“Since the election, I have been urgently seeking direction from dramatists in the way a cardiac patient might turn to nutrition and meditation after a heart attack. I have been thinking not just of Chekhov but of Harold Pinter, who is an even better guide to Trump’s brutal relativism and canny opportunism. Pinter’s plays throw into relief the territorial nature of human beings — the way reality, both present and past, is a turf war in which the will to dominate supersedes all other considerations.”