Michael Hirsh was national editor for Politico Magazine from 2014–2016.

NEW YORK—Over the next few weeks, in a tiny theater next to the Lincoln Tunnel on the remote west side of Manhattan—in other words, way way Off Broadway—George W. Bush is going on trial once a night for war crimes, with the audience playing the part of his jury. Performing on a stage far from the big, popular shows about Disney characters and dysfunctional families, actor Tony Carlin skillfully conjures W. in “The Trial of an American President”—a short drama by advertising magnate and first-time playwright Dick Tarlow—and gets us to empathize with the 43rd president as a good-hearted incompetent who loved his country not wisely but too well. “Do you really think I’m a monster?” Carlin/Bush pleads to the audience at one point.

It might seem strange to be tackling this subject 13 years after the invasion of Iraq—and nearly eight years after Bush left the White House—but audiences have nearly filled the 88-seat Lion Theater each night (about “90 percent full on average,” claims Tarlow). In an interview at his plush Chelsea apartment, the playwright told me that the often-emotional response he gets suggests that Iraq remains an open wound for Americans—especially with ISIS dominating the news—and that it's cathartic for people to get to decide on Bush’s imaginary fate on stage. “We had some people say that what they loved about being on the jury is that they finally got a chance to speak their mind. They felt very empowered by it,” Tarlow says, adding: “If I could get this on cable network and have all of America vote on it like they do on ‘American Idol,’ I think it would be fantastic to lay it out there.”


Tarlow, who financed the four-week run himself, says he wrote the play because he was “horrified” by the Iraq war, which he thought “illegal.” He was, he told me, appalled that Americans “don’t seem to learn our lessons,” and he thought the immediacy of theater could drive some of those lessons home. He’s hardly alone, since Iraq is being litigated once again in the presidential race. Still Tarlow recognizes how unusual, even quixotic, it is for him to be bringing his ambitions for dramatic justice to the stage, at a moment when American theater doesn’t seem to be grappling a lot with American politics, at least as it once did in the era of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” or the work of Clifford Odets. “The theater is nothing like that anymore,” says Tarlow. “It’s not dissimilar to what sells in the movies: superheroes, big musicals. I don’t think there are enough plays that keep my interest. It’s rare that I come back to my seat after intermission. I don’t find them worth fighting the crowd after it’s over to get a cab.”

Are our playwrights selling today’s crises short? It’s a fair question to ask. “The Trial” is plainly a rookie effort; as a play it’s a little clunky, a bit too earnest and on the nose. Still, seeing it made me wonder: Where are the great political plays of yesteryear? Where are the new Arthur Millers and Berthold Brechts and Tony Kushners (though of course the latter is still around)? Just how many plays about screwed-up families can we watch—the endless progeny of “Long Day’s Journey into Night”—when they seem to exist outside our present? Washington loves to talk about the theater of politics; but few in New York seem to be talking about getting politics into the theater. Surely, the problem isn't that we’re not deranged enough as a society and a political culture—not with a reality-show star bidding for the White House, insults replacing political discourse, and twitter wars eclipsing real wars as issues. We’re not lacking in fascinating characters either, as Larry David has demonstrated with his Bernie Sanders imitation on Saturday Night Live, and Jimmy Fallon, Alec Baldwin and others are doing with that Trump guy.

Why should any of this matter? Perhaps it’s because America is a nation traumatized and divided, socially, politically, spiritually—and it is said that theater, perhaps more than any other art form, can promote a kind of social healing. Going back to the ancient Greeks and Aristotle, who thought the drama festivals of his time were cathartic experiences, drama has often served that role, even if the vehicle is a 260-year-old Treasury secretary-turned-rapper, the current sensation on Broadway. “It’s built into the nature of the theatrical experience—it brings us close and gives us critical distance at the same time,” says Alisa Solomon, a cultural critic who teaches at Columbia Journalism School. “It’s a place that allows us to slow down and contemplate things as a community. That’s a very different experience from watching something alone on your screen. Theater is communal, and America needs communal today.”

Or as Mark Blankenship puts it: “America could really use Clifford Odets right now.” Blankenship, a New York-based critic and editor of the theater magazine TDF Stages, is harking back to “Waiting for Lefty,” the Depression-era Odets play about striking workers that, legend has it, drove people to rise up and protest. “It was a great example of an American play that dove head on into the issues of the time, and there is not something that is as raw and immediate happening right now regarding those issues. … Where is the barbaric yawp that comes without years of play development, the sense of immediacy?”

Blankenship adds: “I cannot think of any playwright who has risen to national prominence recently who is trying to deal with those world-historical socio-economic questions.”

It’s not as if the American stage is divorced from what’s going on in the country, as both Blankenship and Solomon point out. “I think we’re doing great job with identity, race and ethnicity,” says Blankenship, pointing to the work of rising playwrights Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins and Ayad Akhtar in particular. At the Public Theater in New York, Richard Nelson is staging his multi-part “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family,” and Mike Daisey is putting on his one-man show, “The Trump Card.” The crisis of economic inequality is a major theme in the new Broadway hit “The Humans,” by Stephen Karam, and other recent plays.

Marc Robinson of the Yale School of Drama, author of The American Play: 1787-2000, tends to agree that while there are not quite as many major plays that are directly about politics today, many go at the subject in other ways. “The obvious high points for U.S. political theater were the 1930s (Odets and the Group Theater; the Federal Theater Project) and the 1960s and early ‘70s (Living Theater, Black Arts Movement, etc)," he writes in an email, “but I think there is still important socially engaged work happening now—perhaps embodying a more capacious idea of the ‘political.’" In other words, key political issues are being tackled in quiet ways in a slew of new plays about social issues, especially white-black relations, in works like Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate,” about a Southern white family that finds in the attic a book of photos of their ancestors lynching blacks, and the squabbling that ensues.

Certainly there are some big plays about political history. Robert Schenkkan’s “All the Way,” starring Brian Cranston as LBJ, was a worthy hit, and “Hamilton” resonates in our current political moment, in musical bits like the “The Election of 1800,” when the protagonist must choose between a man he opposes politically, Thomas Jefferson, and one he fears as being “without scruple,” Aaron Burr. (It’s all too easy to see Trump as a Burr-like figure, and today’s conflicted GOP establishment as Hamilton defecting to Hillary/Jefferson.) Outside of New York this year at Seattle’s ACT Theater, Sean Devine premiered “Daisy,” about the story behind America’s most famous political commercial, LBJ’s campaign-transforming 1964 ad. In little theaters across the country some telling revivals are in the works, especially the newly and frighteningly relevant “It Can’t Happen Here,” the 1936 play by Sinclair Lewis and John C. Moffitt about the rise of a dictator in America, a version of which is currently being performed at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

But the best political drama about our day often seems to come from abroad, especially the UK, with powerful offerings such as “Black Watch” by the National Theater of Scotland, and David Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” two other plays about Iraq. In “Black Watch,” a historic Scottish regiment is blown to pieces in Iraq, literally and figuratively, along with a nation’s sense of confidence about its role in the world; and today in Britain a new version of Hare’s 2004 play, starring Julian Sands as Tony Blair, is eliciting excitement in the wake of the recent damning Chilcot Inquiry report, which vindicated the playwright’s early indictment of Blair’s complicity in invading Iraq without adequate cause. Even in the realm of movies, it seems to be mostly the historical stuff, like “A Face in the Crowd,” Elia Kazan’s great 1957 film about the rise of a demagogue, that has most relevance for our day. (Budd Schulberg’s screenplay for that movie is now being turned into a stage play in Washington.)

Going back to the Greeks, dramatic art has always felt a responsibility to society and sought to comprehend it; great literature and drama can provide a kind of historic or poetic justice when there is none to be found in real life. Is Bush really the only one we can imagine putting on trial? What about the fleecers of Wall Street—or maybe Alan Greenspan? From 9/11 through the Iraq invasion and the crash and Great Recession, America has been strained to the breaking point; globalization, inequality and the over-extension of America abroad has torn at our national sense of self. And while we’re celebrating Alexander Hamilton and what he did two centuries ago on the stage, his greatest pride, the U.S. Constitution, is “gravely, perhaps terminally, ill,” as law professor Garrett Epps writes in The Atlantic. The U.S. constitutional system has grown cumulatively less workable—leading to permanent paralysis on Capitol Hill and the unwillingness of Congress to perform basic duties, and the de-legitimization of the executive branch.

And yet our political elites still seem in a state of shock over the ugly state of our politics and the fierce popular backlash to it—to Trump, Sanders and the rest; not to mention in explaining the strange, all too melodramatic choice in this presidential election: One of the main contenders is a newbie berserker politician who promises to completely shatter the status quo; the other main contender embodies the Establishment itself and seems to think the status quo is just fine.

If that’s not the stuff of national drama, what is? Maybe a Clifford Odets would have seen this coming.

***

Some playwrights are clearly catching on. One can hardly wait for the election eve staging of Joshua Harmon’s “Ivanka: A Medea for Right Now”—in which Donald’s favorite daughter apparently has a change of heart about Daddy—at Washington’s Studio Theater. And in New York, at least, “The Trial” is a start. Deploying a technique used by Ayn Rand’s 1934 play “Night of January 16,” nine members of the audience are chosen to play the jury and given cards with tabs to fold before the performance, indicating their decision on Bush’s guilt or innocence. In most performances so far, they've voted overwhelmingly to convict Bush of war crimes. (People in “premium” seats, says Tarlow, are asked to be jurors.) Though most verdicts have gone against Bush (“New York values” at work, perhaps), some of the audience wish for his acquittal over the Iraq invasion as he suffers under the verbal onslaught of a thundering prosecutor from an imaginary International Criminal Court.

The Bronx-born Tarlow, 75, who made a fortune in advertising before he retired 13 years ago, says he’s long wanted to move from writing ad copy to the literary kind. In developing “The Trial,” he says he was very influenced by Manson Family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s 2008 book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, and other recent books about the Iraq war, but he sought to make W. more human after reading the ex-president’s own memoir, Decision Points. “You come away thinking he truly believes in his Christianity and his desire to bring democracy everywhere in the world. … He’s not an evil man, even though his decisions caused evil.”

Great dramatic art can help with those subtle distinctions, exploring the corrosive effect of power on even the well-intentioned. Unlike the polemical crossfire of Twitter or what passes for commentary on TV, the theater forces you to spend time inside someone else’s head. Still, it doesn’t always clarify things: When Shakespeare portrayed King Richard III as one of history’s worst villains he was mainly promoting the views of the Tudors, who had bested Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485; what Richard was really like, we don’t know. Perhaps, too, we will never really know what we think of George W. Bush or why he did what he did. But it’s worth a try, and maybe “The Trial” delivers a small measure of justice for and understanding about a war that most Americans, according to polls, now think was wrong.

At least Dick Tarlow hopes so. And what’s next for the neophyte playwright? Tarlow grins. “I’m working on Dick Cheney, the Musical.”