Tag: Drama

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 Trump “makes himself up out of thin air and nobody cares”.

That hostile Democratic caucus will be staring right back at Trump as he gives his speech, depriving him of the adoration he gets from restorative crowds of Make America Great Again fans at campaign rallies. He will call for "an end to the politics of resistance and retribution," his counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters on Monday. However sincere he is on working with Democrats to cut the cost of prescription drugs or to repair infrastructure, a few searing lines on the border wall may be all that most people remember. The President is adamant that he has a great story to tell. And no one, not even boom time Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had a job-creating record to tout in a State of the Union address to match Trump's -- even if critics chafe at rising inequality. Trump goes into the State of the Union address in his third year with the lowest approval rating of any President of the last 60 years apart from Reagan, though the Gipper did win a landslide the following year. Encapsulating Trump's self-made box on immigration, a staggering 78% of conservative Republicans think Trump should shutter the government again to get wall funding -- even though the shutdown was a political disaster for him. Perhaps the President, in unifier mode, will offer the speaker an olive branch despite calling her "very bad for our country" in a Super Bowl interview. He could, perhaps offer a path to citizenship for DACA recipients that Democrats really want, which could spur calls for wall funding in return. "The issue with immigration has been that he proposes some ideas that could possibly have bipartisan support then puts some things on the table that are just not going to be workable across the aisle," she said.

Defence lawyers for Paul Manafort made a last-ditch attempt on Wednesday to torpedo the key witness at his trial by asking whether he failed to disclose four extramarital affairs. Manafort and Gates were the first two individuals indicted in Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Andres put it to him: “As you sit here today, do you have any doubt that if you lie, the special counsel’s office will rip up your plea agreement?” Gates said he did not. “You said you had a made mistake,” the lawyer said. Relevance.” Downing responded that the question goes to whether Gates told the truth to the special counsel or whether the plea agreement should be ripped up – potentially devastating to the government’s case and to the public perception of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference. After about five minutes, the judge and lawyers returned to their positions, and Downing appeared to have lost the battle. He asked a broader question about Gates spending beyond his means to fund a secret life. On Wednesday, Gates initially testified Manafort told him to be truthful during a 2014 interview with the FBI about offshore shell companies and bank accounts that contained millions of dollars in proceeds from their Ukrainian political work. Gates and Manafort were not targets of the FBI at the time of the interview. “You knowingly made a false statement to the FBI?” Andres asked on Wednesday.

Seth takes a closer look at the Federal Communications Commission's vote to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality rules and the Trump White House's petty dramas. » Subscribe to Late Night: http://bit.ly/LateNightSeth » Get more Late Night with Seth Meyers: http://www.nbc.com/late-night-with-seth-meyers/ » Watch…