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[Theater reviews]

Taking Courage
Karen MacDonald hitches up her wagon

BY IRIS FANGER

The pain of Bertolt Brecht’s epic anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children — which he wrote in 1938, after being in self-exile from his native Germany for five years — echoes throughout the second half of the 20th century. Its central character, the conniving, surviving Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage, pulls her canteen wagon behind the armies of the Thirty Years War, haggling for coins in exchange for her goods. Carrying her three children along with her, she tries to keep them from harm but cannot. They are lost to a combination of her contradictory instincts and soldiers who shoot to kill — civilians as well as the enemy. As Brecht well understood, and as history keeps demonstrating, it is ordinary citizens who are most affected by the horrors of war and who are most powerless to stop it.

Mother Courage is a plum role, particularly because it offers the maturing actress an extraordinary showcase for her talents. The production that opens this week at the American Repertory Theatre features Karen MacDonald as the mercenary, indomitable Courage. MacDonald — who as a founding member of the company played Celia to Cherry Jones’s Rosalind in the 1980 As You Like It — has appeared in more than 40 productions at ART, but never so clearly in the spotlight. A frequent actor on the stages of regional theaters across the country as well as at ART, she took home the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress in 1996 for moonlighting as the corrosive Martha in Merrimack Repertory Theatre’s staging of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“It’s wonderful to know you’re joining the sisterhood of actresses who have also played Mother Courage,” MacDonald says. “It’s an important role in theatrical literature, but when you’re actually working on it you can’t think that way. I’m exhausted every night, but in a good way. It’s going every day to this world we’ve set up in the rehearsal hall, this world of war with its incredible amount of pain and suffering. War takes what it wants; it’s so massive and hungry.” The large-scale production is being directed by the noted Hungarian director and filmmaker János Szász, in his American debut, with a creative team of Hungarians and Americans. ART regulars Thomas Derrah, Benjamin Evett, Mirjana Jokovic, Paula Plum, and John Douglas Thompson are also in the cast.

Over coffee in Cambridge, MacDonald talks about creating a mammoth icon of the stage. With her turned-up nose, large round eyes, and wispy blond hair, she retains the air of the ingenue parts she once played, but with an edge. Her experience in the theater has given her a savvy and toughness that she is bringing to bear on Brecht.

The play begins in 1624, somewhere in Poland, during the three-decade conflict between German Catholics and Swedish Lutherans. The war has been going on for six years when the curtain rises, and it continues long after the stage goes dark. “One of the things that János said was about the difference of directing a play like this in the United States,” explains MacDonald. “In Europe, where he has staged the play before, every family has directly experienced war. Here we are mounting a play about people living through war in a country that hasn’t had fighting on its soil since the Civil War.”

MacDonald believes that Mother Courage may be Polish because of one line she utters during the play. “She speaks a Polish expression that means ‘Dear God in Heaven.’ My grandmother used the same expression. I’m part Polish; my mom is a Polish girl who grew up in South Boston. When my dad died, we moved back to my grandmother’s house. My step-grandmother, who was Lithuanian, came into my life when I was nine.”

The Polish grandmother, Felicia, was a “homemaker,” in MacDonald’s description; Berniece, the Lithuanian step-grandma, was a “business woman,” the landlady of a tripledecker in South Boston. “These two women were both immigrants. They worked extremely hard; they were fiercely devoted to their families, protective of their children. They were of tough stock, used to adversity. I’ve thought about them a lot.”

Although she is new to Brecht, MacDonald remembers two earlier productions of the play she’s seen: one directed by Peter Sellars at the old Boston Shakespeare Company that starred Linda Hunt; the other staged by her former professor at Boston University, Maxine Klein, at the Open Door Theatre in Jamaica Plain, with one-time Boston theater stalwart Susan McGinley as Courage. “One was enormous; the other was teeny,” she says of the actresses. “I don’t believe there’s some sort of patent on how she’s supposed to look. She’s a woman that women and men can identify with, a single working mother. She’s out there trying to survive, without a man to help her.”

Mother Courage and Her Children will play in repertory at the American Repertory Theatre February 9 through March 20. Tickets are $25 to $59; call 547-8300.