Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

[Pelican Press 0]

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Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

But in previews, Toossi, 33, still found herself negotiating, and sometimes resisting, the reaction of her audience. In one scene, Elham, a young, fiercely intelligent aspiring medical student, struggles with an oral presentation and splutters to her classmates, in halting English, “I want everyone to know I am not ******.” The instructor corrects her, and Elham’s next line, “I am not an ******,” gets a reliably huge laugh. “Then she starts crying, and everyone’s stomach drops,” says Toossi, who began to weep herself when she first heard the Broadway audience roar at the line. “The intention is to implicate the audience in that laughter because the desire to get an audience to interrogate its privilege sounds to me like what a political play is or can be,” she says. On paper, “English” can read as a deeply observed group character study. But when it’s performed in front of a mostly white, mostly affluent crowd, it becomes something else as well. “Because of who we’re talking to — and that’s who I wanted to talk to,” she says, “yes, I think it’s a political play, and I’ve made my peace with that.”

She’s not alone right now. This spring, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Tony winner last season for the political-meets-personal Southern drama “Appropriate,” jumps back into the fray with “Purpose,” a satire about a ****** family dynasty in Chicago that bears some resemblance to Jesse Jackson’s. It will be joined on Broadway by at least three plays that, though they weren’t planned in anticipation of this political era, may be defined in the public conversation by the degree to which they do or don’t feel right for it. Aside from a big-ticket revival of Shakespeare’s “Othello” in which Denzel Washington faces off against Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney will star in a stage adaptation of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” his 2005 movie about the mainstream media and McCarthyism; and a revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1984) with Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk will test New York’s appetite for a conservative playwright’s signature work about remorseless hustlers. Political shows, whether new work or revivals, always vie for relevance but don’t want to be seen as pouncing on a particular issue in a way that could be mocked as too on-the-nose; there’s no greater praise for a play than saying it speaks to the moment without straining to do so. It will be a spring of auspicious timing (or not) and unplanned and/or fortuitous resonance, since we’re not likely to get our first look at work directly inspired by the 2024 election or what has followed it until the fall of 2026 at the earliest.

That will arrive in a world we can only pretend to be able to predict, and that lag may be the steepest hurdle political theater faces during the second Trump term. Breakneck speed is, in theater, not generally achievable. And at a time when many people feel we tumble over the edge of a new cliff every day, it’s almost impossible to imagine what a timely artistic response might look or sound like. Will it offer catharsis, or solidarity, or pushback, or hope or outrage? Or will it just feel like a hand to hold on to while in free fall?

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