Poet-Playwright Ntozake Shange (FOR COLORED GIRLS) adapted Bertolt Brecht’s classic drama in 1980, transposing the action from Europe during the Thirty Years War to the American Southwest after the Civil War. Mother Courage struggles to survive the war by profiting from it but ends up paying the ultimate cost.

The play, which earned Shange an Obie Award, has never been published or performed since its premiere in 1980. Now pulled from the archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library for this production, Shange’s adaptation puts a uniquely American spin on Brecht’s classic drama that forces us to ask how, in the darkest of times, do we survive with our humanity intact?