Rick (James Badge Dale) tells his harrowing story to Gloria (Tamara Tunie) in Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall (photo by Carol Rosegg)

New World Stages
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James Badge Dale is electrifying as a prisoner in 2019 telling his story to a historian in Robert Schenkkan’s gripping, of-the-moment Building the Wall, which opened last night at New World Stages. Dale is Rick, a white convict relegated to solitary confinement and facing possible execution. His lawyer advised him not to take the stand at trial, so he has now decided to share the details of his frightening tale with Gloria (Tamara Tunie), who is considering writing a book about him. Both in their forties, Rick and Gloria are in a small prison room, a table at the center separating them. (The claustrophobic set is by Antje Ellermann.) “Why are you here?” Rick asks. Gloria responds by remembering a racist incident from her childhood, on the Fourth of July when she was six and a white police officer said something deeply offensive to her. “Was he just a, a ‘man of his time,’ like the nose on his face, his racism so much a part of him that he wasn’t even aware of it anymore? Or did he know exactly what he was doing and there was a special thrill in taking this little black child’s racial innocence?” she says. It’s a microcosm of the questions surrounding Rick’s incarceration, as well as much of what is going on in America and around the world, particularly since WWII. Rick, a native Texan whose family moved around a lot because his abusive father was in the air force, wanted to be an architect, but he quit school early and eventually joined the army because of 9/11. As he describes the next events in his life, leading up to the horrific crimes he committed, he makes it clear that every step of the way he worked hard to avoid problems, never intending for things to go so wrong. “You had a situation that got out of control, obviously. Why?” he asks rhetorically in his defense. “Chaotic conditions resulted from a lack of infrastructure, absurd overcrowding, inadequate training, poor discipline, and confusion over mission goals. . . . [The brass] tossed a lotta little people into the trash and then congratulated themselves.” But Gloria refuses to let him get off so easy, making him confront the harsh realities of what he became involved in. “I’m just trying to understand, Rick, given what happened,” Gloria says, making him go over every detail. “I’m just a guy, all right, a regular guy in extraordinary circumstances trying to do the best he can with very limited resources,” Rick responds. But there’s no defense for what ultimately occurred.

Rick (James Badge Dale) and Gloria (Tamara Tunie) explore horrific events in searing political play at New World Stages (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Pulitzer and Tony winner Schenkkan (Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates, The Kentucky Cycle), who has also been nominated for two Emmys (The Pacific) and an Oscar (Hacksaw Ridge), wrote Building the Wall in a weeklong “white hot fury” shortly before the 2016 presidential election. The play touches upon numerous hot-button issues, from race, religion, and education to the privatization of prisons, false flags, and illegal immigration, from NAFTA, NATO, and attorney general Jeff Sessions to Benghazi, Muslim terrorists, and border security. Schenkkan, whose previous play, All the Way, was about President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s efforts to pass civil rights legislation — much of which was recently gutted by a Republican Congress — does not hide that his tale is a warning of what could happen under the Trump administration if people don’t push back, but he and director Ari Edelson slowly unfurl the narrative to make it all wholly believable rather than the ranting of a liberal sore loser. “What does a writer who has often turned to history to illuminate present political crises do when he finds himself living through a turning point in history?” Schenkkan explains in the introduction to the published edition of the play. “To those who say that it could never happen here in this country, I reply, maybe not, but that of course will depend entirely on what you do.” (With that in mind, Schenkkan is widely licensing Building the Wall, realizing it has a limited shelf life and hoping it will be frequently performed all over America.) Dale (The Walk, The Pacific) is intense and affecting as Rick, a bundle of nervous energy who moves around the room like a lost soul; from the very beginning, Dale is able to elicit a critical amount of sympathy for a skinhead in an orange jumpsuit whose next stop appears to be death row. Obie winner Tunie (Familiar, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) cannot quite keep up with Dale, her delivery too static, unable to get past the expository nature of some of her dialogue, something that Dale pulls off in the meatier role. The play is reminiscent of Nicholas Wright’s similarly staged two-person A Human Being Died That Night, in which black psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela interviews convicted white torturer and assassin Eugene de Kock, who committed his crimes for South Africa’s apartheid government. The main difference, of course, is that Wright’s play is based on facts, involving real people and actual events; Schenkkan’s main goal in his latest political play is to ensure that his shocking story remains completely fictional.