Political Theater Moves Into Nonfiction — Is It Drama Or Seminar?

Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me has become “the grandmother of [a] genre” that includes, just this fall, Kristina Wong for Public Office (about Wong’s run for a local commission in Los Angeles), Lessons in Survival (actors repeating, complete with pauses and tics, observations of prominent Black Americans about society), Denis O’Hare’s What the Hell Is a Republic, Anyway? (using the history of the Roman Republic to examine the American one), and Melissa Dunphy’s The Gonzales Cantata (an oratorio setting the 2007 testimony of George W. Bush’s Attorney General before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Jesse Green looks at these pieces and considers “what it means for performers to take public policy as their script at a time when policymakers seem to be taking public performance as theirs.” – The New York Times