Ever since Bertolt Brecht's plays were declared safe for classroom curricila, young theater companies have eagerly embraced his aesthetic precepts, based in intellectual detachment, austerity and didacticspeak as dry as week-old toast. Tony Kushner knows that from stale bread come croutons, however, and serves them up simmering in a vibrant multi-ethnic stew immediately recognizable to modern audiences.

Szechwan is now an urban enclave where immigrants hustle in a medley of native languages for their living, panhandlers brandish hand-lettered signs petitioning us for alms and our self-styled guide to these denizens peddles bottled water. The songs incorporated into Brecht's text are now hip-hop diatribes, forged by the company from the original lyrics, delivered by an ensemble of street people loitering in the elbow-to-elbow proximity to playgoers mandated by Red Orchid's close quarters. Where Cor Theatre director Ernie Nolan most departs from traditional interpretations is his casting a male actor as the kind-hearted prostitute Shen Te ( whose name is now pronounced "Shawn-TAY"—as in "enchanté"—further reducing the cultural appropriation inherent in Brecht's faux-Asian motifs ).

This isn't a simple drag turn, though. When the underclass proves as rapacious and unforgiving as the overlords, our heroine is forced to assume the identity of a fictional protector—her badass male cousin Shui Ta. So thoroughly does Will Von Vogt immerse himself in his cross-dressing persona that even when the transition occurs in full view, the metamorphosis—involving not only a change of clothes, but voice and body language as well—is so complete that we almost believe that we are seeing a different actor altogether. The supporting players likewise negotiate their multiple roles with a deft exuberance that never threatens to spin out of control.

Brecht would have condemned Shui Ta's replacing a homeless shelter with a factory and putting its tenants to work, but in Kushner's universe, the introduction of industry providing jobs for the local population leads to prosperity, awakening in Shen Te's false lover a sense of responsibility toward the woman who will bear his son. Also raising contradictions is Brecht's characterization of a philanthropist as a brutal hypocrite, but whose financial aid, Kushner reminds us, is extended unselfishly, nevertheless. In the play's final moments, when the disenfranchised citizens of Szechwan demand to know what we propose to do about the injustices of the world, it's not like we don't have options.