Despite the ongoing scandal over President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, four key members of the Trump Cabinet, along with many prominent U.S. senators, nevertheless managed to make their New York stage debuts on Thursday night — well, sort of.
New York’s Public Theater and London’s National Theatre copresented a one-night-only staged reading of English director Nicolas Kent’s hot-off-the-presses docudrama “All The President’s Men? Scenes from the Senate Confirmation Hearings of President Trump’s Cabinet” at Town Hall. The play also received a one-night showing last month in London’s West End. According to a news release, Trump officials and all members of Congress were notified of the production and encouraged to attend. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like any were able to make it.
The play was culled together and taken verbatim from hours of live testimony and confrontational cross-examination during the recent Senate confirmation hearings of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Tom Price and Scott Pruitt. Its title, of course, references “All the President’s Men,” Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1974 book on the Nixon scandals. President Trump makes no appearance, although a few of his past tweets are projected.
This is not the first Trump-inspired show to play New York since the election. “Her Opponent,” a recreation of the presidential debates with cross-gender casting, is now running at the Jerry Orbach Theater. “Building the Wall,” a two-hander by Robert Schenkkan (“All the Way”) that examines the policies of the Trump Administration from a future vantage point, begins previews at New World Stages on Friday.
Alec Baldwin, who has won acclaim for his outlandish portrayal of Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” played Tillerson. The actors joining him (many of whom played multiple roles) included Ellen Burstyn (Elizabeth Warren), Aasif Mandvi (Pruitt), Ron Rifkin (Bernie Sanders), Denis O’Hare (Lindsey Graham), David Remnick (Al Franken), Raúl Esparza (Marco Rubio), Regina Taylor (Dianne Feinstein), David Costabile (Price), Ivan Hernandez (Ted Cruz), Bill Irwin (Bob Corker) and Nathan Osgood (Sessions).
The play incorporates a few short disruptions from protesters, but actual anti-Trump demonstrators (accompanied by overseeing police officers with barricades) did in fact show up outside the venue before the show began.
As Public Theater artistic director explained in a preshow speech, the play is not intended to “spin” or “satirize” current politics but to “try to distill something that is affecting all of our lives.” In a preface to the published version of the script, Kent wrote that “the function of this play is to try to lay bare, as much as possible, the philosophy, character and policy ideals of the new Trump administration.” For better or worse, it certainly does that.
In laying bare the questions and answers of the Cabinet members and senators, “All the President’s Men?” serves as simple, direct and extremely necessary political theater. Many of us may have heard sound bites on news shows or read summaries about the lengthy hearings in the newspaper, but few actually bothered to follow the back-and-forth dialogue and interactions on CSPAN.
It should come as no surprise that “All the President’s Men?” does not make for great play-writing — at least in a traditional sense. After all, it is just an edited down, choppy re-enactment of endless question and answer sessions, with no movement or plot or character development.
The piece is also outright disturbing and unapologetically depressing — at least for the many Manhattan liberals and centrists who attended on Thursday night. If a Broadway musical comedy like “Hello, Dolly!” represents “feel good theater” at its peak, this could be deemed “feel absolutely terrible about the state of the world theater.”
In each of the four depicted hearings, Democratic senators aggressively and skeptically press the four nominees how they will fulfill their public duties despite their prior stances and backgrounds, and the nominees respond with half-baked, hesitant and unconvincing answers, which occasionally roused uneasy laughter or angry hissing from the audience.
In an opening statement to the Tillerson hearing, Republican Sen. Bob Corker said that the hearings, in which senators fulfill their duty “to give advice and consent to nominees that are put forth by a President,” represent “the best of America.” Regardless of your political affiliation, it’s very difficult to believe that.
Some audience members slowly trickled out as the long-winded show (which lasted just over two and a half hours) dragged on, and I can’t blame them. There is only so much of this stuff one can stomach. It is also hard to revisit these hearings from a few months ago while new scandals pop up virtually every day in the current administration. Then again, these hearings and other events from the early days of the Trump Administration should not be forgotten anytime soon.
I doubt that the Public Theater will go on to present “All the President’s Men?” as a full production, but it absolutely should keep doing such creative, civic and critical-minded, one-night-only events. As it happens, its “Public Forum: A Well-Ordered Nation” series will continue on Monday night with an event that sports a somewhat hopeful title: “The Way Forward.”
Correction: Director Nicolas Kent’s first name was spelled incorrectly in an earlier version of this article.
