The Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner is writing a play about Donald Trump.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, the writer of Angels in America revealed that he would set the story two years before the 2016 election.
“He’s the kind of person, as a writer, I tend to avoid as I think he is borderline psychotic,” he said. “I definitely think that incoherence lends itself well to drama, but he really is very boring. It’s terrifying because he has all the power, but without the mental faculties he ought to have. I think he is seriously mentally ill, and the fact that he is in the White House is very frightening.”
Kushner is curious as to “how a country commits political suicide” and has already featured Trump’s lawyer and early adviser Roy Cohn in Angels in America. The character is currently played by Nathan Lane in London.
“The difference between Trump and Cohn – for all the malevolence and disturbance Roy was capable of – is that he was also capable of genuine loyalty and an affectional constancy,” he said. “People he knew and cared about he stayed loyal to for decades.”
But he believes the pair share the idea that “all publicity is good publicity”.
Kushner is working on the play now but isn’t sure whether it will be onstage while Trump is still president.
“I’m trying to become a faster writer, but I don’t feel like I have to get something done while he’s still in office,” he said. “I gambled with Angels, which is set in the Reagan era but which I felt would be historically significant 30, 40, 50 years later, because something really fundamental had shifted under Reagan. The same thing is true with Trump.”
The as-yet-untitled play will join other productions revolving around Trump, including the Public Theater’s controversial reimagining of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Michael Moore’s The Terms of My Surrender, which hits Broadway later this month.
