The text of Miss Shange's "Mother Courage" … raises some troubling questions. What are an adapter's responsibilities to the original work? What are a playwright's obligations to history? Is it right to call a play "Mother Courage" when it in many ways violates the spirit of the drama we associate with that title? The motivations behind Miss Shange's adaptation may well be pure, but the result is a case study of what can happen when an exercise in literary adaptation goes wildly astray.

Certainly the adaptation cannot be objected to in principle. Brecht would have approved; he was found of rewriting classic theatrical texts himself. And certainly Miss Shange … would seem the ideal candidate to redo "Mother Courage." Like Brecht, she is a poet with a radicalized political consciousness. It can even be argued that Miss Shange is entitled to move the play's setting from 17th-century middle Europe to...