An actor with a striking resemblance to Donald Trump will be repeatedly stabbed in the back in Central Park this summer, as part of a Trump-styled production of Julius Caesar. It’s the season of resistance theater in New York, a trend likely to displease the president, who once tweeted that politics should never intrude into art: “The Theater must always be a safe and special place.”
It’s not easy to make political theater when American politics itself has been twisted into the format of a daily reality show. Trump won the presidency by blurring the line between TV spectacle and politics, and he has governed the same way, with policy choices of tremendous impact unfurled in multiday cable TV dramas.
The president’s own campaign and victory rallies – complete with chatty asides, call-and-response chants and his use of the reporters covering his speech as sideshow villains – were raucous acts of performance art. One of Trump’s favorite compliments, reportedly used to describe his pick for vice president and other key advisers, is that they look straight out of “central casting”. He’s turned his firing of FBI director James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation into his associates’ ties to Russia, into a new season of FBI Apprentice.
Nicholas Kent, the British director known for staging transcripts of court cases, UN hearings and other inquiries as “tribunal plays”, tried to respond to the political moment by making a short play out of the Senate confirmation hearings of four of Trump’s cabinet members.
The one-night-only show, All the President’s Men?, ran in London and New York in late April and early May. There was a star-studded cast: in New York, Alec Baldwin portrayed US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on the stage instead of Trump on TV’s Saturday Night Live. Ellen Burstyn played the senator Elizabeth Warren; Raúl Esparza, the senator Marco Rubio.
Kent had edited the hearing transcripts down to condensed but faithful versions of the fusty sparring and limp evasion that characterize most confirmation hearings. The precise naturalism of the staging – the long tables, the water bottles, the suit-clad people onstage, the rows of audience members witnessing the exchanges – gave a kind of queasy plausibility to the whole affair.
Baldwin found some laughs, including Tillerson trying to use his “longstanding involvement with the Boy Scouts of America” as a political credential. So did Esparza, who managed to make Rubio sound like a tenacious but appealing 10-year-old.
But the whole project was most defined by its liberal audiences, who came not to be challenged or transformed, but to jeer. “This is the best of America here,” the senator Bob Corker, a Republican played by actor Bill Irwin, said as he introduced the confirmation process, and hundreds of liberal New Yorkers laughed and laughed.
The same thing happened in London, where the line that got the biggest laughs, Time reported, was Tillerson proclaiming as a proud American: “We are the only global superpower with the means and the moral compass capable of shaping the world for good.”
Instead of functioning as art, All the President’s Men? functioned as a kind of political baseball game, where liberals could applaud the invading protesters disrupting the hearings and cheer along with a liberal senator as she asked tough questions. “Wooo!” Elizabeth Warren!
All the President’s Men? may have been designed to hold a mirror up to the bizarre spectacle of American politics, but instead the play melted into it, and became just one more skirmish in an endless war of partisan takes. Why would liberal Americans want to shout in delight as a famous actress recited the months-old words of a famous liberal senator? And yet they did; they appeared to love it. Why was David Remnick, the editor in chief of the New Yorker, onstage playing senator Al Franken, who himself had once been a comedian on Saturday Night Live? What was this supposed to tell us about the dangers of Donald Trump?
It was a peculiar sort of elite East Coast Alice in Wonderland, one set of influential white people playing another set of influential white people, the whole thing a dramatization of liberal failure. Each of the nominees featured in the show had been confirmed.
All the President’s Men? was a very pleasant way of absorbing the highlights of what had occurred in the January confirmation hearings – better than a transcript, much better than a series of CSPAN video clips – but by early May, what was the point? Two days before the performance, Trump had fired FBI director Jim Comey, setting off a new cascade of scandal and outrage. American democracy, you may have noticed recently, has no pause, no rest, no intermission. But this play did, and I walked out.
Building the Wall, another new play at New World Stages, imagines a post-Trump future in which a black academic and a white security officer process the violations committed under Trump’s regime. An interactive spectacle at 3LD Art & Technology Center, 3/Fifths, , stages white supremacy as a fun-filled theme park called SupremacyLand.
Other plays are taking a somewhat lighter touch with their Trump resistance themes. Shakespeare in the Park’s Julius Caesar, also a Public Theater production, features Caesar supporters in red caps, and Marc Antony is played by a woman in a pantsuit. Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, has a distinct Slovenian accent. Only last summer, New York’s Trump-themed Shakespeare in the Park was a comedy, an all-female Taming of the Shrew set against the background of a misogynistic beauty pageant. Now the topical Shakespeare directors are looking to tragedies. How long until a director casts an Ivanka as Hamlet?
Adding Trump decor to a good old play works well enough, but it makes little contribution to the work of trying to make sense of what is going on in American democracy and what to do about it. And that’s work artists could help with, especially in this time of kneejerk outrage, when Americans are drunk on spectacle, dizzy from the constant twists and turns of the family drama that is the White House.
At least one play in New York right now has the antidote for that addiction to spectacle: Venus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ telling of the life of Saartjie Baartman. Baartman was brought from South Africa in the early 19th century to be marketed to European sightseers as the “Hottentot Venus”. She was displayed like a caged animal in London during her life, raped, then dissected by European scientists after her death, her brain and genitals pickled and put on display in a museum.
Venus was first staged twenty years ago, but Parks’ exploration of the interlocking forms of violence used against black women – the layering of sexual, scientific, economic and political exploitation – is still sharp and devastating.
As Baartman, actor Zainab Jah is no simple victim. She’s ambitious and determined. Despite facing horror after horror, she’s reluctant to simply give up and go home again with nothing. Her victimhood is not a lack of agency: it’s that the game she is playing is rigged. Every time she fights for something better, she opens up the door to even more devastating losses. The white doctor who both objectifies and falls in love with her is mocked for his affection, pressured to think of her not as a partner, but as a scientific discovery that can advance his career. In the play, he sleeps with her, abandons her and then dissects her. He writes up his analysis of her body in a scientific paper.
Parks’ play is unsparing in its view of how the political debate and controversy over Baartman – her significance to English morals, to the abolition movement, to the sexual fantasies of English men and women, to the court of law that investigated whether she was being abused – was just one more layer of exploitation. Her body on display provided intellectual titillation for the thinkers of the day.
Only one person in the play is kind to Venus: the Negro Resurectionist, the play’s narrator and the black prison guard who is paid to dig up corpses that will be used for dissection. He cannot save Venus. He will be blackmailed into betraying her and give her body up to the greedy scientists. But he stands witness as she lies abandoned, dying of disease and endless days of cold, mistaking the sound of rain for the far-off patter of applause.
As the Negro Resurrectionist, Kevin Mambo gives a performance of astonishing power. In the past three years, videos of the killings of black Americans by police officers have gone viral, prompting a political movement for police reform. At the same time, this made the deaths of black Americans into spectacle, their killings into a form of digital content.
Near the end of the play, Mambo stands for a few moments with the body of a woman who has been killed by the violence of the spectacle visited upon her. The body is Baartman’s, and it is also, in the absolute presence Mambo brings to that moment, many other bodies, many other determined black men and women and children who lost a rigged game. He waits with her body. He treats it with respect. And his tenderness is revolutionary. Resistance is one body shielding another body. It is a man trapped in the system, a man without power or name, who has not given up his gentleness.
Venus runs at the Signature Theater in New York until 4 June. See it if you can.
