OSCAR VALDES’ NEW PLAY: TRUMP AND MELANIA: PRIVATE MOMENTS
GOES OFF-BROADWAY BEFORE MIDTERMS
The American Theatre of Actors, October 28 – November 1

NEW YORK, NY — Just days before voters head to the ballot boxes, political firebrand and celebrated author, Oscar Valdes brings his most razor-sharp, incendiary theatrical reckoning yet to the heart of Manhattan.
Running for a strictly limited engagement from October 28 through November 1 at the American Theatre of Actors (314 W 54th St, 4th Floor), Trump and Melania: Private Moments shows us what security cameras and press briefings never could: the raw, transactional domestic war waged behind closed doors.

Set in July 2018, in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s widely denounced joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the play drops audiences into the private quarters where global alliances crumble and personal leverage reigns.

Did the American Commander-in-Chief capitulate to the Kremlin, or was the public spectacle a calculated smoke screen?

Valdes strips away the partisan talking points to confront a far more unnerving question: Are everyday citizens being deliberately blinded by high-octane domestic melodrama while autocratic powers redraw the map of the world?
“People are obsessed with the public circus, but the real threats unfold when the doors click shut and the cameras turn off,” says playwright Oscar Carlos Valdes. “Having spent decades evaluating criminal minds and power dynamics inside maximum-security penal institutions, I look at the political arena through an unvarnished clinical lens. This isn’t satire. It’s an autopsy of leverage, silence, complicity, and survival at the highest levels of global authority.” A Provocative Ensemble Peeling Back the Curtain of Power

Under atmospheric sound and lighting design by Giovanni Villari, the production features a fearless, high-voltage ensemble tackling history’s most polarising living figures:

Dante Jayce commands the stage as Donald Trump, portraying a leader caught in a psychological crossfire—balancing megalomania, geopolitical defiance, and the desperate instinct to protect his domestic flank.
Carol Henning stars as Melania Trump, transforming the notoriously reserved First Lady from an enigmatic bystander into an astute, razor-tongued political strategist holding catastrophic domestic collateral.
Charles Kennedy IV appears as Russian President Vladimir Putin, embodying the chilling calculation and quiet leverage that brought Western intelligence agencies to their knees.
Jedidiah Dore doubles as Chinese President Xi Jinping and an aggressive member of the White House press corps, framing the quiet ascendance of Beijing against the backdrop of Western distraction.
Sharon Zaslaw rounds out the dynamic company as Woman, serving as an unsettling chorus that cuts through institutional gaslighting and voice the public’s unspoken complicity.

About the Playwright: Oscar Carlos Valdes
Oscar Carlos Valdes is a Los Angeles-based political commentator, and dramatist whose multidisciplinary work interrogates the volatile intersection of power, deep-seated neurosis, and current affairs. Leveraging extensive clinical experience treating offenders within the California penal system, Valdes crafts narratives devoid of safe political correctness.

His recent theatrical credits include the contentious off-Broadway run of I Am Putin (originally Rebellion Quashed, Rebellion Born), which tracked Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive 2023 Wagner Group mutiny, as well as the Los Angeles staging of Castro and the Baseball Pitcher. As an author and essayist, his provocative bibliography includes Donald and Melania: 75 Days, US Korea Talks & Me Too, Letters to a Shooter, Letters to a Prisoner: The Fight for Freedom, Walk Through Your Shadows, and the forthcoming redemption novel Will You Be My Father.

Production Details & Performance Information
Title: Trump and Melania: Private Moments
Written by: Oscar Carlos Valdes
Lighting & Sound Design: Giovanni Villari
Venue: American Theatre of Actors (Beckmann Theatre / 4th Floor)
314 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019
Performance Dates: October 28 – November 1
Advisory: Contains mature themes, intense political debates, and psychological conflict. Audiences are urged to view this production before casting their midterm ballots.

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