PORTLAND, Ore. — Soon after Stephen K. Bannon was appointed chief strategist for President-elect Donald J. Trump, profiles noted that he was a co-author of a rap musical based on Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy “Coriolanus.” The revelation played as a punch line, another loopy swerve in a career that took Mr. Bannon from a working-class Democratic family to the Trump White House. Coming just after Mr. Trump denounced the hip-hop hit “Hamilton” as “overrated,” the news that his right-hand man had scripted a hip-hop statesman himself felt almost comical.

But Mr. Bannon’s “Coriolanus,” set in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, is deadly serious. And at a moment when the question “What does Bannon want?” has taken on a new urgency, his adaptation of Shakespeare offers an unexpected clue.

Mr. Bannon’s revision of Shakespeare’s tragedy draws its title from one of Coriolanus’s lines, “The Thing I Am.” It suggests the chilling conflict that Mr. Bannon would like to play out on a national stage.