Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht · 1941
A canteen woman drags her wagon through the Thirty Years' War, profiting from the conflict that kills all three of her children. Brecht designed it as epic theater: the audience should think, not feel. But Mother Courage's stubborn survival makes audiences feel anyway, which annoyed Brecht enormously.
The case against
Brecht keeps interrupting his own play. Placards announce each scene's outcome in advance, the songs halt the action to deliver the moral, and twelve episodic scenes spanning twelve years make for a long evening of being instructed. Epic theater treats your emotional response as an error to be corrected; sit through it and you will see why audiences keep committing the error.
Drama · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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