WAR IS SELL Streep tries to get a piece of the action.

Photograph: Michal Daniel

Delacorte Theater. By Bertolt Brecht. Trans. Tony Kushner. Music by Jeanine Tesori. Dir. George C. Wolfe. With Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Austin Pendleton, Jenifer Lewis.

To her great credit, Meryl Streep seems genuinely exhausted by the end of Mother Courage and Her Children in Central Park. Streep is a tremendously fine actor—too fine, one might have thought, for the coarse title role of Bertolt Brecht’s scabrous 1939 epic. But instead of coasting on her starlight, she digs in like a workhorse. Onstage for nearly all of this three-hour play, she is charged with a vast expanse of emotional terrain and a near-constant flow of speeches, wisecracks and songs—and she really delivers the goods, pulling the sometimes unwieldy show behind her like Courage’s famous wagon itself.

Streep is an astonishment, and well worth the six-hour wait for free tickets to this Public Theater production. But, of course, the wares she is peddling are nothing like the junk sold by her 17th-century character, an itinerant trader who lives off the carnage of the Thirty Years War in Northern Europe. The new translation of Brecht’s German text is by the indispensable Tony Kushner, who gilds his impassioned and humane socialism with a luxury of language; the ever-accomplished Jeanine Tesori has written exciting new music for the play, imposing strains of blues, folksong and other styles over a bent backbone of Kurt Weill–ish vamps. And director George C. Wolfe, in his return to the Public, contributes a wizardly spectacle whose many tricks include rain, snow, fire and a working military jeep.

Kushner, Tesori and Wolfe’s last collaboration was Caroline, or Change, arguably the most artistically successful musical of the past 20 years. And there are striking similarities between the two pieces, notably in the helpless intransigence of their maternally prickly heroines—the kind of mothers invented by necessity. Despite Courage’s ironic nickname, she makes a virtue of cowardice, scolding her kids when they risk themselves for honor or military duty. In “The Song of the Great Capitulation”—the show’s thrilling Act I finale—she lays out her disillusioned philosophy, braying with self-contemptuous defiance as Tesori’s music careens into a full mad-carnival waltz.

Unlike Caroline, however, Courage fails to fully win our empathy, despite the tremendous suffering that befalls her in the play. Her three children are taken from her one by one: first the honest Swiss Cheese (Geoffrey Arend, sweetly dopey), whose name predestines his bullet-ridden corpse; then the amoral Eilif (Frederick Weller, dashingly dumb), who has the misfortune of committing crimes of war during a brief period of apparent peace; and finally the mute, damaged Kattrin (the touching Alexandra Wailes). Her prospective romances—with a rakish army cook (Kline, sneakily straight-backed) and an ineffectual chaplain (Pendleton, amiably noodling)—are dead ends; even the hooker Yvette (played with verve by Lewis) fares better. Courage ends the play alone, stuck on a metaphorical turntable: the cycle of war and profit that keeps her in business, answering the call when opportunism knocks.

The visible artifice of Streep’s shrewd performance—you always see her working—honors Brecht’s intention that audiences not identify too sentimentally with the bottom-feeding Courage. But Kushner’s garrulous translation softens the play’s pedantic bent with generous diversions of jokes and aphorisms, even as he sharpens some of Brecht’s dialogue to point up its modern resonance. (“It’s expensive, liberty, especially when you start exporting it to other countries,” the cook explains.) The resulting text is much longer than Eric Bentley’s somewhat grim standard translation, and a leaner edit would surely benefit the play’s dramatic momentum, especially in Act II. But the writing offers ample wit and complexity to hold the audience’s attention; and in our cultural climate of intellectual scarcity, Kushner’s expansiveness is an admirable fault.

At root, Mother Courage is a play of serious political ideas, and one hopes that Streep’s capital star turn will generate interest in them. It would be unfair to blame Courage alone for her problems, which are systemic. But Brecht does establish one pattern with ruthless repetition: When Mother Courage’s children are placed into peril, it is because she is briefly elsewhere, conducting one of the little economic transactions that keep her on the wagon. The lesson is as apt today as in 1939: Tragedy is what happens while all of us are minding our own business.