WHERE ARE OUR JAMES GRAHAMS, WHEN WE NEED THEM?

You probably don’t know the name of James Graham right now, though Americans are likely to become more familiar with him in a short time. He’s an extremely prolific and extremely successful playwright from the U.K., best known here (which is to say, hardly at all) for his libretto for the failed musical Finding Neverland. Next spring his wonderful epic Ink, about the early newspaper career of Rupert Murdoch—yes, that Rupert Murdoch—will come to Broadway, and then Quiz, which deals with a real-life scandal involving a cheater on the British edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. At that point, Graham’s rep stateside should be assured.

But I’m not writing to tout Mr. Graham so much as I am hoping to point my fellow playwrights in his direction. He’s important to us, I believe, as a role model for the kind of work many of us might want to be doing.

First of all, the guy was born in 1982 and he’s already had 22—count ‘em, 22—full-length plays produced. Then again, I have several friends who are equally prolific, if not quite as often produced, and about the same age. That’s not what makes him remarkable. Stay with me on this as I tell you something about some of those plays, in the order in which I encountered them.

His second play, the first I encountered, was Eden’s Empire. This is an epic history of the prime ministership of Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill’s successor and the leader who, more than anyone, oversaw the end of British global leadership in the 20^th Century. The events are told with passion, impeccable scholarship and heightened theatricality. Yet what stays with me was the portrait of the man: ill, old before his time; passed over again and again by a legendary, egotistical mentor who refused to hand over the reins of power until Eden was too infirm to handle them. Determined to show he was just as tough as the man he replaced, he dug in his heels when Egypt moved to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956. Conniving with France to spin a fairy tale about Egypt’s having invaded Israel when the opposite was the case, he found himself and his nation embarrassed before the whole world. Truly a tragic figure.

Wow, I said to myself—such hubris in a leader, redolent of Vietnam and events thereafter (not to mention today). Where are the American playwrights doing a similar job on our history? Who’s writing an epic about the Watergate scandal? Or the New Deal, or Roosevelt’s handling of the Second World War? I looked around, couldn’t find much. This was years before Robert Schenkkan’s admirable two-play LBJ cycle, though All the Way and The Great Society haven’t been joined by very many more of their ilk in the last decade.

I decided to keep checking this Graham out, and almost immediately found a guy who is both knowledgeable about his country’s political system and eager to dramatize it for his countrymen. This House explores the workings of the House of Commons between 1974, when Labour was able to form a government under Harold Wilson, and 1979, when a no-confidence vote damaged Labour P.M. James Callaghan and led to the Conservative Thatcher era. The principals are the whips and deputy whips for the two major parties, and though they’re fictionalized they breathe with authenticity and high drama, even for one like myself who has only a passing understanding of U.K. politics.

I went back and found Tory Boyz, which wrapped sexuality around back-bench machinations. (Its hero is a gay Tory researcher who becomes obsessed with the rumored-as-gay past prime minister, Edward Heath.) And during and after reading both, I’m asking myself: Where are the plays about the inner workings of the U.S. Congress? Even if fictionalized? And what about the Supreme Court? Surely there are plays aplenty—true stories, inspired-by-true stories, and fictional stories—to be found inside that august institution. And plays more substantive, I’d hope, than First Monday in October, the Lawrence & Lee (Inherit the Wind) light comedy about a liberal Justice (based on William O. Douglas) and a female conservative colleague.

Then I heard about, and read, The Vote. Check this out: A general election was to be held on May 7, 2015, and Graham and Josie Rourke decided to create a theater event around it. It was to be staged at the Donmar Warehouse beginning April 24, running each night from 8:30 pm until 10pm, when the results would be announced. (The radio voice announcing the results at 10 pm fades out before we hear any actual news.) The Vote is set in a polling station at a primary school in the Borough of Lambeth. Four poll clerks, each with their own backstory and issues, are there to handle the crowds: three dozen various voters who wander in, vote or not, bring up their problems or not, cause a scene or not, as the clock ticks off election night. Among the alphabetical list of performers you’ll find such luminaries as Judi Dench, her daughter Finty Williams, Timothy West, Bill Paterson, and Mark Gatiss, as well as less famous but distinguished players of every age and ethnicity—a true portrait of Britain today. I read The Vote with intense interest, convinced that I was seeing a cross-section of the vox populi come in and out of that little building.

I guess you see where I’m going with all this. America has a politics as intricate, dramatic, fraught and just plain interesting as Britain’s. And what happens at our polling places and in our halls of government impacts not just our nation, but every nation on earth. Our playwrights profess outrage and commitment and resistance, and so on….but where is the political world on our stages? Where are the plays that will show our audience how this democracy runs from the inside? For that matter, where are the works that dramatize how it has worked, historically? The American political system is a massive subject practically bristling for writers to take it on. Will they? Will you?