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The San Francisco Mime Troupe's: The Mother

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2021

Mel Gordon
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Extract

To me The Mother is one of Brecht's worst plays, sentimental and party-dogmatic. Later on in his career, I tell them [Denny Stevens and Steve Friedman of the Mime Troupe], he [Brecht] learned how to do these things much better, how to sink dialectic into the human situation…. And when I insist on the play's being a lesser work, I get a very cold smile from Steve: “We disagree entirely.”

Review by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice (2 December 1974)

Written in 1930-1931 after a Party directive to bring more women into the various German Communist organizations and first produced in January, 1932, Brecht's adaptation of the well-known Maxim Gorky novel, The Mother, was the subject of an intense esthetic and political debate among theatre critics and left-based theatre workers.

Type
Three Brecht Productions
Information
The Drama Review , Volume 19 , Issue 2: Political Theatre Issue , June 1975 , pp. 94 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Drama Review

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Footnotes

The title photograph by Theodore Shank shows The Mother carrying the red flag in the last scene. Photographs with article are from performances in Davis, California, and Mexico City.