There was most certainly drama, all played out by a vivid gallery of big characters: Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Alvin Bragg, Karen McDougal, Todd Blanche, and Susan Necheles. Outside the court were vying groups of demonstrators and the shocking sight of one man, Maxwell Azzarello, fatally setting himself on fire. So, could former President Trump’s recent hush money trial—guilty on all 34 counts, sentencing to come—ever graduate to another kind of drama on the Broadway stage, and would audiences come to see it?

Will Keen, presently playing Vladimir Putin on Broadway in Patriots (Barrymore Theatre, to June 23), told The Daily Beast that such a play “could be compelling. There have already been plays about Trump. Bertie Carvel was brilliant when he played Trump (in The 47th, Mike Bartlett’s 2022 play, directed by Rupert Goold). There is also quite a history of plays based, verbatim, on legal proceedings, produced by the Tricycle Theatre in London (like The Colour of Justice and Nuremberg) under the artistic director Nicolas Kent.”

A play such as one based on the trial “might help you learn or question the things you yourself are capable of, or question your own moral checks and balances,” Keen said. “It may show you that the character you considered unquestionably immoral or amoral have their own pronounced sense of morality which allows them to behave in the way they do. You may end up questioning your own hardline judgments about people and things. We all have ways of acting, which we sometimes—retroactively—morally justify to ourselves: a moral meaning that allows behavior to have some sense.

“As an audience and actor, a person in the arts, there’s so much about the personality of someone like Trump who spends his time creating an image of invulnerability. I’m interested in investigating what vulnerability is there.”

J.T. Rogers, whose plays include Oslo (about the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords) and Corruption (about the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal), sees a similar rich dramatic potential—even if he does not want to write the play himself.

Playwright J.T. Rogers discusses his play Oslo during Build at Build Studio on May 17, 2017 in New York City.

“Theater, a public stage, provides a way to talk about these things that you can’t in newspapers and other media, because in a play you’re not beholden to facts, even if you are beholden to the spirit of them,” Rogers told The Daily Beast. “That’s what fiction is there for. The challenge is, how do you find the emotional core of relationships set against this vast canvas that audiences can grip onto? We can be invested in politics and ideas, and care about the outcomes of politics and histories, but there need to be characters and stories for the audience to care about and follow.”

Telling the story of the Trump trial, said Rogers, means “finding a way to tell the story of a struggle between two rights, as opposed to a right and wrong—so the audience can see the points of view of two or more sides. Obviously I agree with one more than the other. The other challenge is how you fictionalize and theatricalize something where the battle lines are drawn so tightly, where one side is right and one side is wrong. How can you make the audience care about people who they have no interest in, or perhaps even loathed, when they sat down in the theater?”

One leading Broadway producer, who requested anonymity, said it was the widespread antipathy held by many towards Trump that would kill any play about him before it reached the stage—both from theater-makers and audiences. “No one in the theater, in enough numbers, wants to spend any more time with that man—fictionally or otherwise. I couldn’t spend any time with him,” the producer said.

Another leading producer echoed this, declining to comment because they did not want to “give any more attention to this odious subject.”

However, a third Broadway producer who requested anonymity welcomed the prospect. “I absolutely love the idea. I do hope someone writes this. I would watch it. For me, it should be in the form of a play, and be less about Trump and more about how he came to be, and our responsibility and place in his rise. I don’t think the character of Trump needs to be in the play. There have already been TV shows like Succession and Billions about the personalities of these people. I just watched the 2024 remake of A Man in Full starring Jeff Daniels (based on Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, one of whose main characters is a real estate mogul), which is similar.

“I would want a play to be different to those things—what has our role and responsibility been in the creation of Trump and his power? What created our apathy, so that we have lost our moral compasses? Who are the people who have created and allowed Trump to be who he is—and who are the people left to deal with it? It’s an old morality play.”

Rogers said, “If I had a dollar for every time I had been asked to make........

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