‘Mother’ can’t get them to play nicely

Expectations have been running a little high. Determined spectators (who no one would mistake as outdoorsy types) have been camping out overnight on the edges of Central Park to see the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 masterpiece, “Mother Courage and Her Children.”

Needless to say, it’s not the German playwright who’s emboldening them to risk the rats and rapists of their mothers’ nightmares for a free ticket. No, the drawing card is Meryl Streep, who has ditched her diabolical Prada for paramilitary wear.

The occasion is one of high theatrical seriousness. Not only is America’s leading actress taking on one of the canonical roles in modern drama, but America’s leading political playwright, Tony Kushner, has prepared his own translation of what many consider to be the greatest political play of the 20th century.

To top it off, George C. Wolfe, the man who directed Kushner’s “Angels in America” on Broadway as well as a raft of other celebrated works during his dozen-year tenure as artistic director of the New York Public Theater, has brought his unique brand of showmanship directing to the production, which opened Monday night at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater.

The upshot? Well, it’s not the “Mother Courage” that our war-crazed moment calls for. But it just may be the one that our hasty, semi-committed, event-driven theater deserves.

That may seem like an ungrateful thing to say considering the experience and good intentions that have gone into the offering. With original music by Jeanine Tesori, the composer who collaborated with Kushner on “Caroline, or Change,” and a cast that includes Kevin Kline as the lusty cook, Austin Pendleton as the hypocritical chaplain and Jenifer Lewis as the finagling prostitute, it would seem that the best and the brightest have been summoned.

But that is precisely the problem. These exceptional talents are expected to come together and smoothly operate in a theatrical idiom that, even modified for a sitcom sensibility, is at a remove from both the dogged realism and musical frivolity of our stages. Is it any wonder that the result is such a mishmash?

Though Brecht is known today mainly as a playwright and theorist, he’s considered one of the greatest 20th century directors. When his Berliner Ensemble toured Europe in the mid-1950s, it was a revolutionary moment in the development of contemporary stagecraft.

His blending of Weimar-era cabaret with epic narrative threw critical light on our collective responsibility for social injustice. But the work was revelatory as much for its theatrical effectiveness as for the depth of its political questioning.

For all the fancy theorizing, the style was spare, effortless and direct. But then his actors shared an aesthetic background and training, and were led by a visionary who had a practical genius for collaboration, made possible by comparatively unlimited rehearsal time.

Lacking these advantages, Wolfe’s ambitious modern-dress staging strains to maintain the play’s heightened theatricality. The production approaches the material (a straight drama sporadically bursting into song) as postmodern pastiche, but the actors lumber to achieve the required expressionistic effects, and Tesori’s score never finds its footing.

Mind you, Streep’s mode of attack is fearless. To the martial beat of one of Tesori’s ballads, she enters singing on her canteen wagon. Her voice and manner evoke not so much the 17th century Middle Europe of the Thirty Years’ War (the setting of the play) or the start of World War II (when the play was written) as New York’s Hell’s Kitchen before it became the land of expense-account dining.

Salty and sinewy, she bustles along like a battlefield Mama Rose, trying to support her two sons, whom she wants to keep out of the military, and her tenderhearted mute daughter, whom she does everything in her power to toughen up.

Mother Courage is a character who, sleepwalking in an economic nightmare, attempts to thrive on the war without falling victim to its murderous reality. Streep captures the twisted emotional logic of a woman whose tragic course is driven by the conflict between maternal love and material necessity.

But there’s a rushed, pushing quality to her performance, as though she were directed at every moment to be faster and bigger. The truthfulness of her portrait is smudged by a production that can’t quite figure out how to deploy its resources in the service of Brecht’s vision.

She’s not the only actor who suffers the consequences of Wolfe’s frantically muddled storytelling. Kline often seems to be coping with his lines rather than making choices with them.

The cook is supposed to be a self-interested rake, a monster who doesn’t understand his own monstrousness largely because he insists the world is so much worse than he could ever be. At times Kline seems to be apologizing for his character, at other times erasing him. And in his “Song of Solomon,” in which he exposes the black plumage of his nihilism, he turns him into a dancing cipher given to “Cabaret”-style hand jive.

Pendleton’s chaplain often seems stymied by Kushner’s cumbersome verbiage, which only contributes to the fuzziness of the overall picture. A gale-force presence, Lewis has the most success handling the language, approaching it like a musical theater diva who knows how to transform bluster into comic jazz.

Stillness isn’t held as a virtue. Rather than following the lead of Riccardo Hernandez’s bare wooden fortress set, Wolfe keeps busying up the atmosphere with stormy weather. One minute it’s an oddly contained rainstorm, the next it’s a blizzard blowing to the back of the theater.

As he revealed in his 1995 tropical fever dream treatment of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” which started in Central Park before transferring to Broadway, Wolfe is better at galvanizing a scene than subtly interpreting it.

But the high-kinetic theatrics here not only don’t illuminate, they often seem to entirely block out comprehension of what’s spoken. So when Mother Courage’s son Eilif (Frederick Weller), who has enlisted against his mother’s orders, triumphantly recounts a successful massacre, he performs a jig with a saber in hand that turns the horror into an MTV moment.

For the most part, Wolfe keeps us shockingly aware of the carnage, which is no doubt one of the main reasons for reviving Brecht’s masterpiece now. The production, however, lacks the basic narrative clarity to spark outrage at the way human lives are breezily transformed into casualty statistics.

In a better staging, Streep’s keening just before she pushes onward with her wagon would move us from sorrow to indignation. Instead, it brings only a sense of relief that the clamor has finally come to a close.