Tonya Pinkins On Leaving CSC's MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN: 'The Filter Of The White Gaze'

As reported by BroadwayWorld, Tony Award winner Tonya Pinkins announced yesterday that she would be leaving Classic Stage Company's Off-Broadway production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children as of January 5th, for undisclosed reasons. The production began previewing on December 9th and was scheduled to open on January 7th. That date has been postponed until a replacement can be found.

Pinkins told The New York Times she had written a statement about her reasons for leaving the show but that her lawyer urged her not to make it public. "I'm not even sure I want to tell it," she said.

The Associated Press now reports that Pinkins claims her leading role has been "neutered," ''subordinate" and created through "the filter of the white gaze." Read her full statement here.

Director Brian Kulick has also released a statement in response, and you can read it in full here.

As originally written by Brecht, the play is about a woman who runs a canteen on a cart during the Thirty Years' War, which spanned 1618-1648, depending on the bloodshed to provide for her family.

The Classic Stage Company production, directed by artistic director Brian Kulick, uses a revised script that sets the action in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Pinkins is quoted as describing the change of location as "a decorative motif" and saying that it wasn't until technical rehearsals that she saw the interpretation of her character as "of a delusional woman trying to do the impossible."

"My Mother Courage was left speechless, powerless, history-less and even cart-less," notes Pinkins, who says her attempts to suggest changes were rebuffed.

"Why, in 2015, in the arts, is there a need to control the creative expression of a black woman?" she continues. "Am I a dog or a slave to be misled so as to be controlled in my artistic expression?"

After consulting on the changes with Olympia Dukakis, who has played the role many times and came to see Pinkins in the CSC production, the actor decided, "A black female should have a say in presentation a black female onstage."

In a released statement, Kulick expresses "great respect" for Pinkins both as a theater artist and activist and states, "I am so sorry that over the course of this production our views on MOTHER COURAGE diverged."

"One goes into a theater production with suspicions and hunches and a play slowly reveals what it might want to be. Tonya and I seemed to have started with the same basic impulse but reached two different vantage points."

Click here for the full article.

Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by Kulick and featuring original music by Tony Award winner Duncan Sheik, continues CSC's exploration of the works of Bertolt Brecht with a look at his most famous play. The indomitable Mother Courage follows one luckless army after another across a war-torn world in her canteen wagon. She'll do anything to hold onto her money-making wagon, even if it means the loss of her children, in this timeless tale of war and big business updated to the modern-day conflagration in the Congo.

The cast includes Joshua Boone, Curtiss Cook Jr., Kevin Mambo, Jacob Ming-Trent, Geoffrey Owens, Michael Potts, Deandre Sevon, Mirirai Sithole and Zenzi Williams. Set design is byTony Straiges, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, lighting design by Justin Townsend and sound design by Matt Stine.

Photo by Jennifer Broski