..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Can You Have
Too Much Meryl?

This year it really seems that you just cannot avoid Meryl Streep. The legendary actress is in three movies out right now, The Devil Wears Prada, Prairie Home Companion and - yikes! - even the animated Ant Bully, where she plays, what else?, the Queen of all Ants. How ubiquitous can you get before you become overexposed?

She may be up Oscar nominations for perhaps both of the first two films. Best Actress for her witchy ice queen of a fashion editor in Prada and Best Supporting Actress for her ditzy, disarming country & western chanteuse in Prairie. And her big year got even bigger this week when she opened in the unrelenting three hour 20 minute saga "Mother Courage & Her Children," live onstage in Central Park.

She is my favorite actress. In Prada and Prairie, I just couldn't get enough of Meryl. "She can play anything!" I've always thought. But Mother Courage proved me wrong. I really couldn't wait for it to be over.

Three hours and twenty minutes of Mother Courage was simply too much Meryl. Or too much FOR Meryl. Or anyone.

Mother Courage is rarely performed. And now we see why. It's virtually unperformable. I mean, if Meryl Streep can't make it work, who can?

It was written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht in the '30s, as WWII was breaking out, for his wife the great German actress Lotte Lenya. It is animated, I think, by a great desire to literally kill the actress who's playing it which, in the first case, was his wife.

I was really unsettled by the deep seated misogyny in this supposed Mother of All Roles written in the 20th century for a woman. Courage is a repulsive character who has no scruples and seems to have no feeling whatever for her three children, whom she loses predictably to War, one each hour. She survives simply by dint of her own incredible selfishness, and her blind tenacity. But since Shakespeare wrote no "Queen Leer", Mother Courage is like catnip to actresses. But now that we see it in toto, the only intoxicating aspect of this part is its incredible SIZE.

So now we have the questionable spectacle of America's greatest film actress literally killing herself hauling this three hour twenty minute mountain of a theater piece across the Delacorte stage in Central Park. It's almost like she's hauling the Theater itself. And to what avail? You climb Mount Everest just because it's there? I guess you do, if you're Meryl Streep.

That she barely gets out alive, and to standing ovations yet, is more a testament to a living screen legend who, at 57, is trying to prove has the stamina of an army of Swedes and Poles. (Which is what the play is about, the 30 Years War between these two countries.) Stamina, she's got. In buckets.

This role just about defeats her. She huffs. She puffs. She struggles trying to whip some life into this overstuffed dead horse, and it just about does her, and us, in. Courage is something Streep has as an actress in abundance. But this role reveals her limitations.

She just can't play down to the peasant level, which is what Mother Courage requires. Anna Fierling, who is known as Courage, is a woman from Bamberg (wherever that is) who makes her living selling contraband goods during wartime to BOTH sides. And she and her three children live out of a cart, pulled back and forth across blood-soaked battlefields as Mother Courage haggles and haggles. Then she haggles some more. It's deadening.

So here we have Streep, our greatest actress, and director George C. Wolfe and translator Tony Kushner doing their best to make this misshapen hunk of an anti-war polemic into a play. But they all fail by respecting the text too much to cut it into something bearable. This is second-best Brecht, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Still, to actually watch La Streep alive onstage is riveting, even if she's totally miscast, which, in this case, she is. I never thought of her being particularly patrician, but her Seven Sisters background suddenly betrays here her. She's like a co-ed from Vassar playing Mother Courage AT Vassar. (Which is where she went as an undergraduate).

As a be-smirched, be-grimed camp-follower in army boots, a tattered grey army uniform, dark brown hair in peasants' braids and buns, she just never seems low-class. Never. Ever. She seems to be slumming in this part. Not good for believablity.

And for someone who is renowned for her chameleonic vocal dexterity with accents, Streep chooses no clear accent for Courage. She's veers from Vassar to the Bronx and back again…

Still, she enthralls through her sheer movie star charisma which never leaves her for a second. She has proved that audiences will sleep overnight in Central Park (and they do) to get the free tickets to see her do this to herself. But all those decades before the camera, playing everything small and saving the big moments for the close-ups, hurts her here, where she is in essence re-learning stage technique by doing this incredibly difficult part.

But you root for her regardless to just get through the damn thing. She's shorter than she seems on screen. Her shoulders broader, her figure generally boxier than I thought she'd be.

The supporting cast is all very, very good, including Kevin Kline, who is delightfully daffy in a cakewalk of the small part of Courage's sometime romantic interest, The Cook. The always capable, but never-much-more-so Central Park Public Theater actors are inspired to go beyond themselves by simply being onstage with Streep. She seems to have dynamited them all into explosive levels that they as an ensemble have never reached before. Too bad the play itself doesn't reach that level, too.

- Stephen Holt

August 28, 2006

Stephen Holt is a veteran NY-based journalist. The Stephen Holt Show continues to run weekly in NY.

Also by Stephen Holt ...

Viva Pedro! Part II
Viva Pedro! Part I
Wrapping Up The Newport Film Festival
Will The History Boys Continue To Make Awards History?

 

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