Four Walls and a Roof

In 1947, Bertolt Brecht sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee and ran rings around it: playing dumb, parsing translations, denying he had written what he had written, until the chairman thanked him for his cooperation. Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie take that hearing, already a theatrical encounter, and turn it into a piece of theater. What they build from it is funny in a bleak way and pointed in a serious one: a look at how an artist talks his way out of a room, and what it costs him. Mroué and Majdalanie are Lebanese artists who spent years making theater in Beirut before the pressures of working there drove them to Berlin, and they set that departure alongside Brecht’s. His evening in Washington starts to mirror their own exile: two generations of artists weighing what they can say against what it will cost them. What does a person tell the state when it demands an answer, and what do they surrender to keep speaking?