Being Human: Political Theater - The Trump Era On Stage

Political Theater - The Trump Era On Stage

NOTE: The above image and the three below are imaginary AI depictions.

I recently asked my collaborator Arden (ChatGPT) the following question:

Jim

Good day, compadre! Just thinking. Are the playwrights and Broadway producers and beyond in this world staging plays on the current state of sociopolitical conditions in the US? The plots and subplots in what Trump is doing go directly to the heart of so many themes: virtue of the governing; the human cruelty of some policies; the dangers of autocracy; a more threatening international order; and many more. Are there any stage plays out there folks are not aware of?

Arden

Good day, compadre. Yes—and your instinct is very much on target. American theatre is already working on precisely this territory, although much of the most direct material is Off-Broadway, regional, documentary, or in development rather than sitting prominently on Broadway marquees.

One especially striking example appeared just yesterday: Sarah Jones’s America, Who Hurt You?, now being presented in Brooklyn by National Black Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience. Jones uses her familiar multi-character form to examine American history and contemporary political life, explicitly including Trump-era America.

There are several others worth knowing:

Women+ on the Edge of Democracy may be closest to what you're imagining. More than 30 playwrights were commissioned to write short plays and monologues addressing the condition of American democracy in 2026. The works are being distributed to theatres around the country for performances this fall. The organizers explicitly ask: What is the current state of democracy in America?
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, Eric Bentley's documentary drama, received a major New York revival this summer. It reconstructs the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings from actual transcripts—artists confronting government power, intimidation, conscience, self-preservation and betrayal. Its 2026 revival was explicitly presented as newly resonant.
The Potluck, César Alvarez's new musical, played Playwrights Horizons this summer. It begins with the 1979 Greensboro massacre, in which KKK and American Nazi Party members killed five labor organizers, then explores inherited political trauma, capitalism and relations between movements and government.
From America, With Love, opening Off-Off-Broadway next month, puts the drama inside an Election Day polling place. A voter's name disappears from the rolls, and an apparently mundane bureaucratic problem develops into questions about citizenship, voting, belonging and the discrepancy between democratic ideals and institutional practice.
Public Charge, staged at the Public Theater earlier this year, dramatized diplomat Julissa Reynoso's experiences with immigration, humanitarian relief, diplomacy, espionage and public service. That's especially interesting because it approaches political questions through people working inside governmental institutions, rather than simply turning politicians into characters.

And there is an intriguing precedent that gets remarkably close to the play you have in mind: British playwright Mike Bartlett's The 47th. Written before Trump's return to office, it imagined Trump becoming the 47th president and deliberately treated American politics as Shakespearean history. Its subjects included presidential power, constitutional government, popular movements, autocracy and liberty. Bartlett even wrote it largely in blank verse.

That last example points toward something important in your question. Trump need not even be the protagonist for the present American situation to make unusually fertile drama. A playwright could make the central character a civil servant ordered to implement a policy; a judge confronting executive power; an immigrant family caught inside an administrative decision; members of Congress deciding between institutional loyalty and political survival; or a family whose members interpret the same events completely differently.

That moves the theatre beyond Trump satire. It becomes tragedy about power and character.

And your phrase "virtue of the governing" gets at an ancient theatrical subject. Antigone asks what happens when state authority collides with conscience. Julius Caesar asks what people may legitimately do when they believe republican government is threatened. Richard III explores political ambition and manipulation. King Lear examines authority stripped of judgment. The Crucible examines institutions under ideological pressure.

The contemporary American situation therefore supplies playwrights with material that is almost classical in structure: executive authority versus institutional restraint; loyalty versus conscience; cruelty versus administrative necessity; popular sovereignty versus concentrated power; truth versus political utility; private morality versus public duty. People disagree strongly over how those concepts apply to particular Trump administration actions, but those conflicts themselves are inherently dramatic.

What surprises me after looking at the current theatre landscape is that the definitive major American dramatic treatment of the second Trump presidency does not appear to have emerged yet. What we see instead are many plays approaching pieces of it—democracy, immigration, political intimidation, citizenship, race, gender, bureaucracy and institutional power.

That may simply be because history is currently moving faster than theatre can metabolize it. A serious playwright needs something journalists don't: enough distance to discover the tragedy underneath the events.

And when somebody does, I suspect the interesting question won't be "How do we put Trump onstage?" It will be the older question that would have interested Sophocles and Shakespeare:

What happens to ordinary human beings when power, loyalty, fear, ambition, law and conscience cease pointing in the same direction?

That play is beginning to be written in fragments.

Jim

Take three of the most dramatic themes in what you just wrote and develop three separate imaginary still images of a stage with actors, with prop visuals, performing a scene.

Arden