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Synopsis

In this gripping documentary, Academy Award Winner Meryl Streep (It's Complicated, Mamma Mia! The Movie), for the first time, allowed cameras to record her preparation for her lead stage performance in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Along with co–star, Academy Award Winner Kevin Kline (Wild Wild West, The Big Chill) and playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America), Theater of War not only offers a plenitude of insights into the actress's craft, but also focuses on the play itself—whose themes of warfare and violence have both parallels to life in the present in addition to Brecht's tortured history in America.

Though Theater of War could easily have been crafted into a star vehicle for Streep and Kline, Walter instead digs deeply into Brecht's motives and politics, unearthing the playwright's famed and famously clever testimony before the House Un–American Activities Committee—the day after which he fled from the United States.