Adaptations of classics are often based on a simple transfer in period; costumes and accents change, but almost everything else remains the same. In direct contrast, Ntozake Shange's new version of Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children,"… is a true cultural and political transplant….

[Miss Shange] has moved the play from Europe during the Thirty Years' War in the early 17th century to the American frontier during the Reconstruction in the late 19th century. Mother Courage is now a black woman …, twice emancipated and selling her canteen of wares to troops during the Plains wars against the Indians. Necessarily, there are certain relocation problems, but on her own terms Miss Shange has performed a venturesome feat of reinterpretation.

An adaptation must find equivalents to details of plot, character and atmosphere, and it is here where Miss Shange has been perspicacious. Scene by scene, almost line by line, she...