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I. The Stage-Defining Act
Mother Courage and Her Children is frequently listed among Bertolt Brecht's most important plays, though in the English-speaking world it remains less well known than many of Brecht's other major works, and due to its staging challenges, difficult subject material, and large cast it is seldom performed (one notable exception is a 2006 production in New York's Central Park directed by George C. Wolf, with a script adapted by Tony Kushner, featuring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline). The play was Brecht's first major production upon returning to Berlin after World War II, and there its enormous success catapulted Brecht almost instantly to celebrity status. Audiences were deeply moved by the play's depiction of war, which uniquely expressed the historical moment in which it was written. Brecht had authored the play years earlier while he and his family fled across Nazi-menaced Europe, on the edge of a global confrontation the likes of which the world had never before witnessed and could not yet fully imagine, but in its way foreseen in the scope and power of Brecht's script.
On the surface, the clearly given subject matter of the play is the life of the play's title character-Mother Courage and her singular trials, her private suffering, her ultimate failure to thrive, struggling through life as a petty profiteer during the Thirty Years' War-but as the play's title also suggests, Courage's life decisions are framed at all times by the larger context of their devastating effects on the lives of her three children. One by one, the children are initially shown not only persevering through the war but using it to achieve modest success, with each child able to find a way within it to capitalize on his or her greatest human virtues. The eldest son's cleverness and bravery make him a formidable soldier, and enable him eventually to become the favorite of a general. The younger son's steadfast honesty allows him to become a regimental paymaster, which not only affords him a steady source of income but most importantly keeps him out of combat. And the daughter's loving care and kindness make her an attentive and customer-attracting server in her mother's canteen. However, these same virtues ultimately prove to be the agents of...