Theatre West Special Event:

Mother Courage and Her Children

By Bertolt Brecht

A staged reading with music by Paul Dessau.
Translation by Paul Lawley.

Mother Courage is one of nine plays that Brecht wrote in resistance to the rise of Fascism during WWII. Mother Courage, with its theme of the devastating effects of war and the blindness of anyone hoping to profit from a war, is not set in modern times but during the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648, which involved most of Europe. It follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling, nicknamed “Mother Courage,” who is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Schweizerkas, Eilif, and Kattrin, to the very war from which she tried to profit.