One week before we mark the 50th anniversary of his death, Bertolt Brecht’s popularity in American theater is secure. This week the American playwright Tony Kushner is staging a production of Brecht’s Mother Courage in New York’s Central Park. Kushner last received recognition for his screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Kushner has an excellent command of German and a deep knowledge of Brecht. He feels that it’s necessary to make some adaptations in the text in order to reach the American audiences today:
“The German is strange,” said Mr. Kushner, who also translated Brecht’s “Good Person of Setzuan” in 1994 for the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. “It’s Brecht’s approximation of 17th-century German, not modern, sort of Bavarian, but with modern things in it. It’s not like ‘Good Person,’ which is written in sort of a clean, plain style. It’s rough and bumpy, with a lot of commas and run-on sentences, and it’s hard to find an American approximation for it. I mean, there’s no American regional dialect that would work. And we don’t have anything that old that would work.”
Mr. Kushner’s solution, he explained during an interview at the Public Theater, was to sacrifice the text’s antique echoes and concentrate instead on conversational flow, the thrust and clarity of situations, and the play’s humor, which he said was in danger of seeming “quaint” these days. Serious as its story is, “Mother Courage” actually contains a lot of humor, mostly of an awkward and biting sort that Mr. Kushner has deliberately adjusted.
“The jokes in the play are amusing but not ha-ha funny in the original,” he said. “I’ve made them more ha-ha funny.”
He did this, he said, “to keep the evening crackling,” noting that contemporary American audiences are significantly different from the German ones who found the play shattering when it was first performed in Berlin in 1949. For one thing, the consequences of war are less immediate and palpable for most Americans, despite the growing numbers of American soldiers killed in Iraq.
And for another, “we’re less of a community in a certain sense,” Mr. Kushner said. “We’re more atomized. And one thing I think that laughing out loud does is it knits an audience together. It’s a moment when the audience gets to aggressively assert its claim on the space, against what’s going on onstage. It’s noisy and big and you can see the actors react to it. So I feel like what I did is legitimate.”
Purists may grumble, but at least American audiences are being exposed to one of Brecht’s classic pieces. As Hella points out in her blog, Germans have pretty much lost touch with Brecht (whether intentionally or not): in a recent survey, 42% of respondents in Germany had never read anything by Brecht, and 55% had not read anything since they were forced to do so in school.
