Follow him at /LengelOnTheater and /KerryLengel. The anti-Trump choir will shiver and rage at the sermon, while any MAGA sympathizers - if they somehow stumble into this performance - will find it offensive and ridiculous.Īnd let both sides pray that “Building the Wall” doesn’t turn out to be prophecy. The bottom-line result is a cautionary tale that cautions no one. Grisby’s Gloria, on the other hand, merely serves as a stand-in for the audience, without any real character arc of her own. Though, like most small troupes, it must make do with limited. Herrington, who gave a powerful performance as a war criminal in iTheatre’s “9 Circles” a few years back, is a commanding presence onstage, and the playwright has taken pains to make the character believably complex and not just a cartoon. iTheatre Collaborative is one of the Valleys youngest and most exciting theater companies. Suffice it to say that in today’s polarized polity, Trump supporters would call it liberal hysteria, and liberals … well, wouldn’t.īut while “Building the Wall” makes a forceful political statement, its toxic topicality makes for bad art. It’s not my job here to evaluate the plausibility of Schenkkan’s scenario. He wrote the excellent, Tony Award-winning LBJ bio-play “All the Way” and also co-wrote the films “Hacksaw Ridge” and “The Quiet American.” Now the nightmare - the worst-case scenario - comes to life in “Building the Wall,” a near-future thriller by Robert Schenkkan, no stranger to political dramas. Stray Cat Theatre founder Ron May performed Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Trump Card” a year ago – just days before the presidential election – and it was a trenchant, nay scorching, dissection of the MAGA phenomenon that probably gave liberals in its audience nightmares.
Not that I’m opposed to a good anti-Trump manifesto on principle. RELATED: Review: ‘The Nether’ and ‘Switzerland’ explore dark psychic territory That’s the none-too-subtle message of “Building the Wall,” the anti-Trump manifesto masquerading as a drama that ran off-Broadway earlier this year and is now onstage in Phoenix in a production by iTheatre Collaborative.
0 kommentar(er)
