The Art of Building a Bunker

Lazarus's and Verdecchia's willingness to look at the realities of our failures to connect despite racial differences make this a highly political play.The play is about permissible speech, civility, and "diversity and its discontents"; it is a piece about the city and its fault lines, though perhaps in the brave new post-truth world it has other resonances. Much of the race-based humor depends on irony and some very fine language.The tone of the play fits with today's populist political and social climate, demonstrated by incredible anger on the web, in YouTube videos with people ranting about their situations or about Obama. The protagonist in this play echoes the views of the disenfranchised who spew their anger and fear on the web. The authors genuinely wanted to ask about what is permissible in today's political climate.