Review: In Wooster Groups Staging Of Brechts ‘The Mother, Techno Postmodernism Turns Political

The Wooster Group and Bertolt Brecht may seem like strange bedfellows, but the New York Experimental Group's production of "Mother," one of Brecht's "instructional dramas," made me wonder why the business lasted so long.

The aesthetic differences shouldn't be drawn, but there is a surprising level of compatibility in their innovative theatrical methods. Techno-postmodernism finds its political heart at REDCAT, where The Wooster Group returned on Wednesday with a five-day run of The Mother.

Brecht's epic theater was born in opposition to the traditional Aristotelian formula. The goal was not to mesmerize the audience through emotional storytelling. Rather, the mission was to make viewers aware of the reality that their society is as artificial and changeable as the show they are watching.

Brecht aimed at critical consciousness rather than catharsis. To achieve this, he developed a series of alienation tactics, or alienation effects, intended to break the magic of the performance and reveal the mechanism behind the theatrical illusion.

The Wooster Group has been wowing audiences with their avant-garde style for decades. Often mixing canonical treasures with extravagant trinkets, the company's multimedia collages have worked to deconstruct the ingrained assumptions of theatrical perception. The stage is alienated to allow the audience to explore possibilities long obscured by convention and convention.

Drawing on notable figures of 20th-century theater - Tennessee Williams, Thaddeus Cantor, Harold Pinter - in recent years, the Wooster Group has sought renewal for itself and a new life for an artist or a work of art. The group's homage to Polish artist Kantor, the pink chair (rather than fake antiques) felt like a natural symbiosis of sensibility. Often unfairly compared to the playwright's other challenging late works, Vie Caren, William's dark 1977 memoir, flourished in the extravagant company of the Wooster group.

I feared Mother would repeat the mistake of The Room, the troupe's production of Pinter's first one-act play, which only revealed an unbridgeable poetic chasm. But Brecht's comedy is theoretically and practically accessible to Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte and her veteran cast, led by Kate Valk.

Distilled from Maxim Gorky's 1906 novel of the same name, Mother emerged from the economic turmoil of the early 1930s and sought to educate her audience on the morality of class warfare. The cause that Brecht specifically advocates is workers' solidarity. Marxism determines the didactic orientation of the work. But this is not a high intellectual lesson. The approach lacks human ambition.

Short cutscenes are interrupted by songs. The fourth wall is broken to erase the gap between the actors and the audience. The work is not participatory, but the feeling is that we are all in this mess and that sustained collective action is the only answer.

Valk plays Pelagea Vlasov, a middle-aged Russian widow who lives with her son Pavel (Scott Shepherd), a factory worker whose wages are constantly being cut. Even thrifty Pelagia cannot cook soup with enough water. They are behind on the rent and management doesn't seem to care if their employees and families starve.

The illiterate Pelagia doubts political action as the play begins and becomes an activist after volunteering to distribute leaflets calling for a strike. Her motive is to protect her son, who has begun fraternizing with revolutionary workers (played by Ari Fliakos and Erin Mullin). He fears for his safety, but the more he encounters the atrocities of the state, the more he is committed to overthrowing the existing system.

After his son is jailed for his role in a protest, he is reluctantly taken in by a professor (Jim Fletcher) who offers him safe haven on the condition that he keeps his creepy politics out of his apartment. He soon teaches him and his friends to read and write pamphlets to support their class struggle.

Mother has a more immediate emotional appeal than Brecht's more complex dramatic works, such as Mother Courage and Her Children, written a few years later for a more traditional theater audience. I couldn't help but wish for a little more emotional power from the band Wooster, who punctuated the political humor with their usual wacky antics.

The use of microphones, recorded voices and lip-syncing episodes prevent us from mindlessly diving into the story. This added layer of obscurity can of course be frustrating for the uninitiated. (Wooster Group is not for hesitant beginners.)

But the importance of the work is underlined by the determined and determined point of view of Valx Pelagea, who illogically concludes that without economic justice the world itself is a prison.

Once fearful of getting in trouble with the law, Pelagia is now the first to carry the workers' banner. A great joke from the play, not included in the Wooster Group adaptation, is quietly conveyed through Valk's character's shifting consciousness; "Don't be afraid of death, be afraid of an inappropriate life."

Amir El Safar has composed new music, atonal jazz, which Shepherd strikes on the keyboard and Pavel transforms into a chatty song. As a reporter and occasional commentator, Fletcher keeps the pace of production relaxed.

The cultural stew includes influences from 1930s Hollywood gangster films, particularly in Fliako's mannerisms and voice. But Brecht, postmodernized, is capable. "Mother" always speaks with disturbing simplicity of a struggle for which, as Pelagia exemplifies, one is never too old or too young.

"Mother"

Where: REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Downtown Los Angeles
When? 8.30pm Thursday to Saturday, 3pm Sunday (all programs sold out)
Tickets: $50
Info: www.redcat.org/events/2023/the-wooster-group
Duration: about 80 minutes, without intermission