“Mother Courage and Her Children,” currently attracting daily hordes of ticket-seeking fans to Central Park, is indisputably an event. It is also a ramshackle, stomping gloss on Bertolt Brecht’s 1949 anti-war masterwork, albeit one sprinkled with the occasional flash of stage poetry. It is a brainstorming session trying to pass itself off as a thoughtful production. It is, put simply, a damn mess and a damn shame.

This wasn’t the plan when George C. Wolfe announced the project as a culmination of his 12-year tenure as head of the Public Theater. He commissioned a new translation from America’s most celebrated political playwright, Tony Kushner, and enlisted the peerless Meryl Streep to star in the title role.

But as the indomitable war profiteer Mother Courage would be the first to tell you, emerging from the chaos intact is a virtual impossibility. Her stated business philosophy could just as easily describe the undisciplined mayhem around her: “What works out best for us,” she says, “is what they call paralysis, a shot here, a shot there, one step forward, one step back.” Thanks to Mr. Wolfe’s cluttered direction and a performance by Ms. Streep that manages to be both fussy and scattered, those steps backward start adding up fast.

Written during World War II and set during a 12-year stretch of the Thirty Years War, “Mother Courage” follows Courage and her three children up and down a battle-ravaged Europe. Religions may fall in and out of favor and armistices may end before they start, but Mother Courage and her wagon of goods move on past the ever-present mounds of corpses. A few companions come and go — an earnest but ineffectual Chaplain (Austin Pendleton), a world-weary Cook with a past (Kevin Kline), and a prostitute with her own eye for advancement (Jenifer Lewis). Ultimately, though, Mother Courage’s only comforts are her dwindling family and the prospect of yet another sale.

In contrast with this summer’s first Delacorte Theatre production, a “Macbeth” that included several gratuitous war references, Mr. Kushner’s crisply profane script offers relatively few parallels to the current Three Years and Counting War. (The few exceptions come from the Cook: “It’s expensive, liberty, especially when you start exporting it to other countries.”) But by lingering over each scene and letting each performer take the material in his or her own direction, Mr. Wolfe offers little to root the action in any period, past or present.

Most galling of all are the glimmers of what might have been: Amid the commotion, Mr. Wolfe and his company have gotten several key components of the play right. While Jeanine Tesori’s musical score drifts between Kurt Weill homages and random other pastiche bits — a Highland swing here, a bluesy torch song there — Mr. Kushner’s lyrics have a consistently acrid, well-reasoned bite to them. Mother Courage’s three children are all well represented, notably by Frederick Weller as the impulsive Eilif, and Alexandria Wailes (who is deaf in real life) as the deaf-mute Katrinn. Ms. Lewis’s flamboyantly gritty take on Yvette may belong in a completely different production, but I wouldn’t mind seeing that production someday.

Most important, Mr. Wolfe and Ms. Streep have found the balance between Mother Courage’s love for her children and her ruthless business instincts. This equilibrium, so crucial and yet so hard to achieve, comes to the forefront in what is easily the production’s finest moment, a harrowing scene in which Mother Courage haggles for the life of her middle child, the fatally honest Swiss Cheese (Geoffrey Arend).

Since Anne Bancroft took on the role in the 1963 American premiere, Mother Courage has gradually become desexualized, no longer the mother of three (by three different men, no less) as much as the Mother of Us All. Casting someone with Ms. Streep’s timeless glamour instantly uproots that notion, a fact that Mr. Wolfe and costume designer Marina Draghici try to counteract with an androgynous little-Dutch-boy outfit complete with oversize cap.

That cap gives Ms. Streep plenty to do, including hiking it low on her forehead at a rakish angle. Unfortunately, that is only the beginning of her self-consciously physicalized performance, a whirlwind of neck scratching, hand rubbing, hip rolling, and “Yeah” grunting. Ms. Streep, speaking and singing in a voice much lower than her usual register, often seems to channel the sardonic brusqueness of 1950s character actress Thelma Ritter. It’s a curious take on the role, but one that could theoretically amplify some of Brecht’s gimlet-eyed sentiments if it weren’t so often engulfed by Mr. Wolfe’s frenetic staging.

Take the scene immediately before intermission, in which Mother Courage advises an enraged soldier to sustain his indignation by tempering it: “It was short-lived anger, when what you needed was long-lasting rage, but where would you get something like that?” Brecht scholar/translator Eric Bentley, among others, has suggested that this scene, which includes her “Song of the Great Capitulation,” comes closest to encapsulating the lessons of “Mother Courage.” And if any playwright today has learned to draw upon his or her political anger in continually new and surprising ways, it’s Tony Kushner.

By the end of this song, however, Mr. Wolfe has had Ms. Streep collapse onto the ground, choke herself, spring from one side of the audience to the other, and bellow several passages in a cracked chest voice. (For the record, her supple alto rests much more comfortably with Ms. Tesori’s other songs.) If the wagon of goods were in this scene, she might well have pulled out a few flaming torches to juggle. The only capitulation worth mentioning is the one to the audience looking to head into intermission on a high note. (Mr. Kline has a similarly overwrought solo near the end of Act II, but his motivations are clearer and the song itself stronger.)

This bells-and-whistles overkill surfaces on several occasions, culminating in a finale that includes black-and-white war footage and dozens of extras flooding Riccardo Hernández’s sparse wooden set to serve as cannon fodder. In the middle of all this, the martyrdom of a central character — perhaps the play’s defining tragedy — is all but nullified by an extraneous (not to mention clunkily deployed) special effect.

Rather than focus on these would-be coups de theatre, Mr. Wolfe’s prodigious creative energies might have been better spent suggesting, as diplomatically as possible, that the leads spend a little extra time on memorization. The bewildered Mr. Pendleton is the worst offender on this front, but Ms. Streep and Mr. Kline, who elsewhere gives the Cook a scouring, ultimately poignant anger, each fumbled and grasped for their lines on numerous occasions at a recent performance.

Seeing this lack of preparedness with just one actor is a shock. When it happens with all three leading actors, all of whom have extensive classical experience, something is seriously wrong. Was Mr. Kushner thrusting new pages into their hands minutes before curtain? Was there not enough rehearsal time? (Mr. Kline was a late replacement.) Or did Mr. Wolfe just not have it in him to ask his glittery cast to learn their lines?

If the latter is the case, or even if it isn’t, “Mother Courage” marks a dispiriting conclusion to Mr. Wolfe’s storied reign at the Public. While it’s unrealistic to wish for an “Angels in America” or a “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” or a “Topdog/Underdog” each time out, is a little bit of professionalism too much to ask? Now who’s capitulating?

Until August 3 (Central Park, 212-539-8750).