Verfremdungseffect’’ to move the story along. The German term can be interpreted to mean alienating, distancing, pulling back — and Brecht used it to encourage audiences to step back and try to take an objective view of what’s going on.
Brecht’s approach was “an answer to other emerging theater of the time,’’ Huizenga said. “His intention was thought through juxtaposition. You as an audience member are an observer using your pragmatic mind.
“It will not be your usual trip to Live Arts. It’s more about having a theatrical experience.’’
That’s why Live Arts didn’t rush into bringing “Mother Courage’’ to its stage.
“It’s something we’ve been talking about on and off over the years,’’ Huizenga said. The missing piece of the puzzle, he said, was locating just the right translation or adaptation of the play — one that was accessible to audiences but didn’t lose the heft of the story.
“Finally finding one that works is part of the key,’’ he said. “The language is really key to the thing. I think that bringing that out certainly makes it easier for the audience.’’
The script Live Arts uses helps to bring out the humor of the text — what the director calls “comedy and quirky business.’’
“Some of the humor is painful, but it’s there,’’ Huizenga said.
And the closer audience members can come to the sense of objectivity Brecht strove for, the stronger the sense that little has changed on the human-nature front since World War II can feel unsettling, and instructive.
“Everything’s the same today,’’ the director said. “The parallels are shocking.’’
There’s a different way in which audience members can find modern resonance in the play — and this one has a far more celebratory feel.
The April 5 performance will be part of “Flight to Freedom,’’ a multidisciplinary evening presented by the International Rescue Committee of Charlottesville.
Live Arts and its fellow City Center for Contemporary Arts residents, Light House Studios and Second Street Gallery, will be teaming up to help Charlottesville’s IRC mark its 10th anniversary and recognize the 75th anniversary of the founding of the international organization, which was formed in 1933 to help rescue refugees and resettle them far from Nazi persecution.
The evening begins at 6:30 p.m. with a reception filled with screenings of films made by refugee youths in the Light House program. Guests will have the chance to stroll through Second Street Gallery’s exhibit of Sandow Birk’s “Depravities of War.’’
The curtain will rise on Live Arts’ presentation of “Mother Courage’’ at 8 p.m.
Then audiences will get a chance to see “Flight,’’ a collection of lithographs by a dozen art legends who were resettled by the IRC. Marc Chagall, one of the first to move to the United States with the IRC’s help, is among them, as is Joan Miro.