Review Roundup: Robert Schenkkan's BUILDING THE WALL Opens Off-Broadway

BUILDING THE WALL, the new play by Pulitzer and Tony winner Robert Schenkkan (All The Way, Hacksaw Ridge - Academy Award nominee The Kentucky Cycle), opened in its New York premiere on May 21st at New World Stages for a limited engagement through July 9, 2017.

The two-person political suspense thriller features two stars of the screen and stage: James Badge Dale (Small Engine Repair, The Pacific, "Rubicon", The Departed) and Tamara Tunie (Julius Caesar, "Law & Order: SVU", The Devil's Advocate) and is directed by Ari Edelson (Artistic Director of the Exchange; Little Black Dress, Expats).

From America's greatest political playwright, Pulitzer & Tony winner and Academy Award nominee Robert Schenkkan, comes a provocative 90-minute theatrical event set in the near future and deals with one of the most talked about topics of this past election. In a time when campaign rhetoric turns into real policies, Building the Wall reveals the power of theater to question who we are and where we might be going.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Jesse Green, The New York Times: Perhaps it's inevitable that dialogue written so hastily would lean on familiar ideas. But the entire play hobbles on such crutches...You will not be surprised to learn that Rick (James Badge Dale) is a marginally racist, Trump-loving Texan from a downwardly mobile working-class family, while Gloria (Tamara Tunie) is a highly educated, liberal black woman in a sweater set...I mean it as no insult - but no great praise - to say that the actors give performances precisely calibrated to the material, Mr. Dale hitting all the good-old-boy marks, and Ms. Tunie signposting the steel beneath Gloria's warmth. That the material does not ask them to do much is not their fault...The problem is that the material does not ask us to do much, either. A political play, if it does not engage viewers with new ideas, should at least stir them as drama. But "Building the Wall" might as well be called "Building the Shelving Unit," for all the tension it produces...with everyone in agreement, where's the play?

Adam Feldman, Time Out NY: A sloppy soup of factoids, clichés and dire portent, the show may elicit standing ovations from those who already share its fears, but they're only standing in place...To call their encounter a play at all seems generous; they are barely characters, there is hardly any conflict or tension between them...Schenkkan's point is that it is easy to imagine Trump's America deteriorating into Nazi Germany, extermination camps and all. But he hasn't spent enough time imagining it; the characters and the history they lay out in retrospect are generic and implausible-and also, at times, cheap...It's too easy to be incendiary when what you're burning is a straw man.

Frank Rizzo, Variety: There's a hold-your-breath inevitability to what is finally disclosed in "Building the Wall," the powerful dystopian drama about life in the Donald Trump era by Robert Schenkkan. You hear it in the distant, unnerving soundscape. You see it as two characters increasingly come to grips with their worst fears. Most of all, you feel it in the gut, because what the writer imagines is not so much a fanciful futurist leap but a calculated cautionary tale, taking place just two years from now...the writer zeroes intimately, unsparingly and chillingly at one of this election cycle's disenfranchised followers and takes an unblinking look at what makes him tick...tick...tick...it's gripping storytelling, and powerful performances trump any sense of an overworked template.

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Schenkkan's two-character play reflecting a hot-button political issue proves a solid reminder of how quickly and effectively theater can respond to what's going on in the world...Building the Wall contains passionate anger and urgency and, despite the occasional didactic exchange in which the characters all too obviously serve as mouthpieces for political arguments, it's extremely well written. Rick, who could serve as a model for the expression "banality of evil," registers as a believably ordinary man who becomes induced to commit horrific acts...Despite its predictable aspects...the play still emerges as powerful political theater. It never feels static, thanks to Ari Edelson's taut staging and the gripping performances.

Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News: A "what if" scenario can lead a writer anywhere. Robert Schenkkan goes to the near-future to imagine horrifying aftershocks of Donald Trump's presidency in the cautionary two-hander "Building the Wall," at New World Stages...Written in just a week before the election, the play seeks to push buttons and on that level succeeds. It's also fast moving and credibly acted. Dale's performance is strong and believable. Tunie's take on an academic could use a bit of fine-tuning. Dramatically, it's a mostly static hour and a half...And details nag...Despite weaknesses, the play has an ace up its sleeve - and it saves it for last.

Robert Hofler, TheWrap: Yes, it's Donald Trump time again in the theater, but preaching to the chorus here involves much more than a few oblique reference to the aggrievEd White masses, political incompetence and modern-day fascism..."Building the Wall" is powerful in its preposterousness. Just when you think the revelations can't get any darker, they turn another, deeper shade of black...What doesn't happen in "Building the Wall" is that Gloria never changes. She remains the sympathetic, dogged journalist out to write a good story. In other words, she's a prop put there to ask Rick questions. In a better, even more disturbing play - and "Building the Wall" is very disturbing as is - she might also be shown to bear some responsibility for what went wrong in America.

Matt Windman, amNY: President Donald Trump has been impeached and "exiled to Palm Beach." Not in real life, but in Robert Schenkkan's absorbing and unapologetically disturbing drama "Building the Wall"...With dystopian thrillers now in vogue (see "The Handmaid's Tale" on Hulu and "1984" on Broadway), "Building the Wall" gives yet another perspective on how ordinary individuals can be swept up by history, either willingly or unwittingly. In writing "Building the Wall" and getting it produced so quickly, Schenkkan has initiated a conversation about where the country is heading. It's now up to the audience members to add their voices to that discussion.