ISU's KCACTF Entry MOTHER COURAGE Cleans Up in National Honors

As you may recall, Illinois State University's production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Sandra Zielinski, was selected to be performed at the regional level of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. That regional festival was held in January in Michigan.

Mother Courage was a very successful production, one that earned its cast and production staff all kinds of accolades when it first played Westhoff Theatre last October, and again when Mother Courage dragged her cart to Michigan. During the Michigan performance, a national panel of adjudicators watched and evaluated Mother Courage, as they did all the regional selections at all eight regional college theatre festivals. After viewing all of those college productions from all over the country, the national panel selected which shows they wanted to single out for praise and awards, with Mother Courage singled out for some very special honors.

Here's are the awards handed to ISU's Mother Courage by the national Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival judges:

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A MODERN CLASSIC

DISTINGUISHED DIRECTOR OF A PLAY: Sandra Zielinski

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS: Abby Vombrack

DISTINGUISHED COSTUME DESIGN: Brittany Powers

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN COMPOSITION: Zack Powell

Vombrack portrayed Mother Courage herself, while Powell created new music for this production of the play. Congratulatons to Zielinski, Vombrack, Powers and Powell, along with everyone else who contributed to this fierce and ferocious production of Mother Courage and Her Children. The cast (with Vombrack pictured inside Mother Courage's iconic cart) is pictured below.

To see the complete list of KCACTF national honors, click here.

ISU's MOTHER COURAGE Headed to KC/ACTF Regionals in Michigan

Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance has announced that their "fierce and ferocious" October production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, directed by Professor Sandra Zielinski, has been invited to perform at the regional level of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. That means ISU will be taking their entire production of Mother Courage up to Saginaw, Michigan, in early January to showcase their show and their program. And you can help!

As they take their act on the road, you can contribute a dollar or two (or a hundred or two) and ISU's Friends of the Arts will match your gift. I suggest you go big and make Friends of the Arts match your generosity!

ISU's Mother Courage was really terrific, with exceptional performances from Abby Vombrack as Mother Courage and Michele Stine as her mute daughter Kattrin, among others in the talented cast. Zielinski's use of music and on-stage musicians helped keep it properly epic, while the actors made it affecting and powerful. If you'd like to refresh your recollection of the production, you can see a cast photo, a couple of sketches of the scenic design, and a cast list here.

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival was created in 1969 to connect theatre students from universities all over the country, allowing them to network, perform, and hear opinions from voices outside their own departments, with the overall goal of improving the quality of college theatre across the United States.

Every fall, colleges and universities enter their productions for consideration, with the finest among them chosen to attend regional festivals held annually in January and February. In addition to handing out awards to excellent productions and scholarships to worthy students, the regionl fFestivals offer programs, workshops and symposia on acting, directing, design, playwriting, criticism, dramaturgy and stage management. Regional festival productions like Mother Courage are judged by a panel of three judges selected by the Kennedy Center and the KCACTF national committee. These judges select four to six of the "best and most diverse regional festival productions" to travel to the national festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.

ISU's Mother Courage will be performed at the Region III festival in Saginaw along with Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel, as performed by cast and crew from the University of Wisconsin -- Parkside, Ghost Bike, a new play from Laura Jacqmin, produced by Wisconsin's Carthage College, a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest from the University of Wisconsin -- Whitewater, In the Soundless Awe, from Chicago's Concordia College, co-written by Concordia professors Andrew Pederson and Jayme McGhan, and another new play, Three Generations of Imbeciles, by Bill Baer, presented by Cuyahoga Community College.

To help ISU and Mother Courage get to Saginaw, you can find contribution information here, or proceed directly to the ISU Foundation online giving page.

Fierce and Ferocious: MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN at ISU

Everybody knows Brecht isn't easy. His plays are uncompromising, political and harsh. The power of Brecht's message makes his work as difficult to watch as it is important.

Mother Courage and Her Children, his 1939 play about a woman who pulls a cart around Europe during the Thirty Years War, selling booze and bread and belt buckles to soldiers of every stripe, was Brecht's reaction to the rise of Hitler and Fascism in his own Europe. The message is clear: War never goes away. War is an economic necessity, dug so deeply into our pockets that we will never be rid of it. And you may think you can build your empire on its pile of corpses, but it will destroy you in the end, the same way it destroys everything else.

Illinois State University's production of Mother Courage, directed with clarity and strength by Sandra Zielinski, broadcasts that message every time Mother Courage's cart is dragged in circles around the stage. The cart moves in an endless cycle. Courage herself, plus her children and anybody who gets pulled into her orbit, are no more than workhorses, beaten down and savaged by the very war they plan to profit from.

It's a natural for playwright Tony Kushner, who is also concerned with Marxism, the economics and politics of culture, and how the proletariat gets stomped, to take on a translation of Mother Courage. Kushner's voice is perfect for the material, with a contemporary sound and forceful language that never strays too far from the heart of Brecht.

Zielinski's staging and stage pictures are sharp and arresting, with Brechtian effects like supertitles framing the action and voiceovers (courtesy an uncredited Patrick O'Gara) offering a cynical commentary. The theatricality of the staging, a folk-music-meets-70s-soft-rock score from recent MFA grad Zack Powell, and ferocious performances, especially from Abby Vombrack as Courage herself and Michelle Stine as her mute daughter, Kattrin, give this Mother Courage a powerful punch.

Vombrack is all fire and muscle, pushing the play along from beginning to end by sheer force of will, while Stine has a haunted quality and an expressive, luminous face that speaks volumes about the horrors of war.

Courage's other children -- Tommy Malouf as the brash, violent Eilif and Alex Kostner as pale, sad Swiss Cheese -- are also good, as are Matthew Scott Campbell as the boisterous Cook, Andrew Rogalny, Jr., as a vacillating Chaplain, David Fisch as a cigar-chomping general, and Hayley Camire, whose camp-following hooker Yvette makes a vivid impression.

Malouf and Kostner join Devon Nimerfroh and Pat Boylan in a quartet of musicians that pops up to accompany the singers and add music at interludes, making Powell's music sound lively and on-target.

Delia and Linnea Kerr-Dennhardt also contribute to the tableau as Children of War; Linnea has a charming bit with an umbrella and both stand on the sidelines, as mute as Kattrin, near the end, to bear witness. It's a telling image, as we see how the violence and bloodshed around them have robbed so many of any voice at all.

And Zielinski's choice of a final freeze, as Mother Courage struggles to hoist her wagon one last time, twists Brecht's knife one last time.

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Tony Kushner
Original Music by Zack Powell

Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance
Westhoff Theatre

Director: Sandra Zielinski
Scenic Designer: Jake Wasson
Costume Designer: Brittany Powers
Lighting Designer: Joanna Szewczuk
Sound Designer: Aaron Paolucci
Media Designer: Shannon O'Neill
Hair and Makeup Designer: Mary Rose
Voice and Dialect Coach: Connie de Veer
Music Vocal Coach: Cristen Susong
Dramaturg: Gloria Clark
Fight Director: Paul Dennhardt
Stage Manager: Matthew T. Black

Cast: 
Abby Vombrack (Mother Courage)
Alex Kostner (Swiss Cheese)
Tommy Malouf (Eilif)
Michelle Stine (Kattrin)
Matthew Scott Campbell (Cook)
Andrew Rogalny, Jr. (Chaplain)
Hayley Camire (Yvette)
Carlos Kmet (Army Recruiter, Soldier)
Storm Angone (Sergeant, Soldier)
Devon Nimerfroh (Farmer, Soldier, The One with the Eye Patch)
Pat Boylan (Farmer's Son)
David Fisch (General, Lieutenant, Soldier)
Eduardo Curley (Quartermaster, Young Man, Soldier)
Ashley Donahue (Soldier)
Tyler Riggin (Soldier)
Lauren Pfeiffer (Old Woman, Voice Inside, Clerk, Soldier)
Becky Solomon (Young Woman/Soldier)
Randolph Schmaltz (Colonel, Regimental Secretary, Soldier)
Jenna Liddle (Farmer's Wife)
Delia Kerr-Dennhardt (Child of War)
Linnea Kerr-Dennhardt (Child of War)

Running time: 3:10, with one 15-minute intermission

Remaining performances:  Tonight at 7:30 pm and tomorrow at 2 pm, October 23-27 at 7:30 pm

For information about the show, click here or here. For ticket info, click here.

Opening Tonight -- Brecht's MOTHER COURAGE at ISU's Westhoff Theatre

The title of Brecht's play is really Mother Courage and Her Children, although people often forget the kids are there. That's how indelible a character Mother Courage is. Fierce, hard, practical and cynical... She's a woman who does what she needs to do, changes sides as often as she needs to, keeps pulling her cart, keeps selling trinkets to both sides in an endless war, and mostly just finds a way to survive.

But her children -- Eilif, son of a thief, Swiss Cheese, whose father was a Swiss (of course) engineer, and mute Katrin, with a German dad -- don't survive. They're the price she pays for building her life around war.

Mother Courage isn't her real name, of course. She's called that because she once drove her cart through the middle of a battle just to sell moldy bread. "I'm not courageous," she tells us in Tony Kushner's version of the script. "Only the poor have courage. Why? Because they're hopeless."

Brecht wrote his play in 1939, with Hitler and fascism threatening all of Europe. The play isn't set in anything 20th century, however. Instead, Brecht went with the Thirty Years War, a particularly devastating and prolonged conflict that raged all over Europe in the 17th century. But Mother Courage has been done all over the world, against the backdrop of just about every war imaginable. Some productions, like the one with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline at the Public Theatre in 2006, mix bits and pieces of uniforms and weapons from different parts of history, just to illustrate how little things change and how closely tied to human existence (and economics) war is tied.

Sandi Zielinski directs Mother Courage and her Children in Westhoff Theatre for Illinois State University, opening tonight with a 7:30 pm performance, and running through October 27. Because Westhoff is not a large space, its shows tend to sell out, so you are advised to get your tickets early and arrive early, as well.

This production is using Tony Kushner's script, which played to good effect in New York (as discussed above, with Meryl Streep) as well as in London with Fiona Shaw in the title role.

For ISU, Abby Vombrack steps into Mother Courage's boots, with Tommy Malouf, Alex Kostner and Michelle Stine as her ill-fated children. Matt Campbell, MFA directing candidate who just finished up The Glory of Living, plays the Cook, another character out for the main chance, while Andrew Rogalny takes on the role of the cowardly, hypocritical Chaplain.

Although there are songs in the show (expected with Mother Courage), this production is not using the score Jeanine Tesori wrote for Kushner's adaptation. Rumor has they're looking for more of a rock edge, with guitars on stage instead of the usual piano.

For more information on ISU's production, check out this Facebook page for Mother Courage and Her Children or ISU's productions page.