The Future of America

The new play from Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner Robert Schenkkan (All the Way), Building the Wall is one of the first theatrical works to address the election victory of Donald Trump. Set in 2019, this tense two-hander explores the creeping banality of evil, and how dangerous political rhetoric can translate into previously unthinkable real world actions.

Following a terrorist attack on Times Square, a mass deportation of illegal immigrants is initiated by the Trump administration. Unable to cope with the vast numbers of people awaiting processing, the detainees are moved from prisons to sports stadiums, where crowding and the lack of facilities leads to the outbreak of disease and the deaths of thousands. The play follows a conversation between a scholar (Tamara Tunie) and a prison warder (James Badge Dale) who was in charge of such a stadium and is now awaiting trial, after news of the scandal caused a public outcry. As the scholar discovers, while he may have been made the scapegoat, the warder is only a symptom of the country's problems, and not a cause.