Miss Shange was content to ruin one genre at a time, say poetry or drama. Now, [in Mother Courage and Her Children], she rewrites and makes ridiculous both American history and Bertolt Brecht at one foul swoop. Brecht plausibly perceived the Thirty Years' War as a nasty excuse for otherwise identical people who happened to be Protestants or Catholics to slaughter one another while ruthless and purblind speculators, such as the vivandière Mother Courage, made and lost their boodle, lost and lost their children. And learned nothing from it.

Shange has invented an American Thirty Years' War by gluing together a variety of discrete and diverse conflicts into one big Schwittersian collage. We never know who is fighting whom (North, South, blacks, whites, Indians, the U.S. Army, ranchers, the KKK appear among the combatants whom you cannot tell apart even with the program) or exactly what...