DC Area Premiere

***Advanced tickets for this screening have sold out.  Standby tickets will be available at the AFI Silver box office approximately 45 minutes prior to showtime.  Tickets are not guaranteed and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.*** 

History may not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain keenly observed, it does sometimes rhyme. John Walter’s fascinating THEATER OF WAR weaves together two significant cultural climates through the prism of two extraordinary artists:  Bertolt Brecht, a giant of 20th-century theater, and Meryl Streep, one of our greatest living actors.

In 2006, The Public Theater in New York City mounted an outdoor production of Mother Courage and Her Children, which boasted a new translation by Tony Kushner, featured Streep and the great Kevin Kline, and was directed by the Public’s George C. Wolfe. Written in 1939 largely in response to the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s German army, the play is about the devastating effects of war and the blindness of anyone hoping to profit by it. Nearly seven decades later—as the war in Iraq wages on with no discernable end—Brecht’s play has a lamentable resonance. That is, it rhymes.

Walter takes us behind the scenes, including unprecedented access into Streep’s artistic process. He interweaves these scenes with enthralling details about the play’s author, including a pivotal moment of Brecht’s brilliant testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he gave a brilliant performance and quickly departed the stage and the country.

THEATER OF WAR is more than a backstage pass. It’s an engrossing and fiercely intelligent look at war and capitalism, and their regrettable dependence on one another. But even more, it’s about the power—if not responsibility—of art and artists to cast a light on that which we prefer not to see.

-Sky Sitney