PODCAST
Artifi cial Intelligence
Would-be satire of Trump regmine falls short as podcast
The cast of “Shipwreck,” a play written for the stage by Anne Washburn but adapted for podcast by director Saheem Ali, in rehearsal.
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
Perhaps it’s a question of
timing. Perhaps it’s the
medium. Perhaps it’s the
consequence of an unchecked
pandemic. Or maybe it’s
the pervasive exhaustion over this
political season’s strident atmosphere
— from all sides — with its
unrelenting celebration of opinion
and biases in place of facts.
For these, and probably several
other reasons, the podcast version
of Anne Washburn’s play “Shipwreck,”
now available from the
Public Theater, is a frustrating and
depressing affair. Notwithstanding
its noble intentions to satirize liberal
pomposity and outrage in the
age of Trump, interspersed with
surreal imagined scenes between
James Comey and Trump and
George W. Bush and Trump, listening
to the three-part, nearly threehour
play leaves one feeling more
browbeaten than enlightened.
The play, intended to be presented
live by The Public, would likely
be more successful on stage. It was
fi rst presented earlier this year by
Washington, DC’s Woolly Mammoth
Theatre Company, where it
was enthusiastically reviewed, notably
for the visual theatricality,
which, of course, is missing in a
podcast. The drawback of the medium
is also that there is often a
lack of clarity about the relationships
among characters and even
over which character is speaking.
Washburn has called this a
“History Play of 2017.” It involves
several couples who arrive at an
upstate New York farm for a weekend.
They get snowed in without
too much food. Conversation and
argument. Because they are liberal,
privileged, and relatively —
maybe exceedingly — affl uent, the
talk turns to the political climate.
Therein lies the piece’s inherent
problem — it is very, very talky.
Washburn doesn’t really create fair
argument as Shaw did or Matthew
Lopez did in “The Inheritance.”
Rather her characters talk in set
pieces of political opinion they hurl
about. These discourses lack depth,
nuance, or individuality, leaving
no reason to care about any of the
characters as people. One can be
harangued by ignorant, bloviating
“experts” simply by switching on
THE PUBLIC THEATER
the news these days.
Why are we supposed to care
about Allie who spends virtually
the entire play in a kind of self-important
mania about why no one
is responding to her tweets to get
involved? Yes, Washburn is making
a point about the insufferable
“Karens” who never get called out
for their ignorance, but when this
behavior is so prevalent in the real
world — and by now both unremarkable
and tiresome in its visibility
— the intended satire falls
fl at. With regard to Trump, Washburn
has written with 20-20 hindsight,
so a conversation about the
potential for a future impeachment
is labored and comes across as
pretentious.
When the characters talk in the
way real people do, instead of in
orchestrated arguments, they become
interesting. Washburn only
creates these moments when they
are talking about what it means
to keep making money during the
nation’s political crisis or how a
sudden economic reversal affects
a family. These moments are brief,
and then the characters retreat to
posturing, once again pushing the
audience away.
There’s no question that political
theater is risky and challenging.
Shakespeare’s history plays
are very talky, but they’re full of
action, developed characters, and
insight. (Washburn’s characters
take swipes at Shakespeare and
Euripides, including a very stilted
reference to The Public’s 2017 controversial
production of “Julius
Caesar” that portrayed as Caesar
as a Trump-like monster.) Yet
Shakespeare teaches us that characters
whose only dramatic function
is to indicate a type or declaim
on topics are ultimately boring.
In using surreal appearances
of real political fi gures, Washburn
imitates Tony Kushner’s “Angels
in America,” but without the
emotional impact of a character
like Roy Cohn, where Kushner’s
rage informed the portrayal. Nor
does Washburn create the dramatic
tension of “Oslo,” which was
character-driven and where peace
was literally at stake. Washburn’s
characters talk a lot, but they do
very little. For all their blather,
they are largely ineffectual in the
world but have the luxury of espousing
big ideas from ivory towers.
That may be an indictment of
a certain class of Americans today,
but it’s hardly gripping theater.
Rather, it’s like being trapped at a
dinner party with a guest who monopolizes
the conversation but is
challenged by no one because the
crowd has heard it all before and
it’s not worth the effort.
Interspersed with all of this talk
is a subplot about the former owner
of the house who adopted a child
from Africa, which brings in issues
of race and identity, but they are
not fully developed and seem facile,
merely dropped in to check the
box about racial commentary.
A play that is about current, or
nearly current, events invites comparison
to Richard Nelson’s plays
about the Apple, Gabriel, and Michael
families in Rhinebeck, particularly
as these were fi rst staged
by The Public. Much of what is talk-
➤ SHIPWRECK, continued on p.29
November 05 - November 18, 2 28 020 | GayCityNews.com
/GayCityNews.com
