Mother Courage scene 4. Photo by Vincent Toner.

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Mother Courage & Her Children by Bertolt Brecht

Directed by Justin Anderson

Music Director - Wyatt Brooks

Sound Designer - Jeannie Thomas

Scenic Designer - Jack Stoffel

Costume Designer - Noel Corbin

Lighting Designer - Jacob Yurkovich

What drew me to working on Mother Courage and Her Children was not a deep love for Brecht. In fact, I’ll admit that I had never even read a Brecht play before working on Mother Courage. I’ve studied theatre for over ten years and had mostly heard the name “Brecht” mentioned in the same breath as “epic theatre” and “V-Effekt.” I didn’t think his plays would appeal to me based on the way his theories were taught in the classroom. Oh, how wrong I was.  

It was initially the directorial vision that brought me to this project. Director Justin Anderson envisioned the play not as a period piece but as a futuristic one, the play’s anti-war and anti-capitalist themes retaining relevance in a post-apocalyptic landscape. And it didn’t hurt that Anderson likened his vision for the production to my favorite video game, The Last of Us.  

So I got to work. When I am designing a production, I focus heavily on providing support for the onstage action, enhancing the visual elements of a play and furthering the collaborative vision of the whole creative team. 

But this was Brecht, so all bets were off.  

It was a challenge and a joy to explore the Brechtian alienation that sound design can execute. My goal in designing Mother Courage and Her Children was not to draw constant attention from the action or deliberately upstage it. I wanted to give the audience an occasional nudge, to incite a little buzzing at the back of the mind and not allow the audience to get lost in the story. I didn’t want anyone to get too comfortable in the theater. If during the performance you ever found yourself thinking, "Did I just hear..." the answer is probably yes.  

In a post-apocalyptic world where resources are scarce, every snippet of information is important, from something as life-altering as a declaration of war to something as trivial as a voicemail. A patchwork of sounds both familiar and foreign, the aural landscape of the apocalypse is never static - no pun intended.