War Painting
theatre's lens
Some plays are odes to friendship and others are anatomies of how friendships go awry. When I wrote WAR PAINTING (a free digital version of it streams June 1-17, 2026 from the Lortel Theater in New York City under Jackson Gay’s direction), I was (and still am) interested in how solidarities break among people, what lies get told to get by, and how class/power dynamics affect people’s ability to truly connect with one another.
On the surface, WAR PAINTING is a play-diagnostic of the contemporaneous condition: this decadent stage of neoliberalism as it meets its evil twin techno fascism and takes everyone for a ride; play as Debordian critique of spectacle from within the exo-skeletons of some of the players inside of spectacle’s cavities. But it is also about how friendships are illusory, difficult to sustain, and sometimes impossible to nurture in a society that is built on a foundation dedicated to ‘broken sociality’ (historian Nate Holdren’s term).
I am interested in friendship (toxic and non-toxic) as a terrain for drama’s examination because unlike stories of coupledom (cishet and otherwise), family (nuclear and chosen), and workplace hierarchies - stories that historically and contemporaneously tend to dominate the majority of text-based drama - friendship is a field where subliminal and overt erotic tensions, contentiousness, loyalties and allegiances are continually tested, evolving and under a shifting microscope of attention. It is a fraught yet exciting terrain to think about how and why people become friends anyway, and what happens with and to friendships over time. Throw into the mix the powder keg of living in these 2020s with an awareness of the intense wealth gaps between and among people and the equally intense manner in which morality is daily compromised by acquiescing (or not) to living under the entangled nature of transnational webs of corruption that form what passes for governance on the world stage, and you get a story that takes as its treatise how the act of regarding one another honestly - clear-eyed, to one self and each other - as the high bar that need be set before even friends can even begin to truly comprehend where they stand.
When I started writing WAR PAINTING, I wanted to first of all, build on the series of plays about neoliberalism and its effects that form/ed my Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship project - plays that trace in macro and micro detail how we got to this place in 2026 and where we might be heading, plays about emergencies and emergence. I also wanted to write what in theatre circles is called a “dinner party play” (because I had never written one before!). This type of play is usually about the well-to-do in a charmed vaguely opulent setting wherein sparks fly over class and power (and sometimes family) dynamics. They tend to be plays that test what people stand for. My interest in this form of drama/comedy is less about the dinner party aspect of it and more about how the gathering of people (even if they are just three people, as they are in my play) in a supposedly relaxed setting can reveal the tensions underneath and push things to the brink, and also how such a setting can amplify the deeply philosophical nature of theatre itself: we are all actors rehearsing our parts on society’s stage, and aware somehow that these roles assigned or ascribed to us are fleeting. As one of the characters says in the play “Our performance is survival.”
Director Bush Moukarzel of Dead Centre theatre company once said in a 2021 interview that (and I paraphrase) ‘theatre is about the problem in the and of the room.’ He remarked that the confounding and essential aspect of theatre is that one is trapped in its room for its duration (whether the room be analogue or virtual - although it is heightened when it is analogue) and as theatre-makers our job is to face and mine this room of entrapment for all it is worth - both as a problem (one cannot escape), and as a provocation (how can the room be re-arranged/re-perceived). The intensity of a one-room play (aren’t all plays really one ‘room’ of theatre?) poses unique challenges: how to sustain the drama, how to turn the drama on its end, how to go with and against expectations of drama, and also how to be alert to the fact that it is also a room of language and not just of space. Indeed, how language is also spatial and temporal and a site of action.
In preparing this digital version of WAR PAINTING (perhaps one day it will also be seen in analogue form), my collaborators and I considered how close-up video can reveal or amplify the multiplicity of character perspectives that make the play a three-way dance of internal/external thought and action. The characters speak their minds but also are concealing nearly everything. It is a sly satire but also a tragedy of the commons (to use that old phrase). It is part in this world and partly too in the mythological space that the characters (open to casting but in this iteration are three men) crave to inhabit. It is both about presence and absence. As a result, this version lives relationally closer to what more conventionally would be seen in a gallery as a three channel video installation: video art for the stage.
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There is a lot of revived chatter these days in some circles about keeping theatre ‘pure’ from digital technologies. There is a seeming parochial fear expressed about the ‘contamination’ of theatre by other tools of artistic expression at our disposal, and other modalities that can make theatre and its unique storytelling/event-making/language poetry accessible. Every time I hear someone lash out at theatre-makers that are even interested in screens, I think where have they been the last 30-odd (or longer) years? I won’t go into a repeat of what I say in the introduction to my book TRANSMEDIA THEATRE (published by Methuen Drama), but what I will say is that theatre is media and it is a technology, and its obstinate insistence (of late) that it is somehow ‘better than’ art-makers in dance, opera, music, stand-up comedy, and performance art that have been using (by choice) and exploring the possibilities of video, digital and projection technologies to expand and re-examine live art forms is blinkered and unsound. It’s akin to saying ignore the radio, the telephone, the phonograph, electric lights and LEDs, and recorded sound, and also, the history of audio drama and original cast recordings!
Not every theatre artist will want to explore what video and audio can/cannot do when it interfaces with a text-based play or how a text-based play can be a springboard for a video or audio treatment (audio drama is also digital theatre). But to say that the tools are not there or cannot be used because they are somehow less ‘valid’ or not in the realm of theatre is absurd.
I have been banging the drum about hyperlinked dramaturgy and theatrical mediations since the year 2000. I have also been banging the drum about accessibility for the same time. Theatre (industry) is continually asking “where’s the audience?” and “why don’t people come to the theatre?” but I would respond by saying “if people don’t have access (be it fiscal, geographic, or by dint of disability) to theatre, how are they supposed to become interested in it in the first place?’ It’s like telling someone they should go to church, but never showing them what a church is or what happens inside of it. Also, what exactly is to be gained by hiding new work in analogue-only rooms in the end times, when there are so few opportunities for new work to be seen? isn’t our job one, partly, of communication?
Is theatre ONLY interested in communicating with the ‘exclusive people in the room rather than the inclusive people in the wider room of the world? When is theatre going to stick its head out of the sand and understand its not a niche art only for those that afford ‘access’? And that yes, dear Virginia, there are people that don’t live in New York, Chicago, London, Toronto, Dublin, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles and other ‘major metropolitan centers’ that love theatre but can’t just hop on a plane in the middle of an interpandemic/climate crisis to see a show? How do you educate and expose an audience to new work and what artists are doing/thinking about NOW, if all an audience sees is Shakespeare plays and Arthur Miller plays and Wicked all the time?
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In the war party in which we live in 2026, which is also the war party of wars prior, its worth considering how we paint our lives and make them count or how we waste them in order to satisfy the cruel whims of a ruling class that does not give a damn about anything but their own power. On which side will theatre be when the curtain that is no longer a staple of theatre come down?
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WAR PAINTING streams on demand, global and free and close captioned in English and Spanish, from June 1-17, 2026 from the digital stage of the Lucille Lortel Theatre. info and rsvp information at https://lortel.org/war-painting/