Final evening, each Rosie O’Donnell, performing her new Off Broadway solo present Frequent Information, and Donald Trump, making his first look as president on the White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation Dinner, took to their respective levels to share their ideas on, amongst many different issues, each other.
Slicing to the chase: O’Donnell was higher. A lot, a lot better.
Simply a number of hours earlier than Trump delivered his broadly panned, mean-spirited, deceitful and painfully unfunny psychological ramble in Washington D.C., O’Donnell made full and artistic use of what the president would little question name her “Trump Derangement Syndrome” with a candid and, not surprisingly, humorous account of her latest, Trump-inspired transfer to Eire and the assorted private upheavals that preceded it.
To make certain, Trump is only a small, if intriguing, a part of Frequent Information. Many of the autobiographical efficiency – O’Donnell tells us, proper in the beginning, that it’s all true – issues her household, extra particularly the mom she misplaced in childhood and her youngest adopted daughter who, the previous cohost of The View shares, is each autistic and nonbinary, two descriptors which have delivered each challenges and joys to the comic’s life.
Among the many challenges and determined non-joys in O’Donnell’s life is, after all, Donald Trump. Within the career-spanning picture and video montage that precedes the arrival onstage of the Frequent Information star – extra concerning the title in a bit – is a clip from the 2006 episode of The View when O’Donnell pushed her hair to the facet of her face and delivered a stinging imitation of Trump then within the information for giving recommendation to a Miss USA magnificence pageant contestant. “He’s the ethical authority?,” O’Donnell requested then, earlier than occurring to say Trump’s failed marriages and companies’ bankruptcies.
The View bit launched the 20-year feud that might have a profound impression on O’Donnell’s life and discover a lasting place in Trump’s mind. After O’Donnell moved to Eire in January 2025 – a relocation she says in Frequent Information was prompted in no small half by the Trump’s second election to the presidency – Trump wrote on Fact Social, “Due to the truth that Rosie O’Donnell is just not in the very best pursuits of our Nice Nation, I’m giving severe consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Risk to Humanity, and will stay within the fantastic Nation of Eire, if they need her.”
That Fact Social message was posted a 12 months in the past, however as Trump proved ultimately evening’s White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation Dinner, O’Donnell stays on the forefront of the various grievances he harbors, proper up there with late-night speak present hosts, political rivals and CNN journalists. Final evening, he sarcastically stated O’Donnell “actually wished to be right here as a way to honor me. She loves me very a lot. She was determined to return again to the USA and pay her respect to Donald J. Trump, however that didn’t work out sadly as a result of no one wished her to return again. However she’s one of many best victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome. She’s a sick younger lady. A sick older lady, I suppose now I’ve to say.”
The alleged joke bombed, greeted by the dinner attendees with silence. Not so O’Donnell’s efficiency delivered simply hours earlier than on her Off Broadway stage. Calling Trump “Mango Mussolini,” O’Donnell described her response to Trump’s citizenship risk.
“I assumed it was a joke,” she stated when she realized of the Fact Social submit. Realizing that it was, certainly, an actual submit, O’Donnell merely informed the press that the president couldn’t legally revoke her citizenship.
“I used to be praised for being calm,” O’Donnell, trying match and glamorous in a bedazzled tux-style go well with, says throughout Frequent Information. “however I wished to go [she grabs her crotch and yells) ‘Eat me, you orange fuck.’”
The retort was, at the reviewed performance, greeted with wild applause, a cathartic moment during a show that provides a fairly detailed account of Trump’s impact on O’Donnell’s life and mental health. Deeply depressed during and after the Covid pandemic isolation, worried about her young daughter’s autism, taking too much pot and going through an extended career break, O’Donnell, with the only one of her five children still at home, moved from her beloved New York City to Los Angeles, where she once again took up arts and crafts as a hobby and coping mechanism.
What the arts and crafts were not was a break from her Trump preoccupation. She began posting on social media her hand-drawn and thoroughly unflattering portrait paintings of Trump, even to the point that her concerned publicist phoned to check in. How many of these paintings had she done, her friend wanted to know. “211,” is the response.
As O’Donnell recounts the incident during Common Knowledge, many of her Trump paintings are projected onto a large screen behind her, as is her official social media response to the president’s threat, written in O’Donnell’s trademark poem style and accompanied by a photo of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein:
hey Donald – you’re rattled again?
20 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours
you call me a threat to humanity – but I’m everything you fear:
a loud woman
a queer woman
a mother sho tells the truth
you are everything that is wrong with
america – and I’m everything you hate
about what’s still right with it
you want to revoked my citizenship?
go ahead and try
king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan
i’m not yours to silence
I never was
O’Donnell in ‘Common Knowledge’
Bruce Glikas/Getty Images
While it seems clear that O’Donnell and Trump remain mentally and emotionally entangled in the feud that began decades ago, the comedian doesn’t spend overmuch time on the subject in her new solo show, and, aside from that opening montage, she devotes almost no stage time to her movies or TV credits. Looking for an insider’s take on ABC’s The View? You won’t find it here.
(Side note: O’Donnell does address her upcoming August stint as guest host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, saying she hopes to perform a song – as she previews in Common Knowledge – in which she’s written new Trump-inspired words to the Wizard of Oz‘s “If I Only Had a Brain.” Sample lyric: “All he does is cause us drama/’cos he wants to be Obama/’cos he doesn’t have a brain.” O’Donnell says she’s been told by Kimmel producers that song parodies are hard to get cleared for airing. But the show, she teases, is live, “so what the fuck.”)
What Common Knowledge focuses on are the turbulent and emotional moments of O’Donnell’s family life, both her family of origin and the one she’s created (though even there, she’s selective: No mention is made of daughter Chelsea’s drug-related legal battles). By far the most effective and moving parts of Common Knowledge are the performer’s account of the day in 1973 when, at 10 years old, she was summoned home from a neighbor’s house and told by her father that her ailing mother had died. At the time, she didn’t quite grasp the full impact of the moment, but recalls that her five-year-old brother most certainly did. Hugging her leg, the little boy tells his sister that she’ll have to be the mommy from now on.
Like The Wizard of Oz in reverse, as she describes it, the color was instantly drained from her childhood. Her grieving father temporarily relocates the family to Donegal, Ireland, which in 1973, as O’Donnell reminds us, was reeling from its very own Troubles.
The show’s Ireland interlude is intriguing, but nothing in the performance quite prepares us for O’Donnell’s loving but candid depiction of her youngest adopted child, a girl she names Dakota upon her birth in 2013. At 10 months, little Dakota is able to speak in complete sentences, as we are shown in video evidence. She’s soon quoting complete sections of the film Frozen, and at two years old Dakota is diagnosed with autism, hyperlexia (vocabulary well above typical levels) and echolalia (the uncanny ability to repeat words and lengthy phrases verbatim, often with the accents of other people).
O’Donnell recounts her own initial reactions to her daughter’s diagnoses: Concern, of course, but also a certain appreciation of the girl’s wit, astounding knack for new knowledge (she answers Jeopardy questions about the Mariana Trench with unsettling quickness) and truth-telling, even if the latter takes more than a little getting used to. When a classmate disliked by the daughter – who has announced to O’Donnell that she wants to be called Clay because she considers herself an artist – is mistakenly invited to her birthday party, the boy is bluntly informed by the birthday girl that he is not welcome and should go home.
We can’t know, of course, just how accurate O’Donnell’s onstage depiction of the real-life Clay is, but as a character the daughter steals the show. O’Donnell recounts a pivotal moment in the family’s history when young Clay says of her plush animals, “All my stuffies are nonbinary, and so am I.”
Perhaps no element of Common Knowledge is more telling about the passage of time and social mores as this moment. O’Donnell, a self-described “OG lesbian bitch,” is a bit flummoxed by the whole nonbinary thing – she happily concedes to use Clay’s preferred they/them pronouns, but more than occasionally slips with a “she” (as she does several times through the show). When Clay asks her when she knew she was a lesbian, and O’Donnell says age 10, they follow up by asking how her grade school classmates reacted to the news. O’Donnell’s dumbfounded silence at the impossible-to-grasp question speaks volumes.
If the 75-minute solo show – the title comes from Clay’s insistence that her mental collection of facts and information is merely common knowledge, or should be – can feel a bit underdeveloped (it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year), O’Donnell efficiently and effectively ties up the family tales of her life by ultimately circling back to her own mother. The comedian sees her mother’s face everywhere in the women of Ireland, and draws a crucial lesson from them all: Life, when all is said and done, is about perseverance.
Or as O’Donnell says at the end of her charming show, after all the tribulations of life and Trump , “I’m still here.”
Title: Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge
Venue: Off Broadway’s Daryl Roth Theatre
Written & Performed By: Rosie O’Donnell
Directed By: Gabriel Barre
Running Time: 1 hr 15 min (no intermission)
