How to Put the Trump Trial on Broadway
There was most certainly drama, all played out by a vivid gallery of big characters: Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Alvin Bragg, Karen McDougal, Todd Blanche, and Susan Necheles. Outside the court were vying groups of demonstrators and the shocking sight of one man, Maxwell Azzarello, fatally setting himself on fire. So, could former President Trump’s recent hush money trial—guilty on all 34 counts, sentencing to come—ever graduate to another kind of drama on the Broadway stage, and would audiences come to see it?
Will Keen, presently playing Vladimir Putin on Broadway in Patriots (Barrymore Theatre, to June 23), told The Daily Beast that such a play “could be compelling. There have already been plays about Trump. Bertie Carvel was brilliant when he played Trump (in The 47th, Mike Bartlett’s 2022 play, directed by Rupert Goold). There is also quite a history of plays based, verbatim, on legal proceedings, produced by the Tricycle Theatre in London (like The Colour of Justice and Nuremberg) under the artistic director Nicolas Kent.”
A play such as one based on the trial “might help you learn or question the things you yourself are capable of, or question your own moral checks and balances,” Keen said. “It may show you that the character you considered unquestionably immoral or amoral have their own pronounced sense of morality which allows them to behave in the way they do. You may end up questioning your own hardline judgments about people and things. We all have ways of acting, which we sometimes—retroactively—morally justify to ourselves: a moral meaning that allows behavior to have some sense.