“He is a great observer of the multitudes of selves we all carry around inside ourselves, and how we experience hypocrisy and tragedy simultaneously in our lives,” she wrote in an email.

In addition to Midler, Levy plays an actor at a career crossroads, Rae portrays a rich frenemy of Ivanka Trump, while Dever is a Midwest nurse who comes to aid New Yorkers. Targets include Trump, Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and anyone wearing one of those red baseball caps.

“It was just a kind of response to the world’s collective nervous breakdown,” says Rudnick. “I wanted to show how people so need to be heard and understood.”

Rudnick, whose plays include “Jeffrey” and “I Hate Hamlet,” began the play a year ago and it was intended to be performed off-Broadway. The pandemic ended those plans but HBO thought it could make the transition to the small screen.

So Midler’s monologue is now captured by a police interrogation camera, Paulson’s became a YouTube video, Levy’s was transformed into an online therapy session and Rae’s piece shifted to a Skype call. Rudnick added the nurse’s monologue to incorporate the coronavirus.

“The monologue format was ideally suited in many ways to this kind of remote filming. You get that intensity and that focus that a monologue demands,” he says. “It ended up taking exactly the right form. And that was through no particular planning on my own. But I was very grateful for it.”

The actors performed their pieces in quarantine earlier this summer under the direction of Jay Roach, who knows a bit about political films (“Recount” and “Bombshell”) as well as funny ones (“Austin Powers” and “Meet the Parents”). Rudnick credits Roach and the actors for shaping the works, despite being spread out over the country: “We were just all of us thinking on our feet.”