Word: canteeners
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Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, is intellectual TNT by Broadway standards. In the title role, Anne Bancroft pulls her canteen wagon across the face of Europe during the Thirty Years War and tragically loses her three children. Brecht's reflections on peace and war are deeply ironic, but Anne Bancroft lacks the depth for her part...
...Brecht set his drama against the backdrop of the 17th century Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics. In her cagey peasant way, Mother Courage (Anne Bancroft) is a petty war profiteer peddling brandy, belts and other boodle to the troops. Her only religion is her hand-drawn canteen cart and her three children. But just as Mother Courage is a coward, her children ironically symbolize the degradation and defeat of virtue in the world...
Alone, Mother Courage harnesses herself to the canteen cart and arduously, tortuously circles the stage. Brecht would say that she is determined to keep "getting her cut," come what may, but audiences are perversely affected by the scene and their blurred gaze tells them that Brecht wrote into it some quintessential gritty gallantry...
Lieut. Bandy learns about liquor when he is sent off on a trench raid with a canteen filled with rum: magnificently drunk, he loses his bearings, raids his own trench, and kidnaps his colonel. Bandy needs all of his Christian resolve to avoid being seduced by a pillow-breasted wench: "She clutched her arms around my head, burying my face even deeper in her bosom until my nose was bent almost double against her sternum and her nipples were stuck in my earholes like a stethoscope...
...continues to offer it, and she suddenly takes the canteen and drinks gratefully. She returns it to him, and as she speaks, he is occupied with swallowing some water, sighing appreciatively, wiping his mouth and the lip of the canteen, screwing...