Meryl Streep returns to the stage in the year's big theatrical event and New York's hottest ticket: Bertolt Brecht's timeless war play, Mother Courage and Her Children, in New York's Central Park.

My main problem with this Mother Courage is simply how bland it is. This is quite a disappointment coming from director George Wolfe, who (during his long reign at The Public) both reinvented classics (The Tempest, On The Town) and cultivated exciting new and multicultural work (Bring in Da Noise, Fires in the Mirror, and his own classic Colored Museum).

The last thing I expected from Woolfe would be a Mother Courage that looked like a 2nd-company road tour of a very conservative European state theatre (if there are any).

Hiring a bold showman like Wolfe to helm a Mother Courage outdoors in the park, with Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori collaborating, strikes me as a wonderful opportunity to really play with the play. I'm as reverent a Brechtian as they come, but if ever there were a chance to do something different with a classic, this special summer slot is it.

Save the boring rep productions aping the Brecht model-books for the regular season. Imagine if Wolfe and company devised a 90-minute "riff" on Courage — fully updated to reference Iraq (instead of the safe, pussy-footing winks Kushner drops into the current scripts). Now that would have been an "event."

Ok, no point in reviewing what they didn't do. Still, it's Wolfe's lack of imagination that I want to focus on here. I'm interested in how much the word "tired" has come up in other reviews so far — how tired Streep looks at the end, how tired the audience gets. To me, "tired" is exactly the adjective to describe how the whole enterprise comes off — tired and grey.

Let's take Streep's costume, for starters. Not that anyone expects "colorful" in Brecht , but she looks like a mailman! I could see the impetus for the look — a sort of Soviet-era pastiche, bringing out a gender bending "toughness" in the character. But one need only compare the above photo side by side with images of the original Courage, Helene Weigel (AKA Faru Brecht), to see what's missing.

Weigel's rags may also have been grey, but they made a powerful statement about the character's social situation and struggle. Streep's outfit I found cute, frankly, and so did she it seemed — from all the fun she had cocking her hat and puffing Cook's pipe like Popeye the Sailor Man. In short, what's missing from her characterization, and the whole vision of the show, is the direness of the stakes, the desperation of everyone involved.