Dear Donald/Dear Hillary
(Their Secret Correspondence).

Elaine Liner’s unapologetically satirical play takes liberties, for laughs, with the biographies of famous political rivals Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. What if they’d known each other since the age of 8, assigned to be pen-pals as second-graders? In these heretofore undiscovered personal missives spanning half a century, right up until November 2020, we see their awkward friendship wax and wane in letters that borrow liberally (but not conservatively) from Trump and Clinton’s actual public dialogue.

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Originally underwritten with a grant from UNT, this two-hander was set to perform live across multiple prestigious theatre festivals until the pandemic intervened. In the interest of continuing my creative research during a time that was filled with actors seeking to practice their craft, the logical adaptation was to amend the piece into a virtual format as festivals were increasing their streaming efforts for COVID audiences. Obviously, accomplishing the actual production and filming of the piece required very strict precautions, as I had experienced with earlier streaming versions of Lucky Kirkwwod’s The Children and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. With the collaboration of a UNT-based scenic artist, sound designer, and videographer, we realized the entire project in a single day.

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Actors have been adapting and improvising as long as the craft has been in existence, and this experience offered an example of that unlike any I have ever encountered. The choice was made that the work would remain a piece of THEATRE and that it would be filmed as it would play before a live audience. As a result, the project separated itself from other festival offerings which were largely short films.

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One of the darkest pieces I have ever worked on, the play also lives in the world of biting, acerbic satire, with the angry voice of the playwright couched in broad comedy. The writer actually gives instruction in the script that the actor NOT do an impersonation of Trump (a la Saturday Night Live), so I chose, instead, to lean into the essence of the man, with just a few key nuances of speech and gesture. Based on the response to the work, I believe this made the author’s point land more clearly, as it became about the content of WHAT was being said rather than HOW it was being delivered and told the story of an astounding piece of American history that is still resonating today.