by Hugh Hunter

I had read "Mother Courage And Her Children" (1939) in the past and always wondered how the dramatic final scene in this celebrated play by Bertolt Brecht would play out on a live stage. The production now running at Quintessence Theatre in Mt. Airy under director Alexander Burns does not disappoint.

To be sure, it takes a while to get to this unforgettable finale. The opening act lasts for nearly two hours and is full of dramatically non-sequential scenes. We get to meet Mother Courage (Janis Dardaris) as she follows invading armies during the Thirty Years War, making her living by selling them goods. She does not care if they are Protestant or Catholic. She reasons that a sale is a sale.

But we also get to meet a large cast of characters whose fortunes are equally bound up in the war. Yvette (Leah Gabriel) was betrayed by a lover in her youth and becomes a career camp follower. Cook (Forrest McClendon) is the man who betrayed her, an aging Don Juan and a cynic. Chaplain (Gregory Isaac) lost his church and is now a sycophant. He and Cook comically vie for Mother's romantic attentions.

Brecht wants you to see all characters in relationship to the war, and director Burns backs him up. He drapes white sheets through the columns of the back stage so that the actual war is always vaguely within view. It becomes a kind of show that frames the show, as various light and sound effects put you within the reach of battle scenes (light designer, Ellen Moore; musical director/orchestration, Michael Pacifico).

Throughout act one, cameo performances by other players compete with the mother and her children for center stage. Brecht gives them songs to sing that highlight their point of view (original music score by Michael Friedman). Yvette sings "Song of Fraternization," and Cook sings "The Song of the Great Souls of the Earth," about historical figures died during war because they wise, brave, honest or kind.

Brecht puts an entire society on stage. Elements like song, direct audience address, stand-alone storytelling and dramatic lightening have a distancing effect.

Under his theory of "alienation effect,” he strives to strike out the empathy and catharsis that marks traditional theater because he wants the audience to think independently and see how the characters relate in political terms.

As Mother Courage, Janis Dardaris buys in. She does not want you to like Mother Courage as much as she wants you to understand who she is in terms of her role in society. Thus, Dardaris plays Mother in a very studied way; she is a small-time war profiteer who loves her children but whose every instinct is to see human relationships in terms of money exchanges.

In the short second act we see how Mother's three children, Eilif (Daniel Miller), Swiss Cheese (Tom Carman) and Kattrin, (Leigha Kato), all come to pay the price. And in a denouement that is absolutely draining, Brecht makes his point: The powerful organize war for their benefit, while the common folk have to live with the consequences.

Quintessence is located at 7137 Germantown Ave. "Mother Courage" runs through Nov. 6. Ticket Information at quintessencetheatre.org or 215-987-4450.