Four key players in President Donald Trump's new administration are central characters in a "verbatim play," boiled down from combative US Senate confirmation hearings, that looks to Trump's Cabinet picks for clues to his government's direction.
"All the President's Men?" - the question mark sets it apart from the famous Watergate expose - is being presented as a staged reading today at London's Vaudeville Theatre. It will play New York's Town Hall theater on May 11 with a US cast reported to include some famous names.
An HBO miniseries about the 2016 election is in the works, while British writer Howard Jacobsen turned his shock at the outcome into a just-published satirical novel. Robert Schenkkan's play "Building the Wall," which imagines Trump's presidency taking a darkly authoritarian turn, is in the midst of an acclaimed run in Los Angeles and next goes to New York for an off-Broadway run in May.
Also planned for Broadway are a pair of starkly political works - a revival of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," about a well-intentioned whistleblower eventually branded a traitor, will be produced during the 2017-18 season, and a stage version of George Orwell's nightmarish "1984" is scheduled to open in June at the Hudson Theatre.
"We'd heard all this rhetoric about 'draining the swamp,'" he said. "I thought the best way of finding out about the whole philosophy behind the Trump presidency would be to look at the Senate confirmation hearings. Because the beliefs of the people involved would come out of that, and their backgrounds would come out.