‘Rosie O’Donnell: Common Knowledge’ Review: Poignant New Show Takes On Trump

Last night, both Rosie O’Donnell, performing her new Off Broadway solo show Common Knowledge, and Donald Trump, making his first appearance as president at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, took to their respective stages to share their thoughts on, among many other things, one another.

Cutting to the chase: O’Donnell was better. Much, much better.

Just several hours before Trump delivered his widely panned, mean-spirited, deceitful and painfully unfunny mental ramble in Washington D.C., O’Donnell made full and creative use of what the president would no doubt call her “Trump Derangement Syndrome” with a candid and, not surprisingly, humorous account of her recent, Trump-inspired move to Ireland and the various personal upheavals that preceded it.

To be sure, Trump is just a small, if intriguing, part of Common Knowledge. Most of the autobiographical performance – O’Donnell tells us, right at the start, that it is all true – 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’s life.

Among the challenges and decided non-joys in O’Donnell’s life is, of course, Donald Trump. In the career-spanning photo and video montage that precedes the arrival onstage of the Common Knowledge star – more about the title in a bit – is a clip from the 2006 episode of The View when O’Donnell 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. “He’s the moral authority?,” O’Donnell asked then, before going on to mention Trump’s failed marriages and businesses’ bankruptcies.

The View bit launched the 20-year feud that would have a profound impact on O’Donnell’s life and find a lasting place in Trump’s brain. After O’Donnell moved to Ireland in January 2025 – a relocation she says in Common Knowledge was prompted in no small part by the Trump’s second election to the presidency – Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell 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.”

That Truth Social message was posted a year ago, but as Trump proved at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, O’Donnell 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’Donnell “really 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’t work out unfortunately because nobody wanted her to come back. But she’s one of the greatest sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome. She’s a sick young woman. A sick older woman, I guess now I have to say.”

The alleged joke bombed, greeted by the dinner attendees with silence. Not so O’Donnell’s performance delivered just hours before on her Off Broadway stage. Calling Trump “Mango Mussolini,” O’Donnell described her reaction to Trump’s citizenship threat.

“I thought it was a joke,” she said when she learned of the Truth Social post. Realizing that it was, indeed, a real post, O’Donnell simply told the press that the president could not legally revoke her citizenship.

“I was praised for being calm,” O’Donnell, looking fit and glamorous in a bedazzled tux-style suit, says during Common Knowledge. “but I wanted 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

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)