In The Wheel, playwright Zinnie Harris riffs on Brecht's Mother Courage, giving us a powerful woman who journeys through the heart of a terrible war, refusing to let the horror and brutality crush her indomitable spirit. But where Brecht's heroine is also a cunning selfish bitch who profits from war, Harris's Beatriz (the superb Catherine Walsh) is more of an innocent, an unwitting participant in the surrounding madness.
Harris goes off in many other directions, as well. The Wheel begins on a farm in Northern Spain, late in the 19th century, with the sturdy Beatriz helping Rosa, her skittish young sister (Olga Wehrly), prepare for her wedding. Suddenly soldiers appear announcing that war has broken out with the French. Soon after, a little girl (Stephanie Irwin/Lula Molesson) also mysteriously appears.
Mother dead, father (Stephen McCole) a fugitive, the mute child is taken in hand by Breatriz. They flee the farm together only to encounter another abandoned child, this one a small boy. The grumbling but compassionate Beatriz takes him on as well. Her journey, in magical realism fashion, cuts across other times and places: WWI Germany, WWII Poland, Viet Nam, an Arabian desert. The play's characters change accordingly, taking on different personas and accents.
The journey becomes epic, Homeric. Pushing against history, the wars that come one after another like waves of the sea, Beatriz fights to survive and protect her brood (even though she suspects the little girl might be a malevolent witch). Only rarely does any beauty or joy break through the fog of war (with butterflies serving as those symbols).
The Wheel, we eventually learn by the close of this weirdly brilliant and provocative drama, refers to the human condition. Spinning in merry-go-round fashion we are unable to learn from history and thus are doomed to keep repeating it.
The Wheel's message may be bleak, but it still makes for good theater, especially when it is so well acted and directed.
