Dawn Ursula, Holly Twyford and Michael Anthony Williams in “We Are Proud to Present…” Photo by Stan Barouh.

Listen up, D.C. theater lovers: Two plays dealing with war, death, greed and conquest are closing this Sunday. Here’s a quick comparison.

WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT, Woolly Mammoth Theatre

The rest of the title is “… a presentation about the Herero of Namibia, formerly known as South-West Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the years 1884-1915.”

During those years, the Second Reich of Germany committed a systematic genocide of Herero men, women and children, under the command of a monster named Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha. People were basically forced into the Kalahari desert to perish. The Herero were not the only ones in the region who were persecuted and killed in the thousands. The Nama population were also put in concentration camps. It’s utterly unimaginable.

This play deals with that inability to translate what it would be like to experience such horror and such evil, or heaven forbid to commit such acts of atrocity, from the perspective of the creative types who are tasked to put that across onstage.

It’s not a fun play to attend, but that antagonism in the writing — though most of it seems improvised and spontaneous, it is very carefully constructed to feel that way — is what landed it so many accolades in New York.

You watch a group of actors struggle onstage to get inside the minds of the Germans and of the Herero, to make sure the story is balanced from white and black perspective, to steer it away from, as one character notes, “Out of Africa, African Queen bullshit” territory. This inevitably leads each cast member to relate it back to their own experiences regarding racism, white privilege and stereotype in the U.S.

Completely self-aware and interactive with the audience, the actors in Woolly’s production — Andreu Honeycutt, Peter Howard, Joe Isenberg, Holly Twyford, Michael Anthony Williams, and especially the incandescent Dawn Ursula — are fearless.

About 75 percent of the play will feel a bit over-indulged with all the actor-meta “in jokes” around warmup exercises and coveting particularly meaty roles. This will likely feel especially irksome to those who have never been exposed to the process of play-making. But that’s the point. Because at last the bottle becomes uncorked and access into the heart of evil is granted.

And let me tell you: The last unleashed ten minutes or so, which I can’t talk about here because it would be worse than a spoiler, is one of the most disturbing and haunting moments I’ve witnessed in this kind of space.

Kathleen Turner as Mother Courage. Photo by Teresa Wood.

MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, Arena Stage

The tragedy of Mother Courage is that, while she thrives during wartime, turning profits by peddling to the desperate and destitute, she also fails to save her family. But the real question is — if she knew the dire consequences, would she even change? A modern-day parallel could be drawn to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White from Breaking Bad, who continually claims he’s cooking meth for his family as he loses himself to the cynical, brutal power of empire building.

That parallel and others — like how the line, “We’re all good people. And all too aware that virtue doesn’t pay” — conjures up the callous capitalism contained in the songs “Money” from Cabaret and, more remotely, “The American Dream” from Miss Saigon — and could not have been foreseen by Bertoldt Brecht when he wrote his still-powerful Mother Courage and Her Children as a reaction to the horrors of World War II.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Arena Stage’s rendition, I don’t know if Brecht could have conceived of it ever being, well, rather ho-hum, either.

On the one hand, I did attend a daytime performance on a weekday, which is notoriously difficult for actors energy-wise. And indeed, what made the production drag was the mostly dialed in performance of star Kathleen Turner, whose Mother Courage slouches around the stage, her smokey voice at times reduced to such a strained wheeze that makes you worry about the potential for an onstage collapse. You are always aware that you’re watching the aging former star of Body Heat, dressed up in cheesy gypsy garb, and that significantly lowers the stakes in continuing to care.