Vergette plays Jimmy Van Den Bergh, sometimes known as Dutch, who makes a living repairing cars and is very good at it, and proud of his craftsmanship, which the world doesn’t seem to value. 

He’s a good man.  He loves his wife, who, we discover late in the play, is black, and their child, though the child is biologically another man’s daughter, and that man, unlike Jimmy, went to college and did not fight in Vietnam.  

Jimmy is an ex marine. “I hated the Vietcong. I just wanted to kill as many as I could” he says in a matter of fact tone, then adds: “I need my hate.”  He stood outside a house where some of his comrades were gang-banging a young Vietnamese girl and he thought “what the hell” and started to go in, but a friend put a hand on his shoulder and told him that once embarked on that path, you were lost.  He watched the same friend sliced in two by a bomb. 

Vergette leads us, carefully and sensitively, through the life of this troubled man, and we grow to care about him, and the moment he puts on his MAGA baseball cap feels like an old friend suddenly appearing in jackboots and a swastika. But to Jimmy, it’s natural, it’s comforting. He’s tired of feeling dumb, he says.  Tired of following what the bright people know. The MAGAS hat means a country that looks after you and me. 

For Jimmy, there’s redemption, of a sort.  That’s not so for all of them.  He knows that.

For just under an hour (there is no interval) the audience in the smaller of the Park’s two theatres listened attentively to this one voice, cared about what happened to the man, and went away with an insight into what has made what is perhaps the most dangerous and terrible political movement of our time.  You can’t ask much more of a night in the theatre than that.