\n\tTo be sure, Trump is just a small, if intriguing, part of Common Knowledge. Most of the autobiographical performance \u2013 O\u2019Donnell tells us, right at the start, that it is all true \u2013 concerns her family, more specifically the mother she lost in childhood and her youngest adopted daughter who, the former cohost of The View shares, is both autistic and nonbinary, two descriptors that have delivered both challenges and joys to the comedian\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
\n\tAmong the challenges and decided non-joys in O\u2019Donnell\u2019s life is, of course, Donald Trump. In the career-spanning photo and video montage that precedes the arrival onstage of the Common Knowledge star \u2013 more about the title in a bit \u2013 is a clip from the 2006 episode of The View when O\u2019Donnell pushed her hair to the side of her face and delivered a stinging imitation of Trump then in the news for giving advice to a Miss USA beauty pageant contestant. \u201cHe\u2019s the moral authority?,\u201d O\u2019Donnell asked then, before going on to mention Trump\u2019s failed marriages and businesses\u2019 bankruptcies. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe View bit launched the 20-year feud that would have a profound impact on O\u2019Donnell\u2019s life and find a lasting place in Trump\u2019s brain. After O\u2019Donnell moved to Ireland in January 2025 \u2013 a relocation she says in Common Knowledge was prompted in no small part by the Trump\u2019s second election to the presidency \u2013 Trump wrote on Truth Social, \u201cBecause of the fact that Rosie O\u2019Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThat Truth Social message was posted a year ago, but as Trump proved at last night\u2019s White House Correspondents\u2019 Association Dinner, O\u2019Donnell, visiting the States to meet her newborn grandchild and to perform this show, remains at the forefront of the many grievances he harbors, right up there with late-night talk show hosts, political rivals and CNN journalists. Last night, he sarcastically said O\u2019Donnell \u201creally wanted to be here in order to honor me. She loves me very much. She was desperate to come back to the United States and pay her respect to Donald J. Trump, but that didn\u2019t work out unfortunately because nobody wanted her to come back. But she\u2019s one of the greatest sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome. She\u2019s a sick young woman. A sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe alleged joke bombed, greeted by the dinner attendees with silence. Not so O\u2019Donnell\u2019s performance delivered just hours before on her Off Broadway stage. Calling Trump \u201cMango Mussolini,\u201d O\u2019Donnell described her reaction to Trump\u2019s citizenship threat.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI thought it was a joke,\u201d she said when she learned of the Truth Social post. Realizing that it was, indeed, a real post, O\u2019Donnell simply told the press that the president could not legally revoke her citizenship. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI was praised for being calm,\u201d O\u2019Donnell, looking fit and glamorous in a bedazzled tux-style suit, says during Common Knowledge. \u201cbut I wanted to go [she grabs her crotch and yells) \u2018Eat me, you orange fuck.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tThe retort was, at the reviewed performance, greeted with wild applause, a cathartic moment during a show that provides a fairly detailed account of Trump\u2019s impact on O\u2019Donnell\u2019s life and mental health. Deeply depressed during and after the Covid pandemic isolation, worried about her young daughter\u2019s autism, taking too much pot and going through an extended career break, O\u2019Donnell, 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat 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. \u201c211,\u201d is the response.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs O\u2019Donnell 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\u2019s threat, written in O\u2019Donnell\u2019s trademark poem style and accompanied by a photo of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein:<\/p>\n
\n\they Donald \u2013 you\u2019re rattled again?
20 years later and I still live rent-free in that collapsing brain of yours<\/p>\n
\n\tyou call me a threat to humanity \u2013 but I\u2019m everything you fear:
a loud woman
a queer woman
a mother sho tells the truth<\/p>\n
\n\tyou are everything that is wrong with
america \u2013 and I\u2019m everything you hate
about what\u2019s still right with it
you want to revoked my citizenship?<\/p>\n
\n\tgo ahead and try
king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan<\/p>\n
\n\ti\u2019m not yours to silence
I never was<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/deadline.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-deadline-2019\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tO\u2019Donnell in \u2018Common Knowledge\u2019<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBruce Glikas\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile it seems clear that O\u2019Donnell and Trump remain mentally and emotionally entangled in the feud that began decades ago, the comedian doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s take on ABC\u2019s The View? You won\u2019t find it here.<\/p>\n
\n\t(Side note: O\u2019Donnell does address her upcoming August stint as guest host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, saying she hopes to perform a song \u2013 as she previews in Common Knowledge \u2013 in which she\u2019s written new Trump-inspired words to the Wizard of Oz\u2018s \u201cIf I Only Had a Brain.\u201d Sample lyric: \u201cAll he does is cause us drama\/\u2019cos he wants to be Obama\/\u2019cos he doesn\u2019t have a brain.\u201d O\u2019Donnell says she\u2019s been told by Kimmel producers that song parodies are hard to get cleared for airing. But the show, she teases, is live, \u201cso what the fuck.\u201d)<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat Common Knowledge focuses on are the turbulent and emotional moments of O\u2019Donnell\u2019s family life, both her family of origin and the one she\u2019s created (though even there, she\u2019s selective: No mention is made of daughter Chelsea\u2019s drug-related legal battles). By far the most effective and moving parts of Common Knowledge are the performer\u2019s account of the day in 1973 when, at 10 years old, she was summoned home from a neighbor\u2019s house and told by her father that her ailing mother had died. At the time, she didn\u2019t 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\u2019ll have to be the mommy from now on. <\/p>\n
\n\tLike 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\u2019Donnell reminds us, was reeling from its very own Troubles. <\/p>\n
\n\tThe show\u2019s Ireland interlude is intriguing, but nothing in the performance quite prepares us for O\u2019Donnell\u2019s 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
\n\tO\u2019Donnell recounts her own initial reactions to her daughter\u2019s diagnoses: Concern, of course, but also a certain appreciation of the girl\u2019s 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 \u2013 who has announced to O\u2019Donnell that she wants to be called Clay because she considers herself an artist \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tWe can\u2019t know, of course, just how accurate O\u2019Donnell\u2019s onstage depiction of the real-life Clay is, but as a character the daughter steals the show. O\u2019Donnell recounts a pivotal moment in the family\u2019s history when young Clay says of her plush animals, \u201cAll my stuffies are nonbinary, and so am I.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPerhaps no element of Common Knowledge is more telling about the passage of time and social mores as this moment. O\u2019Donnell, a self-described \u201cOG lesbian bitch,\u201d is a bit flummoxed by the whole nonbinary thing \u2013 she happily concedes to use Clay\u2019s preferred they\/them pronouns, but more than occasionally slips with a \u201cshe\u201d (as she does several times through the show). When Clay asks her when she knew she was a lesbian, and O\u2019Donnell says age 10, they follow up by asking how her grade school classmates reacted to the news. O\u2019Donnell\u2019s dumbfounded silence at the impossible-to-grasp question speaks volumes.<\/p>\n
\n\tIf the 75-minute solo show \u2013 the title comes from Clay\u2019s insistence that her mental collection of facts and information is merely common knowledge, or should be \u2013 can feel a bit underdeveloped (it premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year), O\u2019Donnell efficiently and effectively ties up the family tales of her life by ultimately circling back to her own mother. The comedian sees her mother\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tOr as O\u2019Donnell says at the end of her charming show, after all the tribulations of life and Trump , \u201cI\u2019m still here.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tTitle: Rosie O\u2019Donnell: Common Knowledge
Venue: Off Broadway\u2019s Daryl Roth Theatre
Written & Performed By: Rosie O\u2019Donnell
Directed By: Gabriel Barre
Running Time: 1 hr 15 min (no intermission)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last night, both Rosie O\u2019Donnell, performing her new Off Broadway solo show Common Knowledge, and Donald Trump, making…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88,174987,899,5110,334136],"class_list":["post-785315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-off-broadway","tag-review","tag-rosie-odonnell","tag-rosie-odonnell-common-knowledge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}