WAGON TRAIN.(Meryl Streep's portrayal of a Holocaust survivor )

In 1982, when the city was plastered with posters advertising Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning portrayal of a Holocaust survivor in Alan J. Pakula's "Sophie's Choice," the images made one think less of poor doomed Sophie than of another performer entirely: the gender illusionist Candy Darling. With her bleached hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, and red stain of a mouth pulsating in a nearly Kabuki-white face, Streep's Sophie recalled the effects that Darling had devised for the camera during her brief time as one of Andy Warhol's haunting "superstars." (Darling died, of cancer, in her twenties.) In performances that poked fun at traditional female roles by reenacting them with utter seriousness, Darling epitomized the aesthetic of the late sixties and early seventies: irony laced with pathos. Jacob Brackman, in "The Put-On," a essay published in this magazine in 1967, wrote, "What was once an occasional surprise tactic . . . has been refined into the very basis of a new mode of communication. . . . This phenomenon is known as the 'put-on.' It occupies a fuzzy territory between simple leg-pulling and elaborate practical joke, between pointed lampoon and free-floating spoof."

Streep almost single-handedly ended the era of the free-floating spoof, as she ushered in the kind of nuanced psychological and historical narratives that would define the American film industry from the seventies on. Sophie Zawistowska, Karen Silkwood, Isak Dinesen, Lindy Chamberlain, Ethel Rosenberg--in her best roles, Streep has always managed to find a larger canvas to play against, one that has only underscored her fidelity to the truth of her characters. Whether she is playing a European, an Australian, or an American hardly matters: for us, she is a perennially "European" actress in her disavowal of the American urge to cultivate personal glamour. The subtle transformations of self that Streep enacts through gesture, costume, and vocal inflection--her dramatic alchemy--have made her that much more alluring and mysterious to us in the years since "Sophie's Choice."

Still, it's difficult to see Meryl Streep the actress without being dazzled by Meryl Streep the legend. Streep herself plays on this in her biography for the current staging of Bertolt Brecht's 1939 masterpiece "Mother Courage and Her Children" (a Public Theatre production, at the Delacorte): "Film: over 30 films. TV: three films. Awards: many, most deserved." And one can certainly be thrown off by her familiar mannerisms--staring into space, jiggling her ear with an index finger, fanning her hands to dismiss an unpleasant thought or person--but what immediately grabs the audience every time is her startling efficiency of manner. For Streep, acting seems to be less about stardust than about architecture. Each character is built precisely, according to its creator's specifications. For her performance in Tony Kushner's brilliant adaptation of "Mother Courage," Streep constructs a house that is gray and lopsided, a thespian's version of van Gogh's sad bedroom. Her grandeur is merely a facade, she seems to be telling us, and she is as committed to the job at hand as any other conscientious working actress.

"Mother Courage" takes place in a variety of locales in northern Europe, but its real setting is its heroine's wagon stocked with provisions that she sells to soldiers in need during the Thirty Years' War. We first encounter Mother Courage as she is pulled into a war-torn Swedish town by her two sons, Eilif (the charismatic Frederick Weller) and Swiss Cheese (Geoffrey Arend, who evokes a more subtle Peter Lorre). Standing on the wagon with her mute daughter, Kattrin (Alexandria Wailes), Mother Courage refuses to take sides in the war; politics is for those who can't afford to buy her wares. When a sergeant asks to see her papers--she has none--she explains, "They called me Courage because I was scared of financial ruin, Sergeant, so I drove my wagon straight through the cannon fire at Riga, with fifty loaves of bread turning moldy, I didn't see that I had a choice."

Kushner has strained the lumps from the standard 1955 translation, by Eric Bentley. For instance, where Bentley's version reads:

Let this be a lesson to you, Kattrin, never start anything with a soldier. The heavens do seem to open, so watch out! Even with men who're not in ...