In March A Tree We Planted. Part 1.

By: Eric Stroud, dramaturg (NOTE: Mother Courage and Her Children opened on Friday to a major success. Tickets are still available for other showings, but they are going fast. You can buy them online by visiting this link.)
THE SONG OF SHELTER

IN MARCH A TREE WE PLANTED
TO MAKE THE GARDEN GAY.
IN JUNE WE WERE ENCHANTED:
A LOVELY ROSE WAS BLOOMING
THE BALMY AIR PERFUMING!
BLEST OF THE GODS ARE THEY
WHO HAVE A GARDEN GAY!
IN JUNE WE WERE ENCHANTED.

WHEN SNOW FALLS HELTER-SKELTER
AND LOUDLY BLOWS THE STORM
OUR FARMHOUSE GIVES US SHELTER.
THE WINTER’S IN A HURRY
BUT WE’VE NO CAUSE TO WORRY.
COSY ARE WE AND WARM
THOUGH LOUDLY BLOWS THE STORM:
OUR FARMHOUSE GIVES US SHELTER.

This lovely song comes in scene ten of Mother Courage and Her Children. Sung by a farmer and his family, it seems to be a simple ballad of gratitude for a garden in the spring and a house that keeps their family warm in the winter. It is a pretty song, but to be frank, random. When I first heard it, I wondered why would Brecht include it in his play. However, after some research I was surprised by what I found. Lets focus on the planting of the tree for a moment. A large part of director David Morgan's concept for this show revolves around a tree that sits center stage.

When I first spoke to David about his concept for the show, he spoke of how he wanted to emphasize that any war we have today, is simply evidence that human kind has not learned from its mistakes. He wanted his audience to stop and think for a moment about what war has ever actually solved, and whether or not it is ever the answer. When he told me about the tree, I asked him what he wanted it to mean. He sat for a moment and pondered. "It's human kind," he finally answered. He went on to tell me that the tree would be a dead one, just as war mongering is the death of the human race. When are meeting was over, I immediately started doing research. Now that I understood my director's usage of a tree in the play, I wanted to know what Brecht meant by mentioning it in this song. In most translations of Mother Courage the word 'tree' or 'trees' is mentioned at least ten times. Now for a noun in a play, just over 100 pages, this is a fair amount of usage. Well, after doing some digging I came across some very interesting information. Adolf Hitler loved oak trees.

In fact, there were over 130 oak tree saplings presented by Hitler to gold medalists during the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany. I know, what the heck?

"The oak tree was considered the sacred tree of Germany. Hitler loved oak trees and had them planted all over the Reich as "concordant with the spirit of the Führer." Oak leaves and acorns were even the symbols of the SS, Hitler's green Praetorian Guard."Read more: http://bit.ly/1MfvYUb

So what does this have to do with Brecht's mention of trees so many times in Mother Courage? Well, as I have mentioned before, this play was written by Brecht as an anti-war, direct response to the Nazi Regime of World War II.

Although the play did not go on stage until prior to Hitler's regime (due to Brecht having to hide from them in Poland), we know that Brecht outwardly condemned the Nazi regime, which was his reason for hiding in the first place.

With this knowledge in mind, the planting of the tree by the farmer takes on knew meaning. While we do not know for sure, perhaps inclusion of the song in the play is a commentary on Hitler's attempt to use oaks as a means of manipulation. Just as Hitler seemed to have used the oaks as a mask for the sinister, the farmer uses the trees as a means of willful ignorance to the war going on outside his home. Brecht certainly despised those Germans who would simply submit to the extermination of Jews and an oppressive dictatorship if it meant a joyful Spring. However, if you come and see the play, you can see what happens to this farmer and his family.

David Morgan's concept also took on new meaning for me as well. Though he did not necessarily mean it to, the tree became an omen for future generations. It stood as a warning to those of our generation who ignore our views on war, with a willful ignorance. However, Dave's concept delves deeper. Tune in to the next post to learn what other elements of the show apply to Dave's concept; "any war we have today, is simply evidence that human kind has not learned from its mistakes."

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MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN

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by Makenna Johnston, dramaturg In a ‘special projects’ theatre class held between January and March of 2020, four students and their professor began devising a show. Their devising team? David Morgan (professor), Clara Wright, Mikah Vaclaw, Sten Shearer, and Dylan Wright. Their source text? The Turn of the Screw, a novel by Henry James. Though the team’s original devising process was cut short due to the Covid-19 pandemic, aspects of their invaluable contributions to the production live on. Each student deviser's unique perspective about the story and devising process are explored below. Clara Wright Our professor David Morgan had the idea to create a devised piece of theatre to take to the Edinburgh fringe festival with a group of students. He was drawn to the script of the Turn of the Screw, but wanted to do his own take on it, so he decided to create a new adaptation of the original book with a group of students. He was drawn to the eerie nature of the piece, the elements of horror, and the slow descent into madness of the governess. I joined Dave's class to write and devise this script because, first of all, working with Dave has always been a pleasure, but the story was intriguing to me as well. I loved the idea of studying and understanding a layered female character. I don't think there are enough interesting female characters out there at the moment. The governess was affected greatly by societal pressures and a deep, depressing history that drove her to madness when she arrived at Bly. The story was mesmerizing. I was also excited to work the muscle of creating a new piece of theatre. I am not confident in my writing abilities, but it was exciting to take a piece of literature that already existed and make something new and interesting out of it, using visual elements that you can't get from reading a book. We not only wrote dialogue, but we also wrote out ways we could use movement, sound, lighting, puppetry, and more to tell the story in the most effective way possible. The devising process was a blast! Dave would tell us what scene he wanted us to write and we would each go home and write out our own interpretation of the story. The next class, we would get together and go over which elements of people's scenes we liked best, which moments were the most clear, and which lines we for sure wanted to keep in the final script. Sometimes our interpretations were so different and unique that it was difficult to choose which direction the piece needed to go. Ultimately, Dave would piece together each of our scenes into a cohesive script. Other moments I enjoyed were when we would put scenes on their feet and act them out to see how they translated to the stage. The introduction especially benefited from this exercise. The last exciting part of the devising process that I'll talk about is writing the music. I hadn't written original music like this before so it was such a cool experience creating sound like this for the first time. I didn't ever think about what scene I was writing for, but Dave told me what tone he was looking for in a piece of music and then I experimented until I found something I liked by layering on different sounds I could make on my violin. It was an overall thrilling experience! Turn of the Screw example music Turn of the Screw example music 2 Mikah Vaclaw Because of COVID, we didn’t get to fully get the script up on its feet, so we focused a lot on writing. First, we all read the book over Christmas break, and when we had our first meetings as a group, we talked about what stood out to us in the story and what we wanted our retelling of the story to be. Something we really wanted to explore was the idea that the ghosts were actually things born out of trauma the governess had experienced in her youth, and how she was the only one that could see them/was affected by them. We also wanted to explore jealousy between Mrs. Grose and the Governess. Once we had fleshed out what was important to us, we started writing. Dave would tell us what scene he wanted us to write for homework, and we’d all come back with our different written versions of that scene. Then, in class, we would read them aloud together and talk about what we thought worked, and what didn’t. Dave would then take all of our scripts and compile them together into one cohesive scene. We were able to start toying with the introduction to the play, and Clara wrote some really cool violin music for it. Sten Shearer The process of devising the script was the five of us (David Morgan, Clara and Dylan Wright, Mikah Vaclaw, and myself) would get together a couple times a week. Initially, David gave us some conceptual ideas he had for the show (like using movable screens that could utilize shadow work). Then we all read the original story. At each meeting, we would assign a chunk of the original story as our writing assignment. Using that chunk of the story as inspiration, the four students would go home and write a scene that translated that section of the original story into a play scene. Through that process, we collaboratively came to an understanding of the themes that we wanted the play to explore as well as theatrical devices and ideas that we thought would work well in putting the play on its feet. Simultaneously to writing these scenes, we were also using our class time to experiment with staging and blocking using the earlier scenes that we had written. So for instance, when we were about halfway through writing the script, we were also staging what the early scenes would look like to help test if the script we were writing worked in practice as well as on paper. Dylan Wright We chose this project because we obviously needed something in the public domain that we wouldn't need to pay royalties for, but aside from that this story really highlights the mental turmoil of a young governess as she grapples with her duties as a woman and her place in the world religiously as well. We took this story to an extremely dark place-- it has since been edited for this particular production-- that orbited around this idea of religious toxicity, something all too familiar in Utah. We felt that it was important to excavate and expose the uncomfortable and truly ugly parts of religion and the toll it can take on us. I wanted to work on this project because Mikah, Sten, Clara, and Dave are some of my favorite people and artists. The driving force really, as mentioned earlier, is that we wanted to create. We were all itching to create something. None of us needed this class credits-wise so the idea of coming together to tell a ghost story that echoes modern themes in a bare-bones, devised manner was extremely appealing. Unfortunately we were never able to perform this production because of COVID. But the devising process was an invaluable gem. We would each read the same chapter of The Turn of the Screw and then come to class with our own interpretation of this chapter in scene-form, creating dialogue and stage directions. Dave would then pull the pieces from each that rendered a clearer, more specific story and then we would go from there. When we would arrive in class we would also read each other's scenes out loud to get a feel for them. It was a marvelous process.

In March A Tree We Planted. Part 1.

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