Alan Jacobs


building walls

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What we have here, in other words, is a piece of pornography written in order to stimulate the political libidos of paranoiacs who find their Twitter feeds insufficiently lascivious. Mr. Schenkkan, on the other hand, has described “Building the Wall” as “not a crazy or extreme fantasy,” which tells you everything you need to know about his point of view. It is, of course, possible to spin exciting drama out of raging paranoia, but that requires a certain amount of subtlety, not to mention intelligence, and

Terry Teachout. The play under review seems to be a textbook example of what I have called elsewhere using fantasy to build a world in which your political enemies can be just as evil as you want them to be.