With the recent Broadway and HBO success of All The Way, his play about Lyndon Johnson, playwright Robert Schenkkan might seem like an ideal candidate to write a future-tense play about the Trump administration. And Schenkkan’s new play, written in under a week soon after last November’s election, is anti-Trump both in style and in content, but it’s done in by its utter, plodding dullness. While it’s refreshing to see a show that so directly attempts to tackle the political moment, this play badly whiffs the tackle.
Set two years into the future during a Trump presidency—or rather after it, as he’s already been impeached when the play commences—Building the Wall consists of an African-American academic named Gloria (Kanomé Jones) interviewing a prisoner named Rick (Tony Bozzuto). There’s talk of a terrorist attack in Times Square that led to martial law and mass deportation before devolving into something much more heinous and Hague-worthy. Like any good soldier, Rick is adamant that he was just following orders. When he says that “he knows where the bodies are buried” he means it both literally and figuratively.
Schenkkan’s script has so many flaws that it’s difficult to know where to begin: The slight two-hander is almost entirely dialogue, and much of that dialogue is excruciating. It’s clear that Schenkkan has read all the same interesting articles the rest of us have, because their talking points have been dropped directly into the script. The show is at it’s best when it’s giving us the tick-tock logistics of how the “holding facility” Rick helped manage quickly morphs into an out-and-out death camp; the utter plausibility of the scenario is what makes it so disturbing.
On the other side of all this is Gloria, the character who embodies the play’s worst instincts. Much of her dialogue consists of petty political back-and-forths that feel wildly out of place in the given circumstances; she’s not here to argue with a racist uncle, she’s here to interrogate a war criminal. Schenkkan does the character a terrible disservice, using a woman of color to embody all that is just and good and, well, liberal without ever imbuing her with any kind of real humanity. She’s a straw woman, whose only purpose onstage is to be “right.”
The problems with Building the Wall lie almost entirely with Schenkkan’s script, but director Amy Szerlong’s production has one major flaw as well, and it’s the miscasting of Bozzuto, a physically slight, inherently empathetic actor who does as well as he can with Rick, but he is just entirely unbelievable as an ex-military, Texan good ol’ boy thug. There’s a sense of hardscrabble, country-fried machismo to the character that Bozzuto simply cannot play—nor should he be expected to.
Joe Schermoly’s set, which places us behind an imagined two-way mirror looking into a cinder-block cell, is the lone element here that can be praised unreservedly. The sense of voyeurism and of claustrophobia it evokes will subtly fray your battle-weary nerves even further. Schenkkan wrote Building the Wall last October in what he described as “a white hot fury,” and it shows. Unfortunately it’s clear that anger does not yield the best results, onstage or off.
Stage Left Theatre at Athenaeum Theatre. By Robert Schenkkan. Directed by Amy Szerlong. With Tony Bozzuto, Kanomé Jones. Running time: 1hr 25mins; no intermission.