Building The Wall
Opening Night: May 21, 2017
Closing: July 9, 2017
Theater: New World Stages
From America’s most acclaimed political playwright, Pulitzer and Tony® winner Robert Schenkkan (All The Way, Hacksaw Ridge – Academy Award®nom.), comes a provocative 90-minute theatrical event written in a white-hot fury. In a time when shocking campaign rhetoric turns into real policies, BUILDING THE WALL urgently reveals the power of theater to question who we are and where we might be going.
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May 24, 2017
How long should it take to write a political play? I don’t mean to ask how speedily it should be written — though if I did, Robert Schenkkan’s “Building the Wall” would surely win a prize. It was drafted, Mr. Schenkkan told The New York Times, in a weeklong “white-hot fury” after the election of President Trump in November, and has already been produced, or will be imminently, at theaters around the country. Here in New York, it opened on Wednesday at New World Stages, where I found it to be slick and dispiriting.
But put that aside for a moment. What I really mean to ask is how long it takes for a specific political situation to become ripe for dramatization. Eager critics, and audiences, too, now seem to be asking for a turnaround that all but prohibits introspection. Yet without introspection, how valuable is the result? It is a very rare political work that speaks directly to its time from its time, and also deeply and lastingly. “The Normal Heart” and “Angels in America” come to mind.
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