What I liked
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What I didn't like
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My overall impression
It’s common to lower one’s expectations for any fringe festival show where the lo-fi, thrown-together nature of the performances is part of the experience, but there is no need to do so for And Her Children. It’s a fully realized work of theatre.
Mother Courage reimagined as an NRA spokeswoman is a concept that in the wrong hands could be incredibly bad. But the script is solid. It marries the two ideas relatively seamlessly while emphasizing the (in)humanity of the character and without ever slipping into an op-ep recital of liberal talking points or tired hand-wringing over hypocrisy. It earns its darkness.
Hailey Mcafee’s performance alone is worth attending for. She is a brilliant actor and storyteller. Her pacing is immaculate, her characterizations are sharp, subtle and visceral. During a well paced 80 minutes, she never pushes her delivery once for a laugh or a heavy moment or for the sake of reclaiming audience attention, because she doesn’t need to. She is confident she has us and we are confident in her care. This is an extremely difficult thing to achieve in any case, but on top of this, the performance is designed to alienate and unsettle us, yet still we remain engaged.
There were times when I felt the story was straining against the inherent limitations of a minimalist one person show but there are many such cases. This is as complete an example of the form as you will ever see.
I humbly suggest that the writers try to justify including a song in a future iteration. I think Mother Courage (and Brecht in general) always benefits from its songs. Also, the sound went out at the performance I attended, and while I have no way of knowing for sure, I suspect this may have been a happy accident. The analog nature of the performance, and audience participation that resulted, added a powerful dimension that was in some sense maybe even more “Brechtian” than originally intended.
Go see this show.
