No, this political satire isn't about Trump

Norris wrote his sprawling comic fable half a dozen years earlier, before few predicted that Donald Trump would one day occupy the White House.

“It’s not a play about him in any way,” Norris said.

Indeed, to describe Trumpett’s contemporary descendant, the bumptious head of TrumpettBank Global, the 2013 stage directions said, “Think Mitt Romney,” a Republican and former presidential nominee who is running for an open Senate seat in Utah.

“I don’t think I would be writing it now,” Norris said of “The Low Road,” which is scheduled to officially open Wednesday at the Public Theater in New York. “It’s really hard to respond to this moment dramatically because it’s so melodramatic.”

The national dialogue is too fraught, he said, and his own fears of the Trump presidency too overwhelming. “It’s not a mistake it was written in the Obama administration, which for those of us on the left, was a period of relative calm,” he said.

It’s not that “The Low Road” is divorced from contemporary events. The 2007 global financial crisis was the inspiration. But the specifics are only fleetingly referred to by the play’s 48 characters (played by 17 actors) who skip across time. And Norris, a Texas-born, Pulitzer Prize winner who was originally commissioned by the Royal Court Theater in London, wrote the script in the recession’s chastened aftermath. By the time it opened, financial regulation and consumer protections were expanding, and a second-term progressive president was labeling income inequality the “defining challenge of our time.”

“The Low Road” is set mainly in Colonial America and recounts the picaresque adventures of Jim Trewitt (formerly Trumpett), a foundling left on the doorstep of a Massachusetts brothel, and John Blanke, a slave whom he buys. Narrating the action is Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the patron saint of laissez-faire capitalists, who argued that each person’s self-interested pursuit would automatically maximize the public good. A chance encounter with a tweet-size excerpt about this beneficent “invisible hand” supplies Jim with sufficient justification for his cutthroat immorality.

“The ideology serves as a suit of armor,” Norris said, conveniently vindicating Jim’s selfishness but never challenging his privilege.

Norris took a sip of tea. Sitting next to him at a conference table on the Public’s second floor was the play’s director, Michael Greif, who can count “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Rent” among his credits. With previews, they still have time to experiment and fine-tune the action.

During the play’s two hours, 30 minutes, free market watchwords — not to mention religious piety, racism, judicial corruption and well-intentioned liberals — come in for a drubbing. But the central theme is one that runs through all the playwright’s work: humanity’s irredeemable flaws.

“I probably write the way I do because I’m disappointed,” Norris said. “I was a very optimistic child, and I had a very close relationship with my mother who promised me good things, and then, as I said in another play, she smoked herself to death. So that was a mixed message.”

“Clybourne Park,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, the Olivier Award and later the Tony, picks up where Lorraine Hansberry ended her seminal 1959 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Its subject is inescapable racism, class bias and anxiety.

Similarly, “The Low Road” trains its sights on the species’ inherent failings. The conclusion is that our greed, hypocrisy and ruthlessness will ultimately bring doom — even if there are a few laughs to be had along the way.

Human nature is both noble and ugly. Norris said his mother was intensely devoted to him and thus “was very excusing of all faults in me and very much encouraging me to cheat other children.”

Any misbehavior could be explained away. “Whenever I would do badly in school, she would tell me the teacher’s angry because I won’t date her daughter,” Norris said. “She did that out of her love for me. And we all do that to each other.”

Mrs. Trewitt, the brothel madam who adopts the abandoned baby Jim on her doorstep, has the same instincts. “Twas never my mother’s wish I should be the equal of others,” Jim says when he’s grown, “but that I should exceed them.”

As Greif points out, Mrs. Trewitt’s defense when challenged is, “I only wanted what was best for the boy.”

(Norris described his father as a Republican and born-again Christian.)

When it comes to playwriting, Norris prefers to focus on principles over particulars. Of-the-moment references can quickly become outdated, while complicated, technical details delivered from a stage are easily forgotten. “I don’t really think that’s how the information from dramatic narratives penetrate,” he said.

In rehearsal, when Chris Perfetti, who plays Jim Trewitt, asked for an explanation of his character’s financial shenanigans, Norris called over Chukwudi Iwuji, a one-time economics major at Yale who portrays John Blanke, to explain.

But all the audience really needs to know, Norris said, is there’s a con. The point is that lurking somewhere behind every fortune is a theft or an injustice. To underscore the message, the play opens with the killing of a Native American scout by a European settler.

For all the focus on timeless themes, a play that features a modern Davos-like gathering of billionaires, paeans to wealth and competition, and pointed criticisms of taxation and public assistance resonates differently today than five years ago.

Stock market exuberance and windfall tax cuts are buoying the nation’s biggest moneymakers. The political leadership in Washington has vowed to roll back regulations that hinder the free market and has revived the idea that social assistance harms the poor by perpetuating dependency.

For this production, events seem to have caught up to the play.

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said he was interested in “The Low Road” from the beginning. When he organized the first reading about 3 1/2 years ago, though, Eustis was troubled by a key scene in the second act. Norris, who can be counted on to start an argument at a party, wrote two acrimonious dinner-table debates into his play, one to anchor each of the acts.

For Eustis, the second strayed too far from the work’s central theme, and instead reveled in elbowing the likely audience of liberal theatergoers.

“I felt Bruce was changing the subject when he got to the second act,” Eustis said. “It skewered liberal pretensions, and Bruce loves to do that, but that just wasn’t the subject of his play.”

As it turned out, Norris, too, was dissatisfied with that sequence — although he was insulted to discover Eustis agreed with him. He rewrote the scene anyway, emphasizing the play’s theme of inequality, he said, rather than the question of slavery.

It was an “extraordinary change,” the director Greif said. “It becomes about replacing one form of slavery with an economic kind of slavery, which again is the most current conversation that we’re having.”

For the scene depicting a present-day economic forum, Norris updated references, mentioning Brexit and protectionist policies, but saw no need to fiddle with the punch lines.

Now 10 years after teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe, Sir Edward, a retired financier, still complains of empty rhetoric and worries about the inevitable casualties of a single-minded focus on profits.

And Jim Trewitt’s wealthy descendant still scoffs at the notion.

“I’m saying we’ve crashed the car once,” Sir Edward replies. “Do we really want to hand the keys back to the same drunken driver?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.