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New York’s Public Theater Stages Ivanka 2020, a Trump Family Spoof

New York’s Public Theater Stages Ivanka 2020, a Trump Family Spoof

(Bloomberg) -- Near the end of his 90-minute performance on Sunday night, Ryan Raftery, wearing a blond wig and gold sequined dress, implores his audience to vote for a Democrat. “We make sure in November that Democrats win,” he says to cheers. “Literally anyone will do.”

Raftery, whose new show—Ivanka 2020—runs at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York through March 13, has created and starred in sendups of cultural touchstones such as Martha Stewart and Calvin Klein.

Now, in a ribald, often raucous performance, he’s taking on the first family—with plenty of insult humor. “You know that obesity runs in my family,” Raftery’s Ivanka says in one exchange. “I’ve seen your father and siblings,” replies a character. “No one runs in your family.”

Raftery is on the forefront of a cultural pushback that’s been brewing in the arts community since Donald Trump won the 2016 election, often with Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner as a focus.

Most notably, there was the Dear Ivanka campaign founded by curators, artists, and art dealers, which marshaled many of New York’s cultural figures to protest what they said was the first daughter’s complicity in her father’s domestic and foreign policy. “Stand up for Planned Parenthood. Stand up for the Paris Accords,” read a post on the group’s Instagram feed. “Do literally anything.”

New York’s Public Theater Stages Ivanka 2020, a Trump Family Spoof

A year later, a Trump-inspired production of Julius Caesar drew professions of outrage from pro-Trump allies including the cast of the morning TV show Fox & Friends.

Yet another theatrical parody was the off-Broadway Trump Family Special, which opened in 2018 and has since toured the country. For that play’s opening announcement, (the real) Anthony Scaramucci gave an introduction.

Raftery’s effort, which he’s dubbed a “patriotic celebrity biomusical,” is the first to gesture at the 2020 election, though his plot is absurd enough that it could hardly be called an impassioned get-out-the-vote effort. Instead, the one-man show, which includes multiple musical numbers, video projections, and a backup band, imagines a scenario where Ivanka has fallen victim to Russian mind control.

Sprinkled throughout the (very loose) plot are a variety of songs set to music from Evita, The Little Mermaid, Anastasia, and pop acts.

Raftery fills the time between music numbers with patter, vague plot development, and bits, including a sequence where he talks about reviews of Ivanka’s recent book, Women Who Work. (He quotes the New Yorker—“A painfully oblivious book for basically no one”—as a bell dings and the words “Actual Review” blare on a screen.)

New York’s Public Theater Stages Ivanka 2020, a Trump Family Spoof

Another bit includes Ivanka being ostracized at Bergdorf Goodman. “How exactly do you know he’s psychologically disturbed?” she demands, defending her father to a crowd of hostile Upper East Side socialites. “Are you a psychologist? Oh. You are?”

These jokes might not be for everyone. But the performance, like the Trump-themed exhibitions and musicals before it, represents a political engagement that for years had largely been missing from the country’s artistic class.

“I tried to make this country great,” Raftery sings at one point, to the tune of Journey to the Past from the musical Anastasia. “But it’s too little and too late.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net

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