Because this production took place in alley style (Figure 1.2), it was imperative to me that I took full advantage of the enhanced directionality of the stage and audience setup. I had ten total speakers around the space, including two subwoofers under the stage to enhance the many explosions and gunshots throughout the play. 

One major battle I fought in this production was mixing, as the space layout made it difficult to balance the amplified keyboard with the acoustic instruments and vocals. It was an affordance of the space that each audience member had a different auditory experience, but it also made musical numbers particularly difficult. Initially, we did not plan to have microphones, but getting into the space, it quickly became clear that the music director/accompanist would have an almost impossible time hearing the performers. 

On the second day of tech, we added two handheld microphones for the actors, but we elected not to amplify any instruments aside from the keyboard. The blocking and choreography would require the instruments to have remote XLR hookup or body microphones for them to be amplified, and we did not have the budget to make that happen. 

Because the system had not been designed with this much music amplification in mind, mixing became a struggle. I was now basically designing a full musical with a system that was not intended to play a musical. And since we were already in tech, we didn't have the time or resources to remake the system entirely. So I worked with what I had with the little time remaining. Though I do wish I had had a little more time to play with the system and work out some of the bugs, I am certainly satisfied with the end product. 

Much of my inspiration for this production came from The Last of Us, both in its video game and television formats. In fact, it was director Justin Anderson's likening of his vision for Mother Courage to the aesthetic of The Last of Us that drew me to the project in the first place. The game and its sequel are among my favorites, and I was eager to work on a post-apocalyptic approach to this play. 

One of my inspirations from The Last of Us was the game's spatial worldbuilding, the way the soundscape shifts and adjusts as the player character navigates the world. In The Last of Us Part II, for example, the rainy atmosphere of Seattle retains a presence in the soundscape even indoors. The sound effects that make up the outdoors continue as the player character steps inside a building, and filters slowly come up on the outdoor effects so that the sounds may continue as they naturally would. The filters are different depending on the building - if the player character is on the ground floor versus the top floor, if the windows are shattered or intact, even the material of the roof and walls plays a role in how the outdoor sounds are filtered. 

This seemingly minor detail greatly affects how immersive the game world is for the player. The soundscape reflects how sound functions in the natural world, the aural landscapes of playable areas seamlessly incorporating each other as the player navigates the world. 

I held this detail in mind as I designed the aural landscapes of Mother Courage, figuring out how sounds would function in the various spaces and shifting from locale to locale. Specifically, I used this technique in designing the soundscape of scene 6, which sees Mother Courage serving military officers as their commander's funeral occurs in the distance. First, I created the aural landscape of the funeral, which played from distant speakers (5 and 6 in my system design, seen here) - rain pours, and a fife and drum play a dirge. 

On stage, the playing space is divided in two: inside Mother Courage's tent, and outside the tent in the rain. The wagon sits upstage center and the implied "tent" is just below. The majority of the soldiers are made to sit outside, as only officers are permitted inside the tent. This division of space allowed me to use this spatial worldbuilding technique from The Last of Us to enhance the world of the play. From the downstage speakers in the "outdoors" (3A, 3B, 4A, and 4B in system design), I played the same sound of rain pouring that I had used for the distant funeral. From the upstage speakers in the "indoors" (1 and 2 in system design), I played the same effect, filtered in Logic Pro to sound like rain hitting the tent roof, distanced and quieter. I programmed these various cues in QLab to fire at the same time so the sound would be cohesive and constant across all speakers. The rain would impact at the same moment in every speaker, but the "indoor" speakers would play the filtered rainfall while the "outdoor" speakers played the unfiltered effect.

I used the aforementioned spatial technique in scene transitions as well, allowing the music behind the scene changes to fade from the full set of speakers to only the on-stage radio. The music began unfiltered, then a filtered version could fade in on cue as the next scene began. As I had done for scene 6, I had a radio-filtered version of the scene transition songs that fired at the same time as the unfiltered version. For the transitions, however, I kept the filtered cue muted at the beginning. I built a separate cue of fades, which would fade in the filtered song to the radio speaker and then fade out the unfiltered music in the other speakers. A moment later, the radio speaker, too, would fade out as the scene began in full force. 

The songs used in the scene changes were meant to enhance a Brechtian distancing, commenting on the scene that came before. I didn't want to allow the audience to be lulled into a sense of comfort in the story. I believe one of my strongest scenic transitions followed scene 3 - Swiss Cheese has just been executed, his body brought before his grieving mother and sister, who must pretend he is a stranger. As the enemy soldiers carry his body off on a stretcher, the scene change begins and big band music plays. Michael Bublé croons that "That's how it goes!" The first time we executed that transition in a tech rehearsal, there was an audible reaction from the peanut gallery, and I knew that we had gotten it right. 

I sought that sort of comedically shocked reaction in every transition song. My favorite choices were "If I Were A Bell" following scene 8, where the constant ringing of bells signals peace, and "La Vie en Rose" following scene 11; Kattrin has sacrificed herself to stop a surprise attack, and Louis Armstrong sings "Though I close my eyes, I see la vie en rose." This optimistic perspective from the song following such a tragic scene invokes an irony that I feel encapsulates my goal with these transitions - to give an audience pause and make them recognize the tragedy of the onstage action and furthermore of the war-torn world around them. 

Music was certainly important to the world of Mother Courage, not only because the play contains so much diegetic music, but also because of the post-apocalyptic world of the director's vision. I was inspired by an early comment from scenic and media designer Jack Stoffel that suggested that even in the apocalypse, entertainment has not died. With that comment in mind, I focused on the entertainment value of music in addition to its aforementioned Brechtian function in scene changes. Even in war, these characters seek entertainment, so what is available to them? 

The radio became very important to my design, as it was one of the many items on Mother Courage's wagon of goods. I played with using a functioning radio in my design, even experimenting with an FM radio transmitter so that I could control the radio via QLab. Ultimately, I had to scrap the idea, but it lives on in my dreams. To mimic the mobility and directionality of a radio, I instead used fades in QLab with the onstage speakers as the radio moved around the stage. 

 In a lot of post-apocalypse media, such as The Last of Us and Station Eleven (another inspiration cited by the director), radios function as a source of information as well as entertainment, and I felt it was important to use the radio in both of these ways in Mother Courage. The radio plays music, of course, but it also plays PSAs about illness and war, reminding the characters and the audience that this world is dangerous and always in flux. 

The radio's musical tone shifted throughout the design and tech process, starting first as clear commentary on the anti-war and anti-capitalist undertones of the play. The first iteration of radio music included the likes of Green Day, Rage Against the Machine, and Jimi Hendrix, but little by little we moved away from an American perspective of war in favor of a distinctly European setting. The only song that remained from this initial playlist was "That's How It Goes" by Michael Bublé, which proved to be the strongest scene transition in the show. I kept returning to oldies and jazz as I toyed with other songs to use, leaving behind the disillusionment of explicitly anti-establishment music in favor of the ironic positivity of such songs as "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)." 

I would soon realize that my design concept was becoming more like Fallout than The Last of Us - both are post-apocalyptic video games, but Fallout is rooted more in retrofuturism and the ironic positivity of post-WWII aesthetics and entertainment. Ultimately, I decided to use jazz and oldies music throughout to reflect this aesthetic shift toward retrofuturism. 

As mentioned, the directorial concept shifted a bit over the course of rehearsals, initially seeking to make commentary on the American military industrial complex but then changing focus to better reflect the European setting of the play. This, then, inspired me to consider the diegetic boundaries of this production - the characters are largely Swedish, and their enemies include Bavaria and the Spanish. The dialogue, however, is spoken in English, and actors use their natural accents (most American, and the actor playing Mother Courage is English). So, with this new focus on the European setting, I decided to set a boundary between the world of the play and the world outside of it. 

The pre- and post-show playlist, I decided, would be comprised of non-English songs such as "Je Ne Regrette Rien" and "Mi Ultima Parranda." The intermission playlist, by contrast, was comprised of English songs in the same tone, such as "Pennies From Heaven" and "Cheek to Cheek." Before the curtain rises, the aural landscape is foreign to American ears, but once we enter the world of the play, we allow the audience access to the European world by literally speaking the audience's language. The curtain call song, too, transitions the audience back into the world outside the play, as the first half of the song ("Sh-Boom") is in English, and it transitions into a German version of the song as bows conclude (Figure 4.2). 

Additionally, the pre- and post-show music is unfiltered, but the intermission music is layered with the same radio filter as the diegetic music throughout the rest of the play. PSAs also accompany the pre-show loop in a variety of languages, including pandemic-era slogans in Portuguese, preshow reminders to turn off cell phones in English, and the occasional quote from Mother Courage in its original German (Figure 4.3). 

These, of course, are callouts for attentive audience members or those in the know on Brecht. I like to have a bit of fun in my sound design where I wink to a knowing audience. I also included another reference to Brecht at the start of intermission, where "Mack the Knife" plays from the radio. Even if nobody else understood the reference, I got a little chuckle out of it, and that's all that matters. 

Figure 5.7: Mother Courage scene 12. Photo by Vincent Toner.

One thing I find myself doing in every production I sound design is to have a scene that breaks my established rules. If I am designing a comedy, I will find a moment where the humor is lost and enhance it in my design; in a naturalistic production, I find a time to incorporate the fantastical. In Mother Courage, my sound design was largely ironic and alienating, so I considered where I could find a scene to do the opposite, to let the audience get lost in the story and feel the characters' pain. 

It was watching the designer run that I found this opportunity. The director had restaged scene 10, "Song of Shelter," as a dream in Mother Courage's mind, playing with her three children, alive and free of their trauma. It was meant to pull at the heartstrings in a way that the rest of the play did not, the perfect opportunity to abandon the distancing irony I had practiced throughout the rest of the play.

Leading into "Song of Shelter," I chose to use a scene change song that did not function like the rest. I instead chose an instrumental piece called "Vanishing Grace (Childhood)" by Gustavo Santaolalla, written for The Last of Us. The song was functionally non-diegetic, unlike the other scene change songs that would fade to the radio as the scene began. It was sheer coincidence that "Vanishing Grace (Childhood)" was in the same key as "Song of Shelter," and the two blended beautifully together to lead into this dreamy scene. 

Other non-diegetic effects underscored "Song of Shelter," a far cry from the naturalism of the rest of the play. Children laugh, ambient tones resonate, and static and a blaring alarm fade in as Mother Courage loses her grip on her fantasy. Lights and sound then shock us back to reality, where Mother Courage must face her tragic existence. She and Kattrin continue on with the wagon and we return to form, "Dream a Little Dream of Me" playing from the radio as the scene changes. 

One other trick I like to use in my sound design is the "shocking silence," which I incorporated here, too. The rest of the play is underscored by sound, never truly silent even when it may seem so. I programmed a constant room tone and minor static to play under everything, and it only stops in this one shocking moment. I wanted it to feel like the air had been sucked out of the room when Mother Courage snaps back to reality. The room tone underscore fades back in along with the scene change music, as if we are now able to breathe again after that heartbreaking experience. 

A question that kept coming up throughout the design process of Mother Courage was that of relevance - how do we show the audience that a play about the Thirty Years War written more than eighty years ago still applies to life in the 21st century? 

War, of course, will always be tragically relevant. But for any audience member who fails or refuses to see the relevance to the global climate of the modern day, we wanted to really drive the point home. As Mother Courage continues on alone with her wagon and the ensemble marches on, singing a reprise of "Song of Mother Courage," we wanted to turn a mirror on the audience, laying out plainly that the machine of violent capitalism and profitable war has not slowed down since Brecht's writing of the play. 

I created different tracks for each speaker surrounding the audience, sewing together headlines and sound bites about violent conflicts around the globe since WWII. The tracks come together twice: once to hear emergency sirens all around from the ongoing war in Ukraine, and once to hear a reporter echoing around the room that violence is ongoing in Gaza as bombardment continues. The lights fade to black with that timely piece of information hanging in the air. 

This moment was to me the most fulfilling element of my design. It achieved my major goal in designing Mother Courage - to showcase the play's commentary in a relevant and timely fashion. To leave the audience with a sense of something changed: a new perspective, a deeper understanding, a sense of duty not to ideals but to the good of humanity.