With hindsight, Susan Smith made a big mistake blaming the abduction of her two children on “a black man.” He had, supposedly, a gun and a plaid shirt, and he hijacked her Mazda with the boys inside. Nine days later, after a nationwide manhunt, Mrs. Smith confessed to the killings, and her sons and the vehicle were retrieved from a South Carolina lake. But by then the damage was done.

Had she merely murdered her own children, she might have earned the same support enjoyed by Andrea Yates, the infanticidal pin-up gal whose drowning of her five children last year has prompted a glittery nationwide “Defence Fund” plus the backing of NOW, Katie Couric, Marie Osmond, and many others who think this particular serial killer has done a wonderful job of shining a light on some of the problems of “post-partum depression.” Alas, Mrs. Smith blamed a fictional African-American and so proclaimed herself not just a child-killer, which is one thing, but also a racist, which is quite another. Victim culture only works if the various identity groups respect each other’s turf. In 1994, when Mrs. Smith rolled her Mazda into the John D. Long Lake, she was sailing into uncharted waters and perhaps is not to be blamed for failing to anticipate this.

Now, eight years on, the case has washed up off-Broadway in a form not to Smith’s advantage. Brutal Imagination, at the Vineyard, is a play about the Smith case but not