Dragging us through 12 years of the religious wars that enveloped Europe in the 17th century, along with itinerant “businessman” Mother Courage and the grown children she inadvertently sacrifices one by one, Brecht pens perhaps the most powerful anti-war statement of the modern stage. He had his ideas about how the play should be performed (and in fact created a detailed “model book” of his 1949 Berliner Ensemble production), and these are not they. Rather, Szász’s Mother Courage radiates an Eastern European ćsthetic that is both physically rigorous and stylized. The adaptation is salty and somewhat abbreviated, to make room for the production’s striking tableaux. And this Courage is visually and aurally stunning — from the opening, when the cast, their number augmented by stony warrior statues suggested by those excavated in the Chinese city of Xi’an, rise up from the pit to a loud chorus of computerized chant, to the final moments, in which Karen MacDonald’s gutsy Courage lifts the limp carcasses of her children into what’s left of her wagon before hauling it after the regiment.

Brecht, of course, did not cotton to military heroics — or to the nationalist and capitalist systems to which they’re attached. In Mother Courage, which he wrote on the cusp on World War II, he leaves the actual war in the background, preferring to concentrate on the trickle-down effect of “kings and generals and popes” on ordinary citizens trying to survive. In Anna Fierling (nicknamed Mother Courage for what was in fact an act of mercenary panic), he puts forth a bottom-rung war profiteer, a battlefield-canteen owner who can’t afford to despise the conflict because she lives off it. And in her motley trio of children — bloody Eilif; honest Swiss Cheese; and Kattrin, who “suffers from too much pity” — he sets up a rag-tag Family of Man who’re trying to dodge the ever-present bullet.

At the ART, however, the bartering band of Courage and kids, joined at one time or another by a war-mongering chaplain and a womanizing army cook, are dwarfed by the towering, smoking spectacle of war itself. Hungarian designer Csaba Antal’s set is dominated by a three-story-high corrugated-metal structure that twirls like a turntable, its red-brown surfaces often encompassed in smoke. A length of real railroad track, suggesting the road to Auschwitz, extends from the stage into the audience, making it difficult for Courage to steer the chain of white baby carriages that compose her wagon from one side to the other. The stage picture is cluttered with dead bodies, with those ghostly terra-cotta warriors on the watch. Against a barrage of sound that ranges from harsh clanging to ravishing choral music, muscular soldiers carry on choreographed battles, including a dance of assault and embrace that is as gorgeous in its integration of movement and music as a Mark Morris piece.

Yet at the end of the first half, when Courage’s protracted haggling over a bribe results in the first loss of a child, lighting designer John Ambrosone reduces this vast stage picture to the pinprick of sallow light on Karen MacDonald’s quivering, devastated face, the mouth just beginning to pry itself open in anguish. MacDonald, swaggering about squint-eyed and wide-legged to bark her “Das Courage-Lied,” gives a herculean performance, albeit in a role that doesn’t entirely suit her. Linda Hunt, who played the role so memorably at the Boston Shakespeare Company in the mid 1980s, was a tough raisin of a woman. MacDonald and Szász acknowledge the contradictions of Courage; they make her blunt and pit-bullishly strong, but too soft.

The entire ART troupe rises to the physical demands of the production, though, accomplishing feats as vigorous as they are lyrical. Of particular note is Mirjana Jokovic’s feisty Kattrin. No mere mute martyr in the making, she’s an agitated presence, so disgusted when Courage gambles with Swiss Cheese that she topples her mother into one of her carts.

There are elements of Szász’s staging that baffle. These include the presence of a child Brecht; uttering the tough scene-setting placards, he seems to be delivering a prep-school history report. And a jarring jazz interlude just adds one more casual murder to a production brimming with them. But if this heartbreaking, invasively sensory production is not your Berliner Ensemble Mother Courage, that only proves there’s more than one star to hitch to this great wagon.