FAUST 3: THE TURD COMING, OR THE FART OF THE DEAL
June 11 - 26, 2017
In the Meeting Room at Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South
New York, N.Y. 10012
About The Show:
Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal, a political satire of the Trump fiasco, portrays the ill-advised bargain between the sewer rats and their chosen king, a deceptive clown figure. Although the clown is offensive, vulgar, and evil, the people agree to sign away their future on the gamble that the clown will improve their lives, but they are shat upon instead. In sermon-like tweets, the clown king communicates his predatory intentions, based on perversions of the Beatitudes and other parts of the Gospels. The sensitive ego of the clown king leads to nuclear war and worldwide devastation.
Faust 3 adapts and mangles Goethe's Faust (Parts 1 and 2) and the Gospels in the King James translation, as well as bits of Yeats, Shakespeare, Christmas carols, Stephen Foster, John Donne, Heiner Müller, Julia Ward Howe, Abel Meeropol, and others.
CREDITS
Written by Paul David Young
Directed by Augustus Heagerty
With: Ayun Halliday, Aidan O'Shea, Regina Strayhorn and Ben Watts.
Lighting design by Kia Rogers.
Costume design by Scout Isensee.
Scenic and prop design by Jarrod Beck.
Video projections by Melissa Friedling.
Garrett Markgraf Stage Manager.
Press
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jesse Green highlights our show as a must see Trump satire in his review of the The Public Theater's new production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
"Must I also mention “Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal,” a satire of Mr. Trump performed by a company of clowns? I must.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Some of the new productions take the critiques and portrayals of [Trump] to a whole other level. Consider Paul David Young’s “Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal,” now playing at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. Mr. Young, a playwright whose work has been previously produced in New York, views Mr. Trump through the devilish lens of the Faust story, but with a darkly comic—and very scatological—twist."
THEATER IS EASY Review
by Aiden Dreskin on 6.15.17
"There are some strange and amusing moments in Faust 3. It's very intelligent and the connections it draws between Donald Trump and Mephistopheles, the demon of Faustian legend, are spot on."
"I learned quickly that this wouldn't be a conventional play, but there was a game being played and the rules hadn't been explained to me. There are a couple spontaneous shifts in tone where the direction of things seems to change, just raising more questions about exactly what I'm watching. The language throughout is poetic and visceral, and the cast really commits to relishing their degradation . . . ."
Sara Warner, Huffington Post
Downtown in the East Village, two theaters with roots in the counterculture of the 1960s are sponsoring Bad and Nasty productions. Catch Jessica Litwak in “My Heart Is In the East: An Interfaith Poetic Exploration” at LaMama ETC and Paul David Young’s “Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal,” a political satire of the Trump fiasco performed by an ensemble of four clowns at Judson Memorial Church. “Faust 3” stars Ayun Halliday, Aiden O’Shea, Regina Strayhorn and Ben Watts and is directed by Augustus Heagerty.
From: " Flag Day is Donald Trump’s 71st Birthday: Give Him the Bash He So Bigly Deserves"
HYPERALLERGIC
A Faustian Satire of Our Shitty President
by John Sherer - June 26, 2017
We do not live in a time of subtlety. If you need evidence, take a look at the news. Shaded, nuanced criticism of President Donald Trump would sound like a whisper next to a tornado. It was refreshing, then, to see a play that dispenses with elegant critique of the president in favor of a gloves-off battery. Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal combats Trump’s logorrhea of vulgarities with its own. Trump is never actually named in the script, but the title alone tells you who it’s about, and the text gives plenty of indications. It is replete with scatological jokes; the story tells of a society that makes a Faustian pact to choose a king who will supposedly better their lives, but then shits on all of his subjects. Having made this deal, the citizens are forced not only to live under the shitty reign (and rain) of this despot, but also to pretend they love it, even as the king ends the world in nuclear war. To describe this play as a scathing satire of Trump would be putting it mildly.
Between its uncompromising, blistering rage and its condemnatory rhetorical stance, the play has many echoes of Biblical prophecy. The prophets of the Bible occasionally made predictions about the future, but most of their teachings involved vituperative indictments of those in power. When their predictions came true, they were usually talking about events that were fairly clear on the horizon — a bit like prophesying climate change disasters today. These prophetic texts speak to us not because of their accurate forecasting, but because of their rhetorical use of righteous anger in order to confront injustice and restore public morality.
Faust 3 works in the same kind of prophetic capacity. It aims to make the audience mad enough to strengthen its resolve against our Hindenburg Disaster of a president. In addition to adopting the rhetorical position of Biblical prophecy, it also plays with Biblical material in clever ways. Jesus’s lines from the Gospels are articulated as ironically inverted versions that resemble Trump’s likely misinterpretations of them, such as: “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall save it, and whosoever shall lose his life is a loser and deserves it.” (For the real version, see Matthew 16:25). At other points, verses from the Bible are included almost verbatim to underscore the play’s prophetic nature: “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders … [and] they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24). Given the level of support for Trump among those who consider themselves the very elect, that sounds about right.
Biblical allusions aside, Faust 3 also playfully alludes to a wide range of material, including Shakespeare, Billie Holiday, Christmas carols, Roman history, Yeats, Donne, and of course Goethe’s Faust. With its trove of references and dizzying wordplay, it is an impressive feat of rhetoric, and ensemble members Ayun Halliday, Aidan O’Shea, Regina Strayhorn, and Ben Watts deftly deliver Paul David Young’s ambitious text at a Beckettian, breakneck pace. Together, they form a kind of Greek chorus in clown makeup. There are no discrete roles; the actors alternate between speaking and singing, and between solo and unison delivery. All the shit in the play is described verbally instead of being visualized; the text and the ensemble do a lot of work. Director Augustus Heagerty makes effective use of the ample space in Judson Memorial Church; the actors roam across the wide room and up to the balcony at key moments, adding variation to a visually spare production. Melissa Friedling’s video projections complement the script by drawing attention to important lines of text while creating a sense of looming dread.
The piece is not subtle, and that’s probably fitting. When the president of the United States of America has condoned sexual assault, has publicly said that he would date his own daughter were they not related, has boasted about the size of his penis during a debate, and has both said and tweet-spewed other horrors too numerous to name here (I won’t even go into policy), comparing him to Caligula and Nero doesn’t seem so far-fetched. A play like this would have been too heavy-handed if it were directed at any other recent president, but these days, the rules of public discourse seem to have been thrown out. Now is not the time for art to play nice.
THE FRONT ROW CENTER
Posted By Kathleen Campion on Jun 15, 2017
"The press release describes a “political satire of the Trump fiasco performed by an ensemble of four clowns,…” and these clowns are magnificent. Ayun Halliday, Aidan O’Shea, Regina Strayhorn, and Ben Watts are each original, definable, and endearingly arch.
"Clowns have their bits — she (Regina Strayhorn) sings from her toes and plays her weight for fun. He (Ben Watts) smirks, even simpers and uses his lithe physicality to shepherd the group. She(Ayun Halliday) insinuates herself with the audience — she is us then she is them. He (Aidan O’Shea) does a stagey bit, working the Irish/English accent for Old Vic authority but shows a silly side into the bargain. Add to that, they are very much an ensemble; that is, they are working parts of a single entity. Director Augustus Heagerty holds the whip and the chair credentials there.
"Here’s the thing, if you hanker for an edgy, “out there” hour in the Village this bizarre little Trumpian gag-fest (and I do mean gag) is your show!"
NEW YORK MAGAZINE "APPROVAL MATRIX"
Review: Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal
STAGEBUDDY - JUNE 24, 2017
Written by: Leanna Childers
"Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal" by Paul David Young, a satire of the Trump fiasco performed by an ensemble of four clowns, presented by Skylight Productions from June 11 to 26 at Judson Memorial Church, NYC, directed by Augustus Heagerty. Ayun Halliday. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.
If you had no information other than the title, I bet you could easily guess what Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal is about. However, it would probably be more difficult for you, as it was for me, to anticipate its brilliance. It has “turd” and “fart” in the title—it’s got to be a half-drunk, improvised parody, right? Add to that the fact that it takes place in a church gym and that the characters are actual clowns, and you’d have no idea what was coming for you. But this is experimental, Brechtian, political theater done right, with every millisecond of the hour-long performance packed with nuance and perspicacity. If you’re not prepared, as I wasn’t, it’ll likely knock you backwards like the forceful flatulence of the almighty Clown King.
The play’s description and playwright bio give the first clues to the layers of detail and sheer artistry in store. Playwright Paul David Young has a list of academic and artistic achievements taller than 725 5th Ave. His brilliance got him into, and evolved at, Yale University, Columbia Law School, and the New School for Drama. If that’s not enough, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany where he likely got to know the history and interpretations of the dark, Germanic origins of Faust, upon which this play is flawlessly built. Young was also inspired by the dark poetry of plays of Heiner Müller, particularly his Shakespearean adaptations. Young writes of Faust 3: “Müller is cavalier about punctuation, which is a special offense in German, where all nouns are capitalized. Müller often uses all caps, or, deviating in the other direction, lower case for everything…I popped on the CAPS LOCK and the play flew out of me.”
The relationship with CAPS LOCK is not the only obvious connection to America’s current Clown King (check Twitter if you’re unclear what I mean); Faust refers to various plays, stories and possibly real people all following the theme of someone trading their soul to the Devil for power, riches and the other usual fare—the titular fartful deal. In Faust 3 (parts 1 and 2 came from Goethe and both involve the character Faust making a deal with the Devil for a better life, forgetting from part 1 to part 2 how badly it went the first time), four clowns in white face represent the citizens of the United States who’ve made a deal with the Devil in electing the Clown King, you-know-who. The theme of trading one’s soul with the Devil is therefore applicable twofold, applying to a man who would do anything for power and recognition, and a population (or subsect of it) who would elect and support someone whom many others consider evil, or, at the very least, disastrously incompetent. Of course, as with most the-Devil-gets-your-soul stories, this one doesn’t end well for the Clown King’s worshippers; but, I won’t give everything away.
The characters never name Donald Trump directly, which recalls various religious laws forbidding taking a deity’s name in vain, depicting a likeness of the deity, or, specifically not saying the deity’s name aloud. The religious themes are everywhere, starting with the setting, which is absolutely on point. The performance space is in the Meeting Room of Judson Memorial Church, right across from Washington Square Park. The audience sits facing towering stained glass windows in the historical landmark church, while clown characters spend most of their time in church robes, the choir preaching, echoing and relishing the Clown King’s every word. The Clown King’s followers constantly ask him to shit on them, shit into their mouths, “the Eucharist of the chosen one.” In a way, this is who we’ve all become, even those who didn’t vote for him. We are a national audience waiting for Trump’s reactions, his tweets, and the headlines about him. We hang on every word, analyzing each ellipses and quotation mark, and he knows it. Covfefe, anyone? That is what this piece showed beautifully and ominously: we are a hungry nation feeding on his verbal diarrhea.
“Take the shit and eat,” this is my bowel, moved for you.
The text is as densely packed as the play’s description, such that this one-hour performance with no intermission could have comfortably been stretched into two hours. The clowns’ performances and the pace of the play reflect the desperation of the time they (we) are living in; as the play ramped up, they weaved precariously around each other and crowded purposefully close together, keeping one another, along with the audience, perpetually on edge. With the speed of the Internet and social media, and the amount of news that is continually packed into each 24-hour cycle, the choices for the production were just as brilliant and relevant as the text of the play itself.
The production is directed by Augustus Heagerty who perfectly interprets Young’s piece and its necessity to our moment in time. Scott Isensee dresses the white faced clowns in purple and gold robes, a hat tip, undoubtedly, to the royal presumption and crass gold preferred by our real life Clown King himself. Jarrod Beck minimally transforms the treasured church space, with ragged cloths and benches to distinguish the playing space. One moment that was lost on me was Beck’s mechanical dog, which was wheeled out mid-show as the clowns, now transformed into business casual pundits, spoke in horse-race reporting fashion. In the original stories, a dog transforms into the Devil, Mephistopheles; but, I would not have understood that moment if I hadn’t looked it up later. The design, however, absolutely fit with the found-space theme, also adding a steam-punk mechanicalness giving the air of dystopia. Kia Rogers executes sharp, ominous lighting work, drawing the audience’s eye as well as enhancing the emotional moments skillfully. Center-stage, continually behind the players, was a large television screen for which Melissa Friedling designed video projects that offered visual distortions that once again perfectly interpreted the show. There were moments where the clowns are exploding with poetic lines about getting drenched in fecal matter and on the screen a commercial machine plops out batter for some sort of gooey dessert; another moment overlaid authoritarian-style marching soldiers with what appeared to be Trump emerging and waving from a car as if in a parade.
As an audience member, and a writer, I was, honestly, most taken with the language; this was mostly to do with the eloquent crudeness of it. There were puns on four syllable words, poetry in pooping. I filled 20-pages of my pocket-sized notebook mostly with lines I didn’t want to forget. There were so many anachronistic references that they became no longer anachronistic, in the way that can only be true in the Internet age. It was a collage of references, a 15th-century poem about 21st-century turbulence—or should I say turd-ulance? There were the distorted beatitudes (“BLESSED ARE THE RICH FOR THEY DESERVE IT ALL”) and passing references like “Hate in the Time of Cholera.” For me, this reflected the patterns throughout history that have led us to where we are, as well as the continuous desperate scramble so many of us have been involved in since November in just trying to make sense of…anything.
The worst thing is that the people who could get the most out of this show won’t be able to see it, and probably wouldn’t choose to if they could. It should be taught in classrooms, if I’m honest; high-schoolers love a good poop joke, if memory serves. The play closes June 26th; but, hopefully this won’t be the last of it. It will certainly retain its precise and beautifully rendered relevance well-past the end of Trump’s presidency; or, as the clowns say, his “leader-shit.” Then, of course, there’s always a chance another Trumpian event will occur, like if he’s actually impeached but merely replaced with a puppet as the new “leader of the bowel movement.” Whatever the occasion, this was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve had in my nearly 30 years regardless of its absolute timeliness and I encourage all who can to see it, and I encourage its producers to revive it as quickly as possible. After all, “The shit has hit the fan for real,” and seems only likely to continue to do so.
FAUST 3: THE TURD COMING, OR THE FART OF THE DEAL to Satirize Trump Fiasco Onstage This June
by BWW News Desk May. 19, 2017
"Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal" by Paul David Young, a political satire of the Trump fiasco performed by an ensemble of four clowns, will have its world premiere June 11 to 26 in The Meeting Room of Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, presented by Skylight Productions. Augustus Heagerty directs.
The play presents a Faustian bargain between the populace, and their chosen king, a deceptive, Mephisophelean clown figure. Although the clown is offensive, vulgar, and evil, the people agree to sign away their future on the gamble that the clown will improve their lives. They are shat upon instead. In sermon-like tweets, the clown king communicates his predatory intentions, based on perversions of the Beatitudes ("BLESSED ARE THE RICH FOR THEY DESERVE IT ALL") and other parts of the Gospels. The sensitive ego of the clown king leads to nuclear war and worldwide devastation.
The script adapts and mangles Goethe's "Faust" (Parts 1 and 2) and the Gospels in the King James translation, as well as bits of Yeats, Shakespeare, Christmas carols, Stephen Foster, John Donne, Heiner Müller, Julia Ward Howe, Abel Meeropol, and others.
The performance will take place in the found environment of the Meeting Room, a landmarked Neo-Renaissance sanctuary designed by architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens, with the largest collection of John Lafarge staiNed Glass windows in the world. The actors will use microphones as they move about the space, speaking directly to the live audience. With demonic evangelism, they will also sing, dance, and perform tricks and mock religious rituals while celebrating the clown king. Music will include drums, melodica, recorded music (classical to pop), Christian anthems, Christmas Carols and computer-generated sound.
Faust 3: The Turd Coming, or The Fart of the Deal
"VOICE CHOICE"
Village Voice by Zac Thompson
If the onstage assassination of a Donald Trump–resembling Julius Caesar in the Public Theater’s latest Shakespeare in the Park production strikes you as overly subtle, then maybe you’d prefer this wild “satire of the Trump fiasco” by Paul David Young. An irreverent jumble of Goethe, the gospels, politics, and poop jokes, it’s the tale of a lying, self-loving, Twitter-happy clown king who promises to save the world but causes a nuclear apocalypse instead. The charlatan seizes power when the downtrodden populace makes a Faustian pact with him, selling their souls and winding up in the toilet. Young says he wrote the script in all caps, which seems fitting for our unhinged times. Augustus Heagerty’s production features a cast of four clowns in whiteface — though shouldn’t at least one of those faces be orange?
The actors/clowns are Ayun Halliday, Aiden O'Shea, Regina Strayhorn and Ben Watts. Lighting design is by Kia Rogers. Costume design is by Scout Isensee. Scenic and prop design are by Jarrod Beck. Video projections are by Melissa Friedling.
Development of Faust 3
A few years ago I translated the work of Heiner Müller, an East German playwright who died in 1995. He is unfortunately little known in the U.S., but in Germany and across Europe he is revered as one of the great dramatists of the last century. Müller is cavalier about punctuation, which is a special offense in German, where all nouns are capitalized. Müller often uses all caps, or, deviating in the other direction, lower case for everything. The plays whose translations I worked on were Müller's adaptations of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Macbeth. His brutal take on these already brutal plays left a lasting impression on me. Müller occupied a complex position in East Germany, a dissident who refused to leave. His plays expressed his particular point of view through rather radical means, both in the construction of his texts and his work as a theater director.
Before our recent election, I had already been working on a play that resembled a play by Franz Xavier Kroetz called Request Program. As I had worked further, I detected in a monologue that I was writing, an echo of Faust. This led me back to re-read Goethe's Faust and Marlowe's. As the election approached, I began to feel more and more apprehensive, and the play veered in the direction of a Vaclav Havel drama, with some sort of offstage government violence.
After the election, as with, I would say, any right-minded adult, I was shocked and depressed. I felt such a deep-seated anger that everything that I had believed in had been upended. Equality, justice, civility, peace, the commonweal, and progress had been thrown overboard. My understanding of the path of history toward enlightenment and freedom for all was shattered.
I popped on the CAPS LOCK and the play flew out of me. I knew what I was doing with Faust, which is not an easy puzzle to solve. I had in the meantime reread Goethe's Faust and other interpretations of the myth. Goethe's play/poem is a mess dramaturgically. As a whole Goethe's Faust is revered as one of the foundational works of literature for the language, as embedded in everyday German speech as Shakespeare can be in ours. But it's hard to say what it means. Goethe wrote Part 1 early in his life, and the second part at the end of his life. The parts are very different works. They share his acute ear for the music of German, though he can sometimes be so enthralled by the sound of the words that little if anything is going on otherwise. While Part 1 has a semblance of a plot and is somewhat contained in its meanderings and multiplicity of characters and scenes, Part 2 explodes with diversions and seemingly unrelated adventures.
One strong plot line in Part 1 is Faust's effort to bed a young vulnerable girl through trickery; he kills her mother and her brother in the process. I found this a less fruitful focus. The pact with the devil, however, is a common element of all Faustsand it gave me my plot orientation for Faust 3. The political dimensions of my play echo Part 2 of Goethe's Faust in which the Faust character strangely engages in the invention of paper currency and land management. I took these social explorations by Goethe into today's political landscape.
In working on the translation of Müller's Titus, I had also become very interested in how the clown figure functioned in that play and in Shakespeare's version. The tradition of the fool goes back to time immemorial, and in Shakespeare's plays it plays a significant role. The clown can speak truth to power in classic texts. As it is in Faust 3.
Another literary aspect of Faust 3 is my perversion of the Beatitudes and other parts of the Gospels. Goethe's Faust takes place in part during Easter, and of course the idea of a pact with the devil implicates theology. My Faust is wedded even more closely to the story of Jesus as told in the Bible.
The Bible is only sometimes regarded as a work of literature, but it had a profound effect on me, as I was required as a child to memorize portions of it. In fact, I won the prize for memorizing the most Bible verses. The King James translation of the Bible, though apparently inaccurate in many important respects, was drilled into my head.
In Faust 3, I reworked these scriptures to show that the unnamed "king" has perverted the teachings of Jesus Christ in everything that he does and is. In our current political climate, I am dumbfounded by so-called Christians who are able to support a man who in his being and in his actions is the very opposite of what the Gospels preach.
I also cite other bits of Shakespeare, Yeats, a couple of serious songs—"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Strange Fruit"—and some Christmas carols.
The apocalyptic view of the play is of course deeply embedded in the Gospels. I rework those portions of the scriptures in the context of our potential contemporary world nuclear war. Already the administration has rushed the world breathlessly toward war in the Korean peninsula.
Elfriede Jelinek is one of my literary heroes. Like Müller she is virtually unknown in the U.S., and her plays are rarely produced here. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004, and her work is quite frequently produced at German-language theaters. Her texts are usually a block of words, punctuated, but no characters defined. The format presents a challenge to the director, but also an opportunity for the imagination. In seeing them, one would not know that her texts take this form, because they become so animated on the stage.
My play has no defined characters, like Jelinek's work and some of Müller's. Like Müller's Shakespeare adaptations that I worked on, they are in iambic pentameter, or blank verse. I found in working on the Müller translations that my mind could start to think in this rhythm, which is quite natural to English as a language and to German as well. At Judson, the play will not be spoken as verse. The blank verse was just a way for me to write the play and form it.
Audience Reactions
What is the play like?
Apart from Müller and Jelinek, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi is an older cousin perhaps. Certainly in its multiple layers of meaning, which will be evident in the acting, Faust 3 comes out of Brecht's very entertaining plays about incredibly grim subjects. In particular, I think of his The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. In Brecht's writings on theater, he emphasizes that it is important to make the audience laugh and smile and to seduce it emotionally. Brecht liked a good song. The clowns performing Faust 3will make the audience laugh and, as Brecht hoped to do through his theater, provoke critical thought and active citizenship.
I recently had occasion to review a new translation of Karl Kraus' antiwar dramatic epic The Last Days of Mankind. Kraus, also unknown in the U.S., was a very popular satirist in print who in addition performed his own work on the stage. His Last Daysruns over 800 pages and targets all segments of Austrian society in its complicity and stupidity in fighting World War I. He often uses verbatim contemporaneous material to satirize public figures. Kraus was fearless in skewering the war effort, a highly unpopular position. He also targeted his fellow writers who wrote fictitious "battlefield" reports while safely remaining far from the front.
Faust 3 is clearly apocalyptic drama. There is a strong British tradition of Armageddon on the stage, including many fine plays by Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker, among others.
Faust 3 participates in the long literary tradition of scatology as a means of public comment, which flourished in Greek and Roman literature. In American literature, I think of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. In English literature, the Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, Chaucer, and Shakespeare come readily to mind.
I am a big fan of Charles Ludlam, who so hilariously adapted many classic texts. One of his early plays is called Turds in Hell. His plays have a campy quality obviously, but there are real emotions and facets of personal and social truth expressed in Ludlam's own inimitable, highly entertaining way.
Of things I've seen recently on bigger stages in New York, I'd liken it to Suzan-Lori Parks' The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Her text was occasionally offensive of racial norms in speech, and the action featured the actors repeatedly passing around large watermelon replicas. The decentralization of the casting is similar to my approach. It doesn't follow any kind of plot conventions and yet, at least for me, the performance left a strong lasting impression.
Trump Administration Responses to Faust 3
President Donald Trump's Tweets regarding Faust 3
(in chronological order)
March 14, 2017: "Faust 3 is a great honor!"
March 22, 2017: "I told Vladmir P. to see Faust 3 when visits me in NY!*&*!"
April 1, 2017: "I am thrilled! BUY TICKTS TO FAUST 3!!"
April 17, 2017: "Don't listen to FAKE NEWS! This is a GRATE* show about MEEEEE."
April 22, 2017: "Better than Hamilton!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!ETC."
April 29, 2017: "I'M Going to sing an excutive ordure that allL elimentary scool studnts int he UNITED STATES studie this GRATE PLAY instated of speling!!!?"
May 2, 2017: "I promised to make America shit again, and I will KEEPPmy PROMISE!!!"
May 5, 2017: "Faust 3 is Incredible!"
May 17, 2017: "They're clowns? The FBI FAILED INTELLIGENZ AS USUSUAL"
May 18, 2017: "Faust 3 is desgusting!"
May 21, 2017: "Faust 3 = BAD! + VEEEERie BAAAd!"
May 23, 2017: "Faust 3 = V. Ugly!"
May 29, 2017: "I am singing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to strat an INVESTIGTION into this TERRIBLEL!! TERRRIBBBLE! show."
June 1, 2017: "I bet Angelela MERKEL! is behind Faust 3!! Germans = BAD*-=820 Kovfefe"
Jared Kushner's Comment on Faust 3 (retranslated from the Chinese at a U.S. Visa-for-Real Estate Purchase promotional dinner in Jersey City run by a cousin):
"I did not at any time discuss Faust 3 with the Russians, except through the secret telephone we set up at the New York embassy."
Michael Flynn's Response (through his attorney):
"I assert my Fifth Amendment Rights and decline to respond to Faust 3 on the grounds that it may incriminate me."
Melania Trump's Response (through two spokespersons and a translator):
"[.]"
Donald Trump's lawyer's comments on Richard Comey's Senate testimony about Faust 3 on June 8:
"The president categorically lied, I mean, denied that he said he 'hoped' Comey would sabotage rehearsals for Faust 3."
Jeff Session's leaked written testimony on Faust 3, June 12:
"I did discuss Faust 3 with President Trump on several occasions, noted in the appendix. I was outraged by the derogatory references to slavery in Faust 3. Slavery is a proud part of my Southern heritage. The proposal to ask the Russians to wiretap the dressing rooms of Faust 3, however, came from the President. He indicated at the time that Jared Kushner was having donuts with the Russian ambassador at a secret location the following day, and he thought Kushner could get the Russians to spy for us."