New Histories, Lost Causes, and "Alternative Facts": Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play in the Age of Trump

In The America Play, a Black Lincoln look-alike reenacts the sixteenth president's assassination by asking the audience to stand in for Booth and "shoot" the president. Channeling the mass populace's fixation with death, mythmaking, and relics of popular culture, the racialized performance incorporates a temporal transcendency that freely moves between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inviting a comparison to race in the Age of Trump and a reconception of nation through iconography, "alternative facts," and presidency.