The Trump Card

press release: Mike Daisey’s new political performance piece, The Trump Card, will be presented as a staged reading at the Bartell Theatre on Monday, October 3, 2016 at 7:00pm.

This 80-minute play looks at how we got into our current political situation and where we go from here.  It’s profane, profound, and anything but predictable.

Produced by Jen Uphoff Gray and Colleen Madden, the play will be read by local performers Sarah Day, Dave Durbin, Brian Mani, DeShawn McKinney and Melisa Pereyra.

The Trump Card looks at the candidacy of Donald Trump through the lens of theater.  “Watching Trump’s speeches for months made it clear to me how much he was a creature of the theatre, “ Daisey wrote in the September issue of American Theatre magazine. “He gains power by being brash and saying whatever comes into his mind. The rest are all working from scripts while he is performing improv.”  Daisey has published the script for this monologue on his website and has encouraged theater companies and producers around the country to perform the piece, royalty-free, in the months leading up to Election Day.

Paper Magazine says of Daisey, “[his] skill is that he is able to talk about the historical and make it human, the personal and make it universal, so that the listener is both informed and transformed.”

“Mike Daisey threw a big shiny gauntlet on the ground for all of us, and we were excited to pick it up” says Jen Uphoff Gray, one of the evening’s producers. “By making his script available for anyone to perform he is inviting theater artists to participate in the critical conversations happening across our country right now.  We hope the Bartell will be packed on October 3rd.”

 The performance is free to all, but donations will be collected for One Wisconsin Now’s “Save Wisconsin’s Vote” project, a campaign to protect the right to vote and expand access to the polls in Wisconsin.