Anne Washburn’s new play does something you rarely see in the theatre: it takes Donald Trump seriously rather than as a subject for easy satire. In her previous shows at the Almeida, Mr Burns and The Twilight Zone, Washburn has invoked American popular culture. Here she examines the politics of the moment and, while her three-hour play sprawls and goes a bit bonkers towards the end, it has the supreme virtue of addressing the topic that haunts so many Americans today.
Washburn sets most of the action in a snowbound farmhouse in upstate New York. In conventional drama, you might expect one of the characters to be murdered. Instead we watch a group of privileged white liberals obsessively arguing about Trump at a pivotal moment in his presidency: the period just after ex-director of the FBI James Comey offered damning testimony to the Senate intelligence committee. In a parallel narrative strand, Washburn explores the alienation of a young Kenyan from a kindly Christian couple who adopted him as a child.
Any temptation to treat the liberals as pillars of virtue is resisted: their lives seem messy and confused and they are prone to excess as when they debate whether Trump could be the antichrist. But one of the group, a lawyer, seizes on a key moment when Trump, in a Republican primary debate, claimed that White House delegates pleaded with him to cool his opposition to the Iraq war. The lawyer goes on to say that…
