Barta Heiner says goodbye to BYU with ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’
Barta Heiner stars in "Mother Courage and Her Children" at BYU.
Barta Heiner, Dallin Halls, Leah Hodson and Jordan Nicholes as Mother Courage, Eilif, Kattrin and Swiss Cheese (or as Mother Courage and her children).
An accomplished performer and professor, Barta Lee Heiner is taking a final bow at Brigham Young University before she retires later this year.
”I’m graduating, I’m finally graduating,” Heiner said with a laugh in an interview in her BYU office.
The vehicle for her farewell is the 1939 German play “Mother Courage and Her Children” by Bertolt Brecht: a play that packs an anti-war message as well as a complex starring role for Heiner.
”It’s considered one of the modern classics,” said David Morgan, who is directing the production.
Brecht wrote the play in Germany during the 1930s, when fascism and Nazism began to rise to power.
”Specifically, he was trying to make a statement against capitalism,” Morgan said, “and how capitalism fosters war, and the fact that people are making money — making their living — off of the war.”
That’s what Heiner’s character, Mother Courage, does in the play: She’s a war profiteer whose efforts to benefit from the violence are not slowed by her own personal tragedy.
”It’s a pretty hard role,” Morgan said. “It’s a pretty heavy play, actually. She loses her children one by one, and what’s really sad about the story is that she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand that she’s the problem. She’s the one that’s created this. And that’s the whole point that Brecht is trying to bring out is that we’re all like Mother Courage. We just keep making the same choices over and over and we don’t see or learn anything. And that’s the real tragedy.”
Heiner is quick to add that the play is not all heavy.
”‘Mother Courage’ does have funny parts in it, it does, there’s some very humorous parts,” Heiner said, “but it also makes you think.”
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The piercing indictment inherent in the character of Mother Courage has not always been picked up by audiences, Heiner said, including some early performances of the play when it was released in 1939.
”Everybody saw Mother Courage as a hero,” Heiner said, “and (Brecht) was very upset about that because he wanted it to definitely show that what she was doing was wrong.”
Morgan said that Heiner’s rich experience — including training at the American Conservatory Theater and professional work experience at The Denver Center For The Performing Arts, as well as all her time at BYU — gives her performance the weight the role demands.
”She has a lot of depth in her performance, which is really necessary for a role like this,” Morgan said. “And it’s just great for the students to have that kind of opportunity to work with somebody across from them that’s of that caliber.”
For Heiner, the job of portraying a character like Mother Courage involves digging into empathy.
”I’m dealing with her as a character so I have to find reasons why she does things,” Heiner said. “For me playing the character, I think she does love her children. You know there’s one place where she says, ‘All I want is for me and mine to get by in this war.’ … I’ve had friends go, ‘How can she do that?’ And I go, ‘It’s the only existence she knows.’ “
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Although Brecht’s message in the play “was very much based on political statements about politics of the time,” Morgan said, Brecht chose to set the play during a more distant European conflict, the Thirty Years’ War, “so that it would be somewhat removed from people, so that they could look at it more in a way that they wouldn’t feel that they were being attacked.”
Knowing how to make controversial subject matter more palatable turns out to be something Heiner has practiced during her time at BYU.
”There are some plays I would really like to do but the general BYU culture would not be able to handle it,” Heiner said. “One of the shows that I would have liked to have done here is ‘Souvenir.’ There’s another show that was ‘Lettuce and Loveage.’ I mean one of the shows I wanted to direct here was ‘Sweeney Todd,’ but there’s certain people that go, ‘Uh, we’re gonna get letters.’ “
Navigating the world of art and theater at BYU, Heiner has found success with a moderate approach.
”I’ve told some friends of mine that wanted to make a really big statement, ‘You know you’ll get more people to listen if you offer your hand, an open hand, rather than a flat-handed slap to the face,’ ” Heiner said.
Heiner has noticed that what material might be considered suitable at BYU has fluctuated as different generations of students and administrators have come and gone.
”Ages ago, some of the shows we’ve gotten letters about now never would have gotten letters back then,” Heiner said. “Ages ago I did a show about a returned missionary committing adultery and what he went through trying to come back. If we did something like that now, we might have difficulty with it. And we might have had difficulty then too but I definitely wrote a director’s note that said ‘Hey, we all make mistakes, and this is somebody’s path.’ And I never got any notes, I never got any letters, and I think lot of it has to do with you need to know your audience, and you need to know how to get the message across in a way that they can accept it.”
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In some ways, any tension Heiner has seen at BYU between theater and the university culture reflects a larger tension between theater culture and the culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Heiner said she has known some LDS members who assume that theater people “are all wild and lead wild lives — decadent.”
”That’s probably a stereotype I’m putting on people,” Heiner said, “but yeah, even when I was going to school I had a roommate who had thought about going into theater but had chosen not to because she was afraid she might leave the church, where I was still doing theater, and I always got the feeling from her that she thought I was going to hell. But I still did it anyway because I thought it was something I was supposed to do.”
That tension between theater and BYU or church culture is complicated by Mormonism’s rich history with the arts, Heiner said.
”Oh yeah, Brigham Young started a theater,” she said. “He took money that was supposed to go to a church building, and put it on a theater. A lot of people don’t know that. But he thought theater was so important for people.”
How to explain the disconnect?
”It’s schizophrenic, isn’t it? … I’m not sure how to explain it,” she said.
Nevertheless, Heiner’s full commitment to both her craft and her LDS faith is obvious.
”That woman is one of the best things to ever happen to BYU and to Mormon art,” said Melissa Leilani Larson, a Utah playwright whose recent credits include the film “Freetown” and the play “Pilot Program,” in an email interview. Larson has worked with Heiner twice in a playwright-director relationship; her adaptations of “Persuasion” and “Pride and Prejudice” both ran at BYU, directed by Heiner.
”She’s a trained professional. Her skills as an actor and director are pretty incredible,” Larson said. “She is able to balance her art with her faith; in fact, she lets her faith inform her art, and vice versa. That’s a tricky balance, and we’ve seen others fail to do the same. I think the fact that she is able to be such a great example — both as an actor and as a Latter-day Saint woman — makes her invaluable to BYU and to our artistic community.”
As an actor, Heiner accesses her religion no matter what the production.
”For me, when I’m going through a character, first of all I want to find what makes them work, what makes them tick, but I also … must be in tune at all times,” Heiner said. “Some people do that with yoga concentration — for me I just pray. I pray before every show, just going, ‘Please help me stay connected, please help me do this.’ So for me, it is both a spiritual and a technical thing.”
Infusing one’s religious experiences into a character is an approach that Heiner has passed on to her students. Early in her career, Heiner worked with a student who she said really struggled with acting. Heiner had given her a role to work on from Shaw’s “Androcles and the Lion.” The role included a significant monologue.
”She’s a Christian, and she’s been taken prisoner and she’s going to be thrown to the lions,” Heiner said of the role. “And one of the Roman guards likes her and wants her to defy her religion because he doesn’t want her to die, and she talks to him about, you know ‘I can’t do that. … For me to let go of my God, I can’t do that.’
”And (the student) just wasn’t getting it. And I finally said to her, ‘You’ve got to bear a testimony. This is a testimony. You have to bear a testimony.’ I mean I was ready to give up, seriously ready to give up, and she all of a sudden looked at me, and then went and she did the most incredible moments of that monologue. It connected to her and she really found it, and after that she really started to grow.”
For many artists, Heiner said, acting is spiritual in one way or another even if the actors are not personally religious.
”(For) a lot of my fellow actors that do not have a religion, theater is their religion,” Heiner said, “because it’s where they truly have emotional connections, and truly have, they glean great understanding of things.”
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Mormon-produced art has had its fair share of entries that are “a little bit insipid,” Heiner said, but she has noticed a shift recently toward more complex and thoughtful approaches to Mormon culture in films and theater.
”Really great theater or film to me … lets the audience see all sides,” Heiner said. “It speaks to all sides of things and it lets the audience make a choice.”
As an example, Heiner noted the recent film “Once I Was a Beehive,” made by LDS filmmakers including some BYU graduates, and which featured Heiner in a prominent role.
”I think they did a lovely job of putting that script together and, you know, showing the quirks of the LDS culture but also showing the good sides of it, and then also just showing the non-Mormon culture and the fact that they can go on living without us.”
The film is the story of a Catholic teenager who has a positive experience when she finds herself at an LDS girls camp, but she does not change religions because of it.
”At the end no she didn’t have one of those quote unquote ‘happy Mormon endings,’ ” Heiner said. “You know when I had to do some of the interviews on that, they’d say, ‘Why didn’t she join the church?’ And I said, ‘Cause she didn’t want to!’ You know that kind of thing. I like that (film) because it kind of showed both sides of things.”
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Before Heiner came to the university, BYU offered no Bachelor of Fine Arts program for acting. Students could take classes, but it couldn’t be their main focus.
”She’s done a lot for the department and a lot for the university,” Morgan said. “She’s completely changed the area that she works in. She’s the one that developed the BFA in acting, which is a professional degree.”
In the program, students take courses each semester in voice, movement and acting.
”I based the program on the MFA program that I went to,” Heiner said. “I wanted to give (students) the strongest training I could so that they could survive when they got out of here.”
Morgan says that Heiner’s work has added a great deal to the university.
”She wanted to have a place where actors that were LDS could go and get, you know, professional training that would allow them to move into the industry if they wanted to,” Morgan said. “And she wanted to foster excellence.”
The beneficiaries of that attitude include many students and fellow artists, including Larson.
”Working with her as a playwright has been great because her experience is so vast; she gives me feedback as an actor and as a director, and she treats the text with a real respect that is more and more rare,” Larson said. “If I’m considering a story for a play, Barta is someone I can go to; she’ll tell me frankly if it will work or not and why. She doesn’t sugarcoat her criticism, yet it’s always useful and never cruel. She just tells you as it is, but her angle is always to help the student learn and improve.”
So what’s next for Barta Heiner? One item on the list is to clean her house, she said, but also, she has no plans to quit working.
”I’m going to update my resume and photo and things like that, and start auditioning for other things,” she said.
She is already set to direct a play this summer at the Hale Center Theater Orem, which will go up in September.
“Mother Courage and Her Children” runs through April 1 at the Pardoe Theatre at BYU.
MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN
What: The classic anti-war play, starring Barta Heiner in her final year at BYU.
When: Thursday-Friday and Tuesday-April 1 at 7:30 p.m. Matinee on Saturday at 2 p.m.
Where: Pardoe Theatre, Brigham Young University
Tickets: $8-$15
Info: (801) 422-2981, arts.byu.edu