Watching "Mother Courage" and "Beauty Queen of Leenane" Kevin Sprague Olympia Dukakis, center, in Shakespeare & Company's production of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children," directed by Tony Simotes. LENOX, Mass. - Though they're marginal improvements on Mrs. Bates, the lady who sent little Norman around the bend in "Psycho," these are not mothers you could bring anyone home to meet. One is a conniving, endlessly itinerant businesswoman so hard-bitten that she'll haggle over the price of her child's life. As for the other, she'll do anything she can to humiliate her spinster daughter before others if she thinks it will hold the young'un in her thrall. Besides, she stinks up the place by regularly pouring her urine into the sink. Yet the big-hearted folks at Shakespeare & Company, the long-lived repertory and teaching center in this Berkshire town, have come up with surprisingly sentimental productions of two shows that have seldom read as anything like Mother's Day cards. At the Tina Packer Playhouse, Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children" finds the venerable Olympia Dukakis making nice in the title role of a 17th-century war profiteer who'll do whatever's required to keep on peddling. Across the compound, the smaller Elayne P. Bernstein Theater is occupied by a tender rendering of the brutal "Beauty Queen of Leenane," Martin McDonagh's sinister 1996 family portrait of the ties that strangle, set in rural Ireland. The mother in the picture is played by the formidable Tina Packer. Yes, she's the one for whom that other theater is named, and the founder, longtime artistic director (until 2009) and sometime leading actress of Shakespeare & Company. Of the two, the taut "Beauty Queen" is the easier to get right, and it's the more satisfying production. Watching Matthew Penn's staging of this show, memorably seen on Broadway in 1998, I was struck anew by how impeccably made it is. There's not a plank out of place in the construction of this haunted house of a play. And for the most part, the cast here, which includes Elizabeth Aspenlieder as Ms. Packer's put-upon daughter, inhabits it with a comfortable discomfort. "Mother Courage," written by Brecht in the late 1930s, is a much baggier affair, a three-hour trawl through Central Europe during the Thirty Years" War, replete with dissonant songs, projected scene-setting titles and instructional commentary by the characters. Like much of Brecht, this willfully alienating work has proved hard for Americans to conquer. And this production, staged by Tony Simotes, who succeeded Ms. Packer as artistic director, sometimes goes soft when it needs to be tough. Still, I was glad to have the chance to see Ms. Dukakis, widely known for her work in film ("Moonstruck") and television ("Tales of the City"), onstage in a role she has previously played four times. Ms. Dukakis is 82 now. And while she would seem to have the stamina and theatrical chops of a woman several decades younger, she brings to Brecht's archetypal survivor the full, seen-it-all weariness of someone who has spent fourscore years on this planet. Ms. Dukakis isn't the tirelessly entertaining grandstander that Meryl Streep was in the 2006 New York Shakespeare Festival production. Ms. Streep pulled out every showbiz weapon in her arsenal to keep both her character and the production alive and moving. Ms. Dukakis gives a more naturalistic performance, suggesting a woman always struggling against the downward pull of time and gravity, a Beckettian figure who can't go on but will go on. Her Mother Courage is earthy and witty enough that you can understand why two men, a chaplain (Apollo Dukakis, the star's brother) and a cook (John Douglas Thompson), would vie for her favors. She has a winningly ribald rapport with the Cook, in particular, even if the vibrant Mr. Thompson, a brilliant and natural Shakespearean, is not as clearly a natural for the stylizations of Brecht. The range of acting styles, which run from amateurish exaggeration to Ms. Dukakis's almost Method-like muttering, gives this production a wobbly diffuseness. But like its title character, it keeps moving forward, while usually holding the attention. It is also, at moments, truly affecting. Ms. Dukakis's Mother Courage is more of a mother than usual, a woman with palpable affection for the three children she keeps in harness (literally, since they pull her cart). This interpretation is probably cozier than what Brecht had in mind, but it has its emotional dividends. Every time this Mother Courage loses one of her children to the never-ending war, she becomes so stooped, you expect her to keel over altogether. But she straightens up. Mother Courage is the ultimate trouper, after all. So, it would seem, is Ms. Dukakis. Ms. Packer, who has shepherded Shakespeare & Company through many an economic storm since its establishment in 1978, would probably make a fine Mother Courage, though she might be tired of playing that role in life. She is not perfectly cast as Mag Folan, the saturnine, house-ridden old woman who presides over "The Beauty Queen of Leenane." As anyone knows who saw her in the illuminating "Women of Will," an exhaustive portrait of Shakespeare's female characters (staged in New York this year), she is by nature dynamic and exultant. "Mother Courage and Her Children" runs through Sunday, and "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" through Sept. 15, at Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass.; (413) 637-3353, boxoffice@shakespeare.org.