Theater: Maternal Tug o’ War

The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht, is a kind of pinko version of The Perils of Pauline. Grusha (Elizabeth Huddle) is a good soul, a simple kitchen maid who snatches up an infant princeling when the child is abandoned by the evil wife of the governor during a revolution in a legendary kingdom around A.D. 1200. With the baby strapped to her back, Grusha embarks on a series of adventures that include crossing a rotting bridge over a 2,000-ft. gorge with soldiery in hot pursuit, a marriage of inconvenience with a draft dodger, and a confrontation several years later with the real mother, who now wants her child back.

An amoral scamp of a judge (Robert Symonds), a sort of pie-eyed Falstaff in a sloppy judicial gown, prescribes the test of the chalk circle to determine the true mother. The little boy stands in the center of the circle, and each woman holds one of his arms and is told to tug him out. Grusha lets go so as not to hurt the boy, and is adjudged the true mother for acting motherly. The moral: “What there is shall go to those who are good for it.” This could prove that millionaires are best qualified to have money, but Brecht uses it to justify a decision by Soviet collective farmers some years back that old grazing land should goto fruit growers.

Yet the play is not tediously didactic. It is a little bit as if Brecht had purified the character of Mother Courage, made her an ardent, spunky, dutiful young girl, and graced her with luck as well as pluck. The Caucasian Chalk Circle’s essential mood is playful and bucolic. But anything bucolic in this repertory production at New York’s Lincoln Center is lost in the grinding whirr of revolving stages and the clanking rise and fall of scenery. The music, crucial to any decent Brecht production, seems to have been composed by a tone-deaf mute. Watching the cast’s birdlike masks and flaming Oriental finery is far better than watching their acting, for the troupe is about as playful as a gang of work elephants piling teak.