Trump allies become centre of stage drama
U.S. Senate hearings become backdrop for play exploring what president stands for
LONDON— Coming to the West End and then the Broadway stage: Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Tom Price and Scott Pruitt.
Four key players in President Donald Trump’s new administration are characters in a “verbatim play,” boiled down from combative U.S. Senate confirmation hearings, that looks to Trump’s cabinet picks for clues to his government’s direction.
All the President’s Men? — the question mark sets it apart from the famous Watergate exposé — was presented as a staged reading Monday at London’s Vaudeville Theatre. It will play in New York on May 11 with a U.S. cast reported to include some famous names.
The play is among the first trickle of what will soon be a flood of artistic responses to Trump’s election.
An HBO miniseries about the 2016 election is in the works, while British writer Howard Jacobsen turned his shock at the outcome into a justpublished satirical novel. Robert Schenkkan’s play Building the Wall, which imagines Trump’s presidency taking a darkly authoritarian turn, is in the midst of an acclaimed run in Los Angeles and next goes to New York for an off-Broadway run in May.
Also planned for Broadway are a pair of starkly political works: a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, about a well-intentioned whistleblower eventually branded a traitor, will be produced during the 2017-18 season, and a stage version of George Orwell’s nightmarish 1984 is scheduled to open in June at the Hudson Theatre.
Nicholas Kent, who created and directed All the President’s Men?, said he wanted to understand what Trump actually stands for.
“We’d heard all this rhetoric about ‘draining the swamp,’ ” he said. “I thought the best way of finding out about the whole philosophy behind the Trump presidency would be to look at the Senate confirmation hearings. Because the beliefs of the people involved would come out of that.”
For the project, Kent watched 50 hours of Senate hearings and admitted that “to begin with, it was a little like watching paint dry.” But he said he gradually “saw the big issues coming out.”
The four candidates were little known to most Americans. There was Tillerson, the ex-oil boss who is now secretary of state; Sessions, a longtime Republican senator who is now attorney general; Obamacare critic Price, the health secretary; and climate-change skeptic Pruitt, now in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“I chose particularly these four people because they represent in many ways the nub of how America will be governed for the next four years,” Kent said. “I’m trying to look for the central essence of each of the characters. I’m not trying to do a satirical portrait in any way whatsoever. I’m trying to look at their beliefs.”