Reacting onstage to the political times
Award-winning playwright pens dark Trump play
Playwright Robert Schenkkan spent three years writing The Kentucky Cycle, the series of nine one- acts that won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992. He spent 21 months on a first draft of All the Way, which won him the Tony Award in 2014.
Building the Wall, a disquieting response to the dawn of the Trump era, took him just one week to complete. He wrote it, he said, in a “white-hot fury.”
Five theatres around the United States, acting with unusual speed, have already agreed to present the play in a series of productions beginning next month, shaping an early response to an embryonic presidency that has alarmed many theatre artists.
“We no longer live in a world that is business as usual — Trump has made that very clear — and if theatre is going to remain relevant, we must become faster to respond,” Schenkkan said. “We cannot hope to be useful if we can’t respond until 18 months after the fact.”
The play, set in 2019, is in the form of speculative fiction, or future history. In it, a writer interviews a prison executive awaiting sentencing for his role in a Trump administration effort to detain and deport large numbers of immigrants after a terrorist attack in the U.S.
“It is not a crazy or extreme fantasy,” Schenkkan said. “It’s very solidly grounded in current American law, and Trump’s rhetoric, and his most recent executive orders.”
Schenkkan, also a screenwriter who wrote this year’s Oscar- nominated Hacksaw Ridge with Andrew Knight, penned Building the Wall the week before the 2016 election. The play was then circulated by the National New Play Network, an alliance of non- profit theatres. Four quickly agreed to stage their own productions while sharing credit for the world première. The Fountain Theater in Los Angeles will mount the play next month, followed by the Curious Theater in Denver; the Forum Theater in Silver Spring, Md.; and the Borderlands Theater in Tucson.
“We had our season in place, with another production planned, but as soon as I read this script I knew we had to move fast,” said Stephen Sachs, an artistic director of the Fountain Theater. “It’s a raw, passionate warning cry, and I knew we had to be bold and make this statement.”
The play seems likely to have multiple other productions. Most recently, the Adobe Rose Theater in Santa Fe, N. M., became the fifth theatre to commit to presenting it, and Schenkkan is working on putting together a touring production and considering requests for productions in Canada, Britain and other countries.
The theatres presenting the play say they believe that drama can help shape public understanding and conversation, in this case about an administration whose policies they find troubling.
“History will judge us by how we responded to this crisis, and we can’t waste any time,” said Michael Dove of the Forum Theater. “We can’t choose silence.”
There is a long history of playwrights expressing political concerns in real time. The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 response to McCarthyism, is an oft-mentioned example. More recently, Stuff Happens, a play by David Hare about the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, reached the London stage in 2004; and Privacy, James Graham’s response to the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations, reached the London stage in 2014. Last year, Berkeley Repertory Theater staged a new adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, citing parallels between the book and Trump’s candidacy.