Lackey, a philosophy professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, says he was prompted to write the play in part as a response to the question of why so many people stand behind Donald Trump, even though they do not share his ideas. Why did Heidegger, he asks, “one of the great philosophy professors of his time, obviously not believing in the ideas of Nazism because they were too simple and stupid, nevertheless collaborate with the Nazis?” The reason, Lackey suggests, is opportunism. In philosophical terms, Lackey argues that Heidegger represents “the irrational spirit in philosophy and Arendt represents the rational.” These two currents of thought, he says, clashed in the 1930s and tragically, “the irrational defeated the rational.”

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