THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 AR 5Theater
When Anne Washburn wrote her play “Ship-
wreck,” in a white-hot dash inspired by a sin-
gle news cycle of the Trump era, she didn’t
care whether it had a future.
It was June 2017, and as Washburn was on
her way to a silent playwriting retreat, the
former F.B.I. director James B. Comey had
just testified to the Senate Intelligence Com-
mittee about the infamous dinner in which
President Trump demanded his loyalty. She
spun the story into a sprawling fantasia,
rooted in realism but ascending toward the
mythic, about a group of liberal New York-
ers, their weekend getaway at an old farm-
house upstate and, of course, that dinner.
“I thought it would be a good way to clear
my head,” recalled Washburn, whose dar-
ingly imaginative output includes “Mr.
Burns, a Post-Electric Play.” “It really was
just a play for one year. I thought it was going
to be completely out of date at any moment.
But it’s become a play for four years.”
Many of the play’s threads — even as it
has been slightly revised, from its premiere
at the Almeida Theater in London last year
to its American debut at the Woolly Mam-
moth Theater in Washington this February
— have remained in the national conscious-
ness. Its conversations about activism and
race seem eerily prescient.
And now “Shipwreck: A History Play
About 2017” — still a chattering mirror of our
moment’s too-muchness — is about to find
its widest possible audience yet. In a change
of programming prompted by the coronavi-
rus pandemic, it has been adapted into an
audio play, produced by the Public Theater
and Woolly Mammoth, out now as a three-
part podcast.
This version, replacing a canceled staging
at the Public, was directed by Saheem Ali,
who also oversaw the Woolly Mammoth pro-
duction as well as the Public’s first pandemic
audio play, Shakespeare’s “Richard II.”
When he first read “Shipwreck,” he said, he
wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it “be-
cause of how so deeply theatrical and politi-
cal it was.”
“How can these two things live side by
side, with these ideas and this language?” he
continued. “I feel it in my bones that there’s
something urgent and astonishing about
what she’s written.”
The play, which displays “boundless em-
pathy,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York
Times, doesn’t at first appear to lend itself to
audio. The dialogue moves quickly, among
many characters; scenes progress fluidly
from the present to the past to pure fantasy.
The two scenes with Trump (Bill Camp), an
imagined meeting with George W. Bush
(Phillip James Brannon) and a climactic en-
counter with Comey (Joe Morton), are “ex-
plosively theatrical,” Ali said. So the new pro-
duction leaned heavily on sound design, by
Palmer Hefferan.
“The thing about ‘Richard’ is that I had
discovered the strengths of sound,” Ali said.
“The creaking floors and the fireplace felt
necessary to conjure for a sense of realism,
like you’re eavesdropping. Then that’s in
concert with these leaps of fantasy.”
Over Zoom from her apartment in Brook-
lyn, Washburn talked about making art in
the Trump era, how “Shipwreck” has
evolved — notably, she excised the Black
protagonist, Mark, whose monologues
amounted to an entire subplot — and what
she hopes for its future. Here are edited ex-
cerpts from the conversation.
Art made in moments of crisis tends to fall
along a spectrum. At one end, perhaps, is
blunt agitprop, and at the other is pure
abstraction. What interests you?
Work that is struggling to understand some-
thing. I’m not interested in going to the the-
ater and seeing something that I know I al-
ready agree with or that tells me what to
think. I’m interested in the feeling of strug-
gle. I’m interested in having to puzzle my
way through something, in feeling a little
confused.
The conversations in “Shipwreck” offer no
clear conclusions. Do they reflect similar
gatherings you’ve had with liberal friends in
real life?
Interestingly, when this was rehearsed — in
London and then at Woolly Mammoth — we
really had to say to the cast: Remember
what it was like in 2017, when we still had all
the energy to go into these things at length.
It’s not like we’ve stopped talking about it,
but at the time there was more to explore
and a kind of freshness. So these conversa-
tions, I think, capture where we were almost
four years ago. We were more innocent.Even a mention of James Comey feels quaint,
like distant history.
It feels like distant history, but also I’ve said
that when I wrote this play and it was done I
assumed that I’d have to rewrite it mas-
sively. And that wasn’t the case. The dinner
with Comey was so early on, it still gets a lit-
tle bit of the original sin of the Trump admin-
istration.It is remarkable how sturdy the script has
been from the first staging until now. I feel
like that gets at something about the mo-
ment we’re living through: So much happens,
so quickly, but the themes are generally con-
sistent.
Yeah, there’s a structure in the play, which
has been there from the beginning, that
characters can speak into the future: What if
this happens? What if thishappens? I
thought I’d have to exploit that at some point
to incorporate some crazy new thing that
would have occurred — I mean, which still
could occur. But for all that Trump dazzled us
with the variety of outrage, there are some
really consistent underlying themes to what
he’s doing and what his motivations are. It
might be that you could pick any one week of
news in the Trump era, and if you really get
into it, basically have the same set of contin-
ually reverberating dramatic and political
problems.
Can you talk about how you arrived at your
depiction of Trump?
I will say that because I was writing so
quickly, I wasn’t particularly making deci-
sions that I could unpack later. I do know that
I felt strongly that any depiction of Trump
should not be obvious and clownish. The first
scene, with Bush, is I think very muchTrump as his supporters genuinely see him,
and also I think as he genuinely sees himself.
The second portrayal, with Comey, is more
Trump the 12-D chess player — that Trump
supporter’s fantasy of him, but also a liber-
al’s worst nightmare of him. My instinct as a
mad person was to make him stupid, but it’s
not the most interesting thing to do, and he
doesn’t have 40 percent of the population in
his thrall because he’s stupid.
The most substantial change in this version
of the play is the absence of Mark. What led
to cutting him out entirely?
When I was writing this initially, I was writ-
ing a Black character talking about Black ra-
cial trauma in America. I did not know if it
was my story to tell, but I felt that real dis-
cussion could happen from it. Then George
Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, and a
lot of discussion started up, and it just felt as
though this was not a time for people to en-
counter that discussion written by me. Along
with a lot of other discussions happening in
the American theater about who’s being giv-
en the bandwidth to tell these stories, it just
felt like this play was going to cause pain
rather than be a productive discussion. I
thought I would withdraw the play, and Sa-
heem Ali really felt like we had this play
without Mark. And yes, you do. It’s not the
same play; it’s a different play.
Those conversations about race still happen,
but the perspective changes from a Black
one to a white one. I’m wondering whether
there’s actually some sort of opportunity
there, artistically and even sort of politically,
in depicting white liberals struggle to talk
about it.
I sat down with a bunch of different people,
and I was told that when you had Mark in the
play, everyone in the audience, including all
of the white liberals, knew who their alle-
giance was with. You’ve got your guiding
star. When you remove that person, you are
more sitting in this house with this group of
largely white liberals, and if you are a white
liberal yourself, that’s a more complicated
place to be.
Plays are powered by artifice, and I think
there is an artifice in the degree of discussion
that happens in the house, since my experi-
ence of white liberals is that generally we
don’t talk about race, or we do, but really
carefully in a prescribed way. And if there’s
any divergence with that: freakout, emo-
tional maelstrom, end of all discussion. I do
think that when it comes to talking about
race, white liberals have essentially the vo-
cabulary of 3- or 4-year-olds. Or we did at the
beginning of the pandemic. Now we’re kind
of like semi-bright fifth or sixth graders.What is the afterlife of this play when Trump
is no longer in office?
If Trump is not president in January, I think
we won’t want to think about him again for a
long time.Like a de-Trumpification?
I’m all for it. I wish nothing more for this play
than to be irrelevant.CELESTE SLOMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESMARC BRENNERMARC BRENNERHoping for Success and Irrelevancy
Anne Washburn’s ‘Shipwreck’
is a sprawling Trump fantasia.
By JOSHUA BARONEAnne Washburn, top left,
whose play “Shipwreck” is
now streaming as an audio
performance. Top right,
from the London
production, with the
character Mark, played here
by Fisayo Akinade, center;
and below that, Khalid
Abdalla, foreground, as
James B. Comey and Elliot
Cowan as President Trump.
Above, Saheem Ali, bottom
right, the director of the
audio “Shipwreck” show
rehearsing with, top row,
Brooke Bloom, Sue Jean
Kim, Mia Barron and Jenny
Jules; second row, Phillip
James Brannon, Raul
Esparza, Joe Morton and
Richard Topol; third row,
Jeremy Shamos, Bill Camp,
Washburn and Rob
Campbell; and bottom row,
Bruce McKenzie.VIA THE PUBLIC THEATER.