CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, February 08, 2017

What do we do in the time of Trump? The theater community is trying to figure out the answer.

The Washington Post: For Adam Immerwahr, artistic director of Washington’s Theater J, it was a no-brainer. As an offering in the company’s upcoming season, he’d been mulling “Sotto Voce,” a play by the Pulitzer-winning Nilo Cruz concerning the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner filled with hundreds of Jewish refugees, that at the start of World War II was turned away by the United States and other nations. As a result, many of its passengers wound up back in Europe, and ultimately in concentration camps.

1 comment:

Kelly Simons said...

I like this article. I think in the wake of the election the best possible strategy is awareness. The article states: “That sense of urgency has begun to take hold at any number of theaters across the Washington region and the country, as artistic directors and theater producers — positioning themselves as first responders in a time of political and humanitarian upheaval — grapple with how to jump-start a current-events conversation with audiences, sparked by the controversies that President Trump’s initial actions have stirred.” Theatres need to spring into action in order to offset the terribleness of Trump’s regime. The fact that so many theatres have realized that they need to create theatre in order to combat the oppressive and oftentimes scary new America that we all are living in. This new America also lends itself to new works from playwrights; they can write about their experiences as well as the experiences of the citizens of the U.S.