STAGING PROTESTS
Theatre community reacts to Donald Trump’s antics
In the latest play by Washington, D.C.’s Synetic Theater, The Mark of Cain, the central character undergoes a series of physical transformations. Cain — the biblical figure who slew his brother, Abel — metamorphoses first into a cruel Roman emperor, then a bloodthirsty medieval king, then a fascist dictator. And finally, into a familiar-looking guy in a solid red tie who’s obsessed with his smartphone, one who is described in the program as “a media-savvy demagogue.”
Which phone-loving “mediasavvy” fellow could Cain director Paata Tsikurishvili possibly be referencing? The theatre world is chewing over the bombastic image and pronouncements of U.S. President Donald Trump, with little concern about neutrality. It’s fair to say that among the lively arts, the theatre has staked a claim as a conduit for critiques of an administration that the majority of artists see as threatening.
More to the point, theatre makers seem to be scurrying to take up rhetorical arms and secure a place in the vanguard of artistic resistance. The rush is on to vent onstage about Trump.
The dramatic pot has been burbling for a while now, coming to an provocative boil last month in New York, where Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, staged a modern dress Julius Caesar. An actor made up as Trump played Caesar, who, as every high school student knows, is assassinated by Roman senators alarmed by his growing tyranny. Performances were interrupted by alt-right protesters, some corporate sponsors withdrew their support, and Eustis was accused in some quarters of a thought crime against the presidency. But the director argued at the time of the controversy that his conceit came from the heart of Shakespeare’s play.
“The fundamental question in Julius Caesar is what do you do to protect a democracy when a demagogue is threatening the thing that you love?” he said. “My job is how do you make the audience feel that.”
In terms of a rapid response to changes in the White House, the American stage has not seen anything like this since the era of Vietnam and Watergate. And as with the plays and musicals of that time, these early attempts at capturing some essence of what’s going on are often too rawly conceived or mere excuses for getting something off one’s chest. The first time you see Trump or his administration’s ideas sent up on a stage, there’s a jolt, but that charge isn’t sustained from production to production.
Building the Wall, for example, is a two-character drama that playwright Robert Schenkkan told the New York Times he wrote in a “white-hot fury” in response to Trump. It posits a prison interview in which a white supremacist details the brutalities he inflicted on Muslims and people of colour rounded up after Trump declares martial law. The piece was produced off-Broadway, where reviews were mixed and it fizzled at the box office.
In Things You Shouldn’t Say from D.C.’s Theater J by the Kinsey Sicks, an irreverent group that calls itself a “dragapella barber shop quartet,” Trump comes in for lambasting, with the group suggesting the administration’s agenda is not exactly friendly to anyone who isn’t of Trump’s persuasion. “White is the new black,” they declare in the show, “because orange is the new president!”
Playwright Josh Harmon was moved last fall to what he described as an “act of civil disobedience” to write Ivanka, a riff on Medea in which the president’s daughter commits a violent act as a repudiation of her family. And on Broadway, the Trump-bashing momentum is building, with filmmaker Michael Moore’s oneperson show, The Terms of My Surrender, opening Aug. 10.
This avalanche of theatrical anti-Trumpism suggests writers and directors perceive a door open to channelling audience discontent. Moore, for one, is hoping that the outrage has legs. “Can a Broadway show bring down a sitting president?” goes one of the promotional slogans used on The Terms of My Surrender’s website.
Writing for New York Magazine’s Vulture blog, Mark Harris noted how attitudes about Trump are shaping the way we perceive political messaging across a spectrum of popular entertainment. In TV series such as The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel imagining a society in which women live under male domination, Harris says we’re finding connections that may not have been apparent when filming began. “The Handmaid’s Tale has been called prescient by many,” he wrote, “and right now, in the place where real life and entertainment meet, there’s no higher praise.”
Great theatre thrives on nuance and complexity. Trump is the opposite, and the artistic responses to a figure of such superficiality and vindictiveness have tended to be rather thin and shrill as well. Taking angry swipes may release some pent-up audience desire to engage in communal scorn. During a recent short-run revival in New York of Assassins, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s brilliant 1990 cabaret of the men and women who tried or succeeded in killing an American president, one line sung by the musical’s balladeer brought a commanding round of applause:
“Every now and then a madman’s bound to come along.”