Theatre: A Counterweight for Heavy Times

AMERICAN THEATRE: Last June I sat among a packed house at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in D.C. for a preview of Mike Daisey’s The Trump Card, another of his funny, angry, discursive monologues about politics and personality. It was still more than a month before the Republican convention, and many months before the general election—in other words, a dewy, halcyon age that now feels like a lifetime ago—and an audience full of presumably left-of-center theatre folks, in town for the annual Theatre Communications Group conference, laughed nervously, but maybe not nervously enough, at Daisey’s ingratiating opener: “You, my friends, are fucked.”