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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. To read more, click here.

This play is going to be huuuge! All the Way's Tony-winning scribe Robert Schenkkan quickly cranked out a Trump-era work that is receiving an off-Broadway run at New World Stages. Building the Wall begins performances on May 12 with opening night set for May 21. Pulitzer winner Schenkkan, stars Tamara Tunie and James Badge Dale and director Ari Edelson recently met the press prior to the play's off-Broadway bow. Take a look at the pics, and be sure to catch the play we're sure everybody will be talking (and tweeting!) about. The limited engagement is scheduled to run through July 9. To read more, click here.

Broadway is a bully in April, stealing attention, if not lunch money, from theater everywhere else in the city. But with the end of the bigfoot season on April 27 — the date by which productions must have opened to compete for this June’s Tony Awards — it’s once again safe for the smart, weird shows to come out and play. Aside from revivals of established masterworks, including the Sondheim-Weidman musical “Pacific Overtures,” at Classic Stage Company, and Beckett’s “Happy Days,” at Theater for a New Audience, May looks to be hospitable to a wide range of proudly oddball productions, Off Broadway and beyond. Here are five that I’m especially looking forward to on my first day as the new co-chief theater critic here at The New York Times. To read more, click here.

The presidential campaign of 2016 was not just a defining moment for award-winning playwright and University of Texas graduate Robert Schenkkan. It was a call to action. Concerned by what he saw as Donald Trump’s divisive talk on immigration — “build the wall” — and his supporters’ chorus of approval, Schenkkan wrote “Building the Wall,” an exploration of race and a bleak warning about anti-immigrant politics. “I was so alarmed, so angry, so anxious,” he said. And that was before the election. “I wrote this in late October just before the election. I was already sufficiently upset about the incendiary rhetoric of the Republican presidential candidate and already feeling the country had crossed a line,” the Austin-raised Schenkkan told the American-Statesman. “That first draft was written in a fury in a week.” To read more, click here.