Lynn Nottage’s Ruined and Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations are two plays giving Broadway audiences contemporary perceptions of motherhood and maternal responsibility. Ruined, which has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, seeks to bring the entangled postcolonial brutality of a central African rainforest to the urban/urbane jungle, while 33 Variations transports its New York audience from American academia and family life to Europe in and the early 19^th century.  My reflections on these performances, which I attended at the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, respectively, in March 2009, offer some insights into the ways in which Brecht’s legacy is surfacing in new American theater.

Only Ruined openly claims a Brechtian connection. Its lead character Mama Nadi, performed in this production by Saidah Arrika Ekulona, was inspired by Brecht’s Mother Courage. She operates a comfort station for guerillas and soldiers of various loyalties in the war torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, a shifting African political terrain doubtlessly just as volatile as Brecht’s scenario of the Thirty Years War. Mama Nadi is both the protector and exploiter of the young women in her charge. Her relationship with her merchandise supplier and sometime suitor, Christian, is alternately stormy and tender. She mollifies Christian’s sensitivity to the hard bargains she drives by serving strategic bottles of orange Fanta on the house, while Christian lubricates the relationship with chocolates and poetry.

Their material, emotional, and physical desires sometimes tip dangerously toward self-destructive indulgence. Christian’s penchant for orange soda conceals a weakness for hard drink.  Mama Nadi’s proud confrontations with gun-toting customers and her hunger for profit put her and her girls at constant risk.  Eventually their commerce culminates in a human transaction, as Christian successfully relinquishes his battered niece Sophie to Mama Nadi’s entrepreneurial embrace.

Sophie joins Salima and Josephine in Mama Nadi’s bar and brothel, where the clever newcomer promptly begins skimming money from Mama’s revenue in order to save up for a medical procedure that can correct the bodily damage inflicted upon her from repeated rapes.  (Sophie is “ruined.”) Salima has a similar story, sacrificed to the abusive neglect of her husband, a soldier who lurks in the jungle near the brothel, unwilling to accept his wife’s declaration of independence: “You will not fight your battles on my body any more!” Josephine, a character reminiscent of Natella Abaschwili in Brecht’s other great study of motherhood, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, does not share the principled defiance of her “sisters” but is no less a protégé of Mama Nadi in her determination to exploit a hegemonic male economy to her advantage. Josephine eagerly offers herself to an aging European businessman, Mr. Harari, envisioning herself being happily married to the commodities broker, but even more happily to his commodities.

Mama Nadi’s ample bosom is the repository of cash retrieved from all manner of threatening male customers who represent different sides of the civil war, the soldiers’ roles interchangeably played by the same actors. In contemporary central Africa the sustenance of motherhood normally associated with maternal breasts is transformed to financial transaction. “Mama” is a title that designates not just a maternal role, rather also the material means to sustain that function. The interdependence of motherhood and money, the prerequisite of physical sustenance for moral actions, are conditions that Brecht understood would not be limited to his lifetime.

Playwright Lynn Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey are as conspicuously aware of Brechtian theatrical tenets as they are determined to eschew them at crucial points in the play. The jungle of tree trunks comprising the set effectively merges with the thicket of the backstage mechanical apparatus, blurring the boundary between the reality of the theater and the constructed reality of its setting. On the other hand, Nottage’s production also resorts to classically narrative and often obvious metaphors, relying on such props of dramatic theater as sullen birds in a cage, and a raw diamond in Mama Nadi’s treasure box as reminders to the audience of the current and potential  condition of the women trapped in a jungle of male violence.  Musical interludes of song and dance evoke the Brechtian stage, even as a concluding dance between Mama Nadi and Christian steers the play into a search for equilibrium through romance, a resource unknown to Mother Courage and her suitor cook. It is Mama Nadi’s secret wound, revealed only at the end of the performance, that makes the orbit of this play most elliptical to epic theater and its insistence on transparency and provocation - functions that are undermined by Nottage’s strategic concealments from the audience.

Interestingly, the mother in Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations is likewise injured, though the nature of her malady (Lou Gehrig’s disease) is revealed early on. Like the ruination in Nottage’s play, the debilitation of Dr. Katherine Brandt’s body, though not attributable to violence, has befallen her due to forces beyond her control. Brandt, played in this performance by Jane Fonda, is a professor of music history who has a strained relationship with her directionless daughter Clara. Clara’s ambivalence to goals stands in contrast to her mother’s driven determination to discover the reason behind Beethoven’s fixation on a theme by Anton Diabelli, a preoccupation of the composer that eventually produced a record thirty-three known variations. Among the revelations resulting from Dr. Brandt’s archival investigation of Beethoven’s manuscripts is the discovery that the composer was an obdurate soup-swilling codger, not unlike Brecht’s Galileo Galilei, his stained musical scores revealing as much about his dietary habits as his genius.

Both plays use the maternal wound as a contact point for empathy, both among characters and between audience and stage production. In the case of 33 Variations, the diminishing life span and deteriorating body of the main character energize the narrative in dramatic fashion with a sense of urgency for the completion of Dr. Brandt’s task.  However, under Kaufman’s own direction this dramatic trajectory is frustrated with a disjointed, non-chronological, and distinctly Brechtian arrangement of scenes, each standing independently of the other. Scenes are introduced with a projection announcing the number of a Beethoven variation, accompanied by the Beethoven score as played by Diane Walsh, who is seated as visibly at a piano on stage right as might be a musician at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.  

Diabelli, Beethoven and Beethoven’s devoted assistant Anton Schindler are also characters in the play, their dialogue arching across centuries and continents. Beethoven’s obsession with Diabelli’s theme is as frustrating to his assistant Schindler as Brandt’s musicological fixation is to her daughter Clara, and Brandt’s nervous disorder is as threatening as is the composer’s encroaching deafness. The exploitative nature of the mother-daughter relationship in Ruined finds a parallel in 33 Variations, as the mother seeks to live vicariously through Clara and to ease the pain of her failed relationships by orchestrating those of her daughter.  The tension between change and consistency inherent to musical variations on a theme forms a backdrop for what Brandt and her daughter eventually learn: how to excel at changing. As in Ruined, the paths of these characters ultimately lead to the triumph of harmony over dissonance. The equilibrium they reach is a slippery recognition of the dynamic of time and history, of the disappointing inability to capture the past or effectively map the future; but their common ground emerges as a mutual willingness to celebrate both the accomplishments and limitations of that ambition. 

Mama Nadi remarks at one point in Ruined, “I didn’t come as Mama Nadi, I found her here.” Looking at these two new plays through a Brechtian lens reveals inconsistencies with epic theater even as there is a conscious indebtedness to it. As Mama Nadi’s remark attests, as Katherine Brandt’s archival work reveals, and as Brecht taught, it is possible for individuals to learn, change, and become. In this sense one might be encouraged that Nottage departs from the recommendations of a white 20^th century playwright or that appreciation of Beethoven’s mastery does not become obeisance to it. However, common to both plays, and to the times since Mother Courage and Her Children and since Kaufman’s far less comfortable play about homophobia, The Laramie Project, the healing experienced among Nottage’s and Kaufman’s characters in 2009 takes place mainly within the boundaries of the theater. The satisfaction derived from these two competent literary experiences does little to bridge the distance between Broadway and the Congo or to ensure that the economy of contemporary motherhood will enable the daughter to survive the jungle any less wounded.