Sunday night. Memorial Day weekend.

Fresh-faced all-American warriors had converged on Times Square to remember U.S. Veterans and to be remembered by the citizens they are sworn to protect.

I chose to spend Memorial Day Weekend with Red Mother– a celebration of those who painted themselves in vibrant prime colors to enter battle, an Honor Song for those who fell, and a tribute to those who have survived.

The artistry behind each element of the production is consummate. From the dramaturgy to the performance; from the crafting of “Blue Fred” to the choreography; from the direction to the projection design, this is an exercise in storytelling that is compelling and unforgettable.

Mother Courage and Her Children follows a sharp and cynical woman as she trails the Swedish and Finnish armies across Seventeenth Century Europe selling her wares through twelve years of the Thirty Year War. Like the many German citizens who elected Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, this entrepreneur supports “her” war, which she believes brings profit and opportunity. Brecht’s unlikely “heroine” Mother Courage is a likeable carrion eater, hoping to fatten her children on a war that kills other mothers’ children. After twelve years of profitless toil and incalculable loss, Mother Courage—childless and alone—has learned nothing. As the play ends, this hyaena [sic] of the battlefield” (Brecht 64) still believes that her war will ultimately pay off and that she will be finally reunited with her eldest son of whose recent execution the self-aware Courage remains ironically unaware. But Brecht’s lessons are not for his characters.

Mother Courage learns nothing from all of her travails; after twelve years, she has gleaned no insight into the nature of the beast in whose belly she has lived so long. Brecht intended the lessons she has failed to learn in her time and place for the audience that occupies his own. Mother Courage and her Children spoke back to Hitler’s inflated promises to a broken people and idealized visions of heroic self-sacrifice for a ‘greater good.’ But Bertolt Brecht found it necessary to flee Germany before Mother Courage could take the stage, and it was not until he returned from exile in 1947 to take up residence in the Soviet controlled East Berlin that German audiences saw (too late) the play that he had written for them—the play that might have changed everything…

For Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island, everything has changed; we who live today are the survivors of a war that has been raging for centuries upon our shores. In the wake of its armies and into the throes of its continuing conflicts Muriel Miguel’s Red Mother makes her way. She belongs to no single time or territory; a creature of the eternal present, Belle  (played by Miguel) moves across four centuries from conflict to conflict, finding therein a way to survive and thrive despite the circumstances that surround her. She is, in the words of Spiderwoman Theater, a “craven” woman, a “failed mother”—‘treacherous,’ ‘complicit,’ and utterly incorrigible (Red Mother, Publicity Materials, 2010). This restless spirit sells her children when she needs money and eats the carcass of her best friend (rather than burying it) when she requires food. Belle—this unlovely mother–does not know she is a spirit; hence, she lives as if she will never die, feeding fleshly cravings regardless of their cost.

She is neither sage nor noble, neither earthy nor kind. She is the Indian woman they never wrote about—the Indian grandmother not spoken of at any great length by her grandchildren. Weaving the chronicle of this Red Mother into traditional demon lore of Kuna Yala, Muriel Miguel speaks back to the popular stereotypes that have defined and confined Indigenous women for the past four centuries and that continue to define and confine contemporary Indigenous women across Turtle Island (the Americas). The unlovely Belle of Miguel’s imagination stages her intervention by revealing a suggestion of the beauty in seeming ugliness, of the honorable self-sacrifice in seeming capitulation and of the victories in seeming defeat.

Where do those victories lie? How do they manifest themselves as victories? How do the stories of these victories—little victories hard won by the invisible, marginalized, broken, craven, raving females who have been erased from popular imagination—write themselves upon the hearts and minds of their descendants? This is a central question that has driven Muriel Miguel to create Red Mother. How does the “bad mother” on the fringe pass along her knowledge and cultural understandings? What has she passed on to her descendants? As Indigenous people, Miguel has reminded me, we owe our survival as much to her as to the sagacious, self-sacrificing earth-archetype (Personal Communication, 7 May 2010). She has learned key lessons in the fray, and somehow she has passed them on to those who survive her.

• What are the lessons the unlovely Belle teaches us—the beleaguered grandchildren who still struggle to survive a centuries-old war?
• How might these lessons change us?
• How might Red Mother’s lessons change everything?

Creator/Performer Muriel Miguel and Director Murielle Borst invite you to join them in a round-table discussion to explore these questions on Sunday May 30, 2010 at La MaMa (E.T.C.) immediately following the 2:30pm performance of Red Mother.

We also invite you to respond to this Blog with your own questions, thoughts and observations!

Red Mother is presented by  La MaMa E.T.C. in association with Spiderwoman Theater and developed in collaboration with Loose Change Productions. Tickets may be ordered at 212-475-7710 or online at http.//www.lamama.org

Works Cited

Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. Trans. John Willett. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club (First Floor Theater) 74A East 4^th Street, NYC

8pm — Thursday-Saturday May 27-29, 2010                      2:30pm — Sunday May 30, 2010

8pm — Thursday-Saturday June 3-5, 2010                          2:30pm — Sunday June 6, 2010

Red Mother is presented by La MaMa E.T.C. in association with Spiderwoman Theater