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“An Enemy of the People” is the second play announced for the next Broadway season that seems prompted by the Trump presidency; the first was a new theatrical adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984,” which is scheduled to open in June at the Hudson Theater.

The Trump presidency is also leading to new theater work. The Pulitzer-winner Robert Schenkkan (who also wrote the Tony-winning “All the Way”) has written “Building the Wall,” responding to Mr. Trump’s restrictive immigration initiatives, that is being mounted around the country and will have an Off Broadway production at New World Stages beginning next month.

Among his opposition, President Trump likely triggers daily episodes of anger, frustration and fear. But he also sells tickets. “Building the Wall,” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan’s new political play written in response to what he calls Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and authoritarian tendencies, has become one of the best-selling shows in the 27-year history of the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, Artistic Director Stephen Sachs said. To read more, click here.

This two-hander by Robert Schenkkan, co-screenwriter of ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ and a Tony winner for his LBJ bio-drama ‘All the Way,’ offers a cautionary look at how fascism can come to define the land of the free in Trump’s America. To read more, click here.

Playwright Robert Schenkkan’s new work, “Building the Wall,” is a hot-take play that depicts what could unfold after a terror attack in Times Square encourages President Trump to declare martial law and imprison more and more immigrants and suspects until his private prison system morphs into Nazi-style death camps. It’s a metaphor for how America increasingly allows fear to overshadow public policy — and how President Trump masterfully exploits it. The play will have an off-Broadway run beginning in May. With the production nearing, I called the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer as part of a larger story on why Trump inspires artists more than other presidents, but our discussion touched on topics so vital to our democracy that I wanted to make it available. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation so blistering, so intelligent, so exciting that it could only have occurred in the New York Daily News. To read more, click here.

President Trump doesn’t want to fund the arts — but he’s certainly inspiring plenty of it. Even as the Trump administration’s first budget proposal includes not a dime for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, there’s no shortage of art aimed squarely at the 45th President. The very long list begins and ends with Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Schenkkan “hot-take” of a show, “Building the Wall,” which will mount a just-announced off-Broadway run in New York May 12 through July 9 after successful performances in Los Angeles and Denver. To read more, click here.

One of the first new plays written in direct response to the Trump era will be staged in New York this spring, following a handful of productions around the country. “Building the Wall,” by the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (“All the Way”), will be given a commercial Off Broadway production at New World Stages, beginning previews May 12 and opening May 21. To read more, click here.

How does darkness overtake a nation? The philosopher Hannah Arendt took up the subject in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which investigated the mystery of how ordinary Germans transformed into murderous Nazis. The face of evil, Arendt discovered, wasn’t a demon lurking in the cellar but the factory supervisor in the nice house across the street. Those carrying out the orders that led to the extermination of millions of Jews along with other marginalized groups became part of the bureaucracy of genocide. This startling and still controversial insight — that the Holocaust was executed not by sadists but by conformist clerks and self-interested middle managers — inspired the famous subtitle of Arendt’s book: “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“The Kentucky Cycle”) who co-wrote the screenplay for “Hacksaw Ridge,” has a new play that explores the concept of the banality of evil in our own backyard. “Building the Wall,” which opened Saturday at the Fountain Theatre, imagines the unimaginable happening in Trump’s America. To read more, click here.

It was in the midst of the presidential debates of 2016, and Robert Schenkkan was alarmed. Though both the pundits and the polls seemed to assure that Hillary Clinton would soon become the 45th president of the United States, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist felt that the rabidly racist, anti-immigrant cant that spewed from the mouth of the Republican nominee had already brought familiar if discredited ideologies, supposedly long ago settled by war and safely consigned to the past, harrowingly close to the highest office in the land. So Schenkkan, perhaps best known for The Kentucky Cycle, his epic nine-play saga of three Appalachian families’ violent and avaricious quest for the American Dream, sat down to write. One week later, he had the first draft of Building the Wall. The playwright believed that his taut political suspense drama, which fast-forwards Trump’s immigration policy of mass arrests and deportations to the incarceration of several million detainees, would be merely a dark cautionary tale of dystopian fiction, a national bullet narrowly averted. With November’s electoral upset, however, Schenkkan’s speculative chiller had suddenly taken a leap towards becoming real. To read more, click here.

How do you write a play about the Trump presidency when real events threaten to change the script seemingly daily, even hourly? In Robert Schenkkan’s case, the answer is: Get very angry and write very quickly. The National New Play Network’s rolling premiere of Schenkkan’s Building the Wall opens March 18 at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, the same day the two-character play will be published in hardback. Productions are also scheduled for Curious Theatre Company in Denver and Borderlands Theater in Tucson, Ariz. Set in 2019, Building the Wall finds a writer interviewing the supervisor of a private prison who’s been prosecuted for carrying out Trump’s federal policies surrounding immigration and deportation. American Theatre spoke to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Kentucky Cycle and All the Way. To read more, click here.

The Great Society, Robert Schenkkan’s follow-up to his enormously successful All the Way, will run between February 2 and March 18 of next year. In The Great Society, the wily, larger-than-life Lyndon B. Johnson simultaneously tries to prosecute an unpopular war and advance a historic social program while running a racially fraught nation. “[The Great Society is] impressive in its scope, surprisingly energetic and shines a bright, clear light on a pivotal moment in American history, as postwar optimism began to dim, as cracks in the polity became ever more apparent,” Charles Isherwood of the New York Times said. “I came away more impressed than I was with ‘All the Way’ — and, ultimately, more moved.” Kyle Donnelly, who direct All the Way at Arena last year, will direct this year, and Jack Willis returns as Lyndon Johnson. To read more, click here.