How Theater Stepped Up to Meet the Trump Era
As artists saw liberties threatened and inequities exacerbated, the stage became more thrillingly urgent than it had been in decades.
Gregg Henry as the Trump-styled title character in the Public Theater’s 2017 “Julius Caesar.”Credit.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Published Jan. 18, 2021Updated Jan. 20, 2021
On the Tuesday morning in June 2015 when Donald J. Trump waved his way down, down, down a golden-edged escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy on a stage below, he set the United States on a trajectory that much of the country wasn’t anticipating. The theater, for one, was busy heading in a very different direction, and in a vastly different spirit.