Our topic today: war.

We start the hour with Christopher Gunness in a discussion over the killing of aid workers and the role of refugee aid agencies in Gaza. He is Executive Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, and former spokesperson for UNRWA, a Palestinian refugee relief agency that Israel, in recent days, has proposed dismantling in exchange for permitting more humanitarian aid in Gaza.

Then for the rest of the hour, we turn our sights closer to home, and speak to the troupe putting on a production of Mother Courage Alone ahead of their three-performance run this weekend. The play, from Fermat’s Last Theater Company, is an adaption of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 antiwar play Mother Courage and Her Children. 

Director David Simmons, and professors Nam Kim and Marc Silberman join Esty in the studio to talk about the production. The play, they say, is “a searing portrayal on stage of what we now see daily in the media.” The play opens tonight, Friday April 5, at 7:30pm, and will be followed by a discussion with Nan Kim on the origins and causes for war.

It will have additional afternoon performances this weekend on Saturday, April 6 and Sunday, April 7 at 2pm. All performances are at the Arts + Literature Laboratory. Admission is free and open to the public. More information is at fermatstheater.org.

About the guests: 

Christopher Gunness is the former chief spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine refugees.  He is the founder and Executive Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, which works to build criminal cases against individual members of the Myanmar security forces. Gunness covered the 1988 democracy uprising in what was then Burma for the BBC, where he worked for 23 years. He later joined the United Nations as Director of Strategic Communications and Advocacy in the Middle East. You can follow him on Twitter @MyanmarAProject.

Marc Silberman is Professor Emeritus at UW-Madison, where he studies and teaches the history of German literature, culture, political theater and cinema. He has translated and edited many works on Brecht and German culture.

Nam Kim is an anthropological archaeologist interested in sociopolitical complexity, and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UW-Madison. He is the co-author of the book Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past (Routledge, 2018).  He is himself a child of war — his Korean father met his Vietnamese mother during the Vietnam War, and they fled in the exodus of 1975.

David Simmons is the founder of Fermat’s Last Theater Company, which he has directed since 2013. The free theater never charges admission, and prides itself on documentary theater that confronts issues of political and social inequality.

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