the barbarians
PREMIERING AT LA MAMA’S ELLEN STEWART THEATER
FEBRUARY 14-MARCH 2
CONTACT:
DAVID ELKIN // PUBLICIST
LYDIA KRUMPER // PUBLICIST
Lately, the playwright Jerry Lieblich has not been making sense. But then, sense doesn’t make much sense in a country that, in the name of defending freedom, wages wars of colonial aggression. By unhinging words from their meanings, speech from its effects, the United States has relentlessly and throughout its history made sense of violences that, though unspeakable, even unthinkable, have proven relatively easy to commit.
Lieblich’s recent plays—including Mahinerator, which premiered last year at the Tank to rave reviews, and The Barbarians, which will premiere in February 2025 at La MaMa—refuse the dictates and strictures of sense, turning instead to, in Lieblich’s words, “uncertainty, betweenness, nonsense, and illegibility as forms of resistance, ways of giving the system the slip.” Both plays have come out in the years since Lieblich came out as non-binary, and, in different ways, emerge from a lived practice of “sitting in something that doesn’t make sense,” and conceiving of “not-knowing as a productive, generative space of possibility.”
Mahinerator is a monologue in a quasi-English pseudolect about an ambitious bureaucrat who rises to prominence by creating more and more efficient machines for killing the earth. Performed by two-time Obie-winner Steve Mellor—who navigated the tongue-tangling boscage of Lieblich’s text with casual fluency and aplomb—the play examines the ethical and linguistic mechanisms of “the banalation of the evilwise.” By throwing audiences into a forest-place of semi-intelligibility, Lieblich slows down our ready habits of grasping comprehension. A little lost, unsure, not knowing how any given word will end, let alone any sentence, we take pleasure in sound, in texture, opening ourselves to a different kind of understanding—a standing under rather than a taking in and over.
Though it arrives later onstage, The Barbarians was written before Mahinerator. Lieblich wrote the first draft of this play—in which “a Witness at a trial describes to us a play in which a team of scientists attempts to use real speeches from real US Presidents to nullify the language-power of the fake US President (but also maybe the real US President) while the rest of us try to go on living lives of picturesque American normalcy, unaware that this isn’t a theater at all, it’s an aircraft carrier and we’re headed for war”—in the months before Trump’s first election. It seems apt that a play that is so much about the failures and felicities of performative speech acts should have taken eight years to arrive at its appropriate time and place.
It's worth noting that this is not a play about Trump, or not only. The writing and development of The Barbarians has spanned the Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies, and it will premiere in the early days of a second Trump administration. The play’s war-declaring Madam President Fake President is equal parts Obama and George W., Trump, Hillary, and Harris—not to mention Bill, George HW, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, FDR, Wilson, Teddy, Lincoln, McKinley, Polk, and Monroe, whose declarations and justifications of war are interwoven in this play.
The original version of the play was most rooted in George W. Bush’s America, drawing on the War on Terror as its primary model for how US presidents have used the rhetoric of national security to arrogate to themselves the powers of war. (The character Ana Coluthia—named for anacoluthon, a sentence or construction in which the expected grammatical sequence is absent—seems a particularly apt figure for Bush’s grammar of war, in which claims of a yellowcake deal proved baseless and the weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be found.)
In Trump’s America, Lieblich notes that the “shadowy, scary ‘them’ has now been placed on American soil,” with Trump referring to immigrants as “invaders,” and stoking fears about Antifa, the radical left, and trans people. “The idea being,” Lieblich says, “that there are people who live here who hate America and are trying to destroy the country from within.” Director Paul Lazar observes that “something very basic has changed” from the Bush era to the Trump era, “which is we’ve gone from disastrous international adventurism to disastrous isolationism.” The intersection of those two ideologies is “in the absolute need to define in vivid terms an Enemy. The difference is it’s the enemy abroad versus the enemy within,” though in both cases the enemy conceived as “absolute”: “There is no negotiation. There’s no compromise. It’s either we eradicate them or they’re going to eradicate us.”
The current version of The Barbarians deftly addresses this transformation. After a civilian (the aforementioned Ana Coluthia) is killed by the dropped bomb of MPFP’s first declaration of war, Madam President Fake President immediately labels her an “enemy”: “She was the enemy, and that’s why she’s dead, right?” This rhetorical move is drawn straight from the Bush and Obama military playbooks, in which people killed in targeted strikes were labeled EKIA—“enemies killed in action”—even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. In this way, the murder of any man within any theater of combat in the malleable, ever-spreading War on Terror could be considered justified.
Madam President Fake President then delivers a speech that opens with a barrage of war declarations bouncing from FDR to Wilson to Truman and culminating in Bush’s infamous 2001 speech, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” At this point, MPFP leaves behind the formal, resounding tones of earlier presidential speeches, taking up Trump’s simplistic, looping rhythms: “But you know, and this is hard for me to understand, but there are loads of people out there, loads of people, and mind you, these are not good people, they’re not the best, but there are loads of people out there who hate this country.” MPFP closes with a slightly hazy declaration of war on “these bad people,” and a smug nod to a back-pocketed Congress (“which I mean come on guys you owe me”).
Lieblich’s argument is chillingly clear: Trump’s flagrant lies and violent fearmongering are entirely consistent with the death powers accrued by previous presidents. All the tools were already in American democracy’s toolkit—the only difference is that they may now be used to dismantle American democracy itself.
At this grim turn, I should also mention that the play is wildly funny—Dr. Strangelove comes to mind, and Mac Wellman’s The Offending Gesture. Director Paul Lazar—a co-founder of Big Dance Theater as well as a prolific director and actor—has been working with Lieblich on the project since 2018. He’s found that the play requires a certain “thinness and lightness,” though characters “have to be real enough to make sure you don’t say in the first instant that you won’t engage with them.” Lieblich praised Lazar’s ability to use blocking and body position to reveal relationships and motivation, imbuing the text with the feeling that “something juicy is happening” without weighing it down with psychology. Lazar described this as partly a matter of energy: performers’ “physical energy can create character.” (And the performers’ energies are vivid and wonderfully weird, with a cast that includes downtown geniuses Steve Mellor, Jess Barbagallo, Chloe Claudel, Naren Weiss, Jennifer Ikeda, and Anne Gridley.)
“A play’s meaning,” Lieblich has written, “might be this effect on attention’s texture; how, and what, it attunes one to.” To engage with Lieblich’s plays is to become obsessed with how language works, how it works on us, and how we use it to work on others. Their ear, so rigorous and tender, so alive to what’s broken, attunes us to the high frequencies of our violations, while opening apertures onto the other worlds we might express.