On March 3, 2019, Kathleen Turner was a guest at Susquehanna University and interviewed by the school's president, Jonathan Green, who had encouraged students and faculty to submit questions he could bring to the actress that night. As I had been thinking about Kattrin and was aware of Molly Smith's casting Turner as Courage at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., I shared my questions about the theater of war, theater's empathic opportunities, Courage's relationship with her daughter, and Kattrin's creative modes of expression.

Turner placed emphasis on theater as a locus of diversity and community. Harboring doubts about the Stanislavskian system (method acting) taught as standard in America, she underscored the importance of Brecht’s completion of his antiwar play at the outbreak of World War II and that, at the time of her Arena engagement, no congressman had ever served (and only one had. son who did). While the Iraq war had prompted Tony Kushner, Meryl Streep, and their collaborators to perform Mother Courage in New York's Delacorte Theater in 2006, it was the Afghanistan war that spurred the Washington, D.C. enterprise in 2014.

Diametrically opposed to Brecht's take on theatrical affect (especially Lessing's notion of pity), Turner contextualized compassion as great value. She had to keep rehearsing the moment when Courage receives Kattrin’s body, because she could not easily act such intensity without tears. Unlike Helene Weigel at the Berliner Ensemble, Turner received the body directly from the roof where Kattrin is shot. She emphasized that Brecht endowed Kattrin with her own language and that Erin Weaver rendered this language excellently. Turner also explained that before her rheumatoid arthritis she had heavily relied on her body.