The Good Woman of Setzuan: Just a Quaint Old Story

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The Good Woman of Setzuan: Just a Quaint Old Story

Mary Moody Northen Theatre,

through March 5

Running Time: 2 hrs, 25 min

Is it our time or just that so much time has passed since Bertolt Brecht wrote this fairy-tale-cum-socialist-parable that renders it so gentle and impact-free? The Good Woman of Setzuan, written in 1938 during Brecht's exile from Nazi Germany, may be the weakest of the exile plays -- plays which also include The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage and her Children, and The Life of Galileo, and which have since been declared the playwright's most important. It certainly poses problems for modern producers if it is supposed to raise any meaningful questions about what makes a person good or bad in the light of America's incredible economic winning streak. Greed was good in the 1980s, remember? Now it isn't really greed any longer, it's business success.

In this St. Edward's University production, directed by Susan Loughran, much is made of Brecht's so-called "alienation effect," that is, the sense that an audience is always fully aware that it is watching a play, generated by the use of certain techniques in the production; the idea is to keep the audience from becoming so wrapped up in the drama of the story that they forget the social criticism propping the story up. To this end, Loughran mixes into the production declarative songs, dancing, dream-interrupting puppetry, masks, direct address, scenes staged all around the theatre, and other performance techniques. But there must be a balance between distancing an audience from the narrative and allowing them to understand the implications of the narrative: in this case, that to simultaneously succeed in business and be a good person is impossible in a capitalist society. Here, things can get pretty confusing. Brecht does not help matters with a script that sheds little light on its characters, has no real ending, and takes its sweet time discerning whose play this is, the Good Woman's or the Water Carrier's.

It is the Water Carrier Wong who acts as a narrator for much of the play's opening, and it is Wong upon whom the Gods descend (and whose dreams are interrupted with some very funny puppetry) in their search for someone good. Jose Marenco fashions Wong much the way Zero Mostel did his slave in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: full of self-deprecating wit, an almost bumbler, but a good, sweet man.

But it is the Good Woman Shen Te to whom the story belongs, really. She is a prostitute-turned-businesswoman who, in order to survive in the bad capitalist environment, must pretend to be a fictitious male cousin whenever her goodness lets others get the better of her. Shen Te's corporate savvy is negligible -- her goodness gets in the way -- and she is soon overrun with hangers-on. But when she pretends to be her cousin, things change: Shen Te's little tobacco store becomes a drug-producing empire, a corporate giant. How can this good woman go so far bad? Or is she all that bad in a society where the bottom line is everything? In our highly charged economic times, this is a quaint argument: So what if a few people suffer? So what that a good person runs a sweatshop producing illegal narcotics? In the name of survival, even in the name of goodness, some sacrifices must be made. Right?

Angela Denny's pleasant onstage demeanor makes her Shen Te as sympathetic to the audience as it makes the character an easy mark to those who would take her for all she has. But as the wicked capitalist cousin, Denny never gets deeper than the caricature of the man. And none of the other actors in the very large cast really get beyond caricature in their roles. There is little at stake, then, for any of the characters. Which is not to say that the cast isn't charming and sweet, they are, but Brecht's irony is missed by most everyone, and we are left with that quaint old-fashioned fairy tale instead of something with more dialectic meat.