Twenty years from now, Siri will be Kiki. Climate change will render breathing so dicey that the government will issue daily color-coded air-safety notices. Kate Middleton will be the Queen of England. And, if we can believe “Coronation,” at the Den Theatre in Wicker Park, the United States of America will still not have elected a female president. That last part — indeed, the part of the plot that the entire work hinges on — as playwright Laura Winters well knows, may need changes in less a week, after Election Day. The problem is the play, at least right now, runs through Nov. 16. Donald Trump wins, the play stays the same. Kamala Harris wins, lines and plot mechanics will need some fast adjustments. So … wondering then: Who will Winters be voting for? “My agent asked the same thing!” she said. “‘Would you vote for Trump to make your play more relevant?’ My answer is, absolutely not. I’d rather it not be relevant at all.” Winters, 32, grew up in Mount Prospect and lives in Los Angeles. She had a nice off-Broadway breakout earlier this year with her Kyra Sedgwick-led drama, “All of Me.” She chose the Chicago-based, activist-minded Refracted Theatre Company for the debut of “Coronation,” partly because she’s known Refracted’s co-founder Tova Wolff since they attended Northwestern University together. Winters wrote the play five years ago, and when work on Redacted’s production finally started last winter, President Joe Biden was still the presumptive presidential nominee for Democrats. History still seemed predictable. In fact, Winters had thought of “Coronation” as a work of science fiction. The handful of plays she’s had staged so far have been contemporary, “the kind where everyone wears jeans and T-shirts. I wanted ballgowns, suits — gas masks!” Her show “Gonzo” (inspired by the Netflix doc “Hot Girls Wanted”) was about Miami porn stars. “Emerson Loses Her ‘Miand’” was set on a beer trolly in Nashville during a bachelorette party. “All of Me” is a meet-cute romantic comedy about a disabled couple using electronic text-to-speech. She recently completed a play that was inspired by Travis and Jason Kelce. But “Coronation” — well, some plays chew off a lot. It’s three acts, told in less than two hours and covers a couple hundred years of future American history. Without giving much away: In the first act, the latest female presidential candidate (played by Chicago actress Amber Washington) has lost to a slimy male candidate. She meets up with a friend (Jodi Gage) who also wanted to be president at one time but lost the nomination to her husband. As Winters explains: “They sitting around afterwards, getting a little drunk and they start thinking: What if we had a Catherine Middleton over here? Someone to ideally represent America and stand for all, not just Democrats or Republicans? They start brainstorming. What if you can’t lobby a queen? How would she fix things? Could she just have these neutral policies that people want? What if the queen could just decide: ‘Insulin should be free!’ A queen to get people motivated in government. Cooler than a president — and here I’m kind of playing into influencer tropes. A queen with both awesome outfits and some great ideas.” Also, the Siri-like voice that plays through the house is starting to offer opinions. The second act opens a hundred years later. Siri, er… Kiki (also Gage) is no longer a voice but an unsettling prototype household robot. There’s also now an American Queen (Washington), yet no female presidents. Climate change and war have driven everyone left alive underground. “The idea to have a queen — which was earnest in act one — feels more like an act of state TV when things went terrible,” Winters said. “She’s put there to say America is still amazing.” Act three leaps ahead even further in time, to the election of the very first female president, about a century later, or roughly 500 years after the founding of the country itself. There’s also, spread across the three acts, love stories, questions of gender politics, the Founding Fathers, apocalyptic fashion, monarchy, and anxiety about artificial intelligence … Refracted — which won eight non-Equity Jeff Awards last year for Dave Harris’ “Tambo & Bones,” about a pair of Black actors trapped in a minstrel show — was founded to chew off a lot, Wolff said. “The idea was to do plays that took on an array of hot-button issues, not a single issue, then also explored at the intersection of those subjects.” But when development on “Coronation” started in January, the plot was still seen partly as “being an outlet for frustration,” said Wolff, who also directs the show. “The morning after Kamala entered the race, next day, we had conversations with dramaturg Kenya Hall about how this changes things, does it make it irrelevant — what is it saying now?” Amber Washington, Mary Tilden and Jodi Gage in "Coronation" by Refracted Theatre Company at the Den Theatre in Chicago. (Joe Mazza)Mary Tilden in "Coronation" by Refracted Theatre Company at the Den Theatre in Chicago. (Joe Mazza)Amber Washington, Dylan J. Fleming and Mary Tilden in "Coronation" by Refracted Theatre Company at the Den Theatre in Chicago. (Joe Mazza)Dylan J. Fleming and Amber Washington in "Coronation" by Refracted Theatre Company at the Den Theatre in Chicago. (Joe Mazza)Show Caption1 of 4Amber Washington, Mary Tilden and Jodi Gage in "Coronation" by Refracted Theatre Company at the Den Theatre in Chicago. (Joe Mazza)Expand Hall said the tone changed drastically as soon as Harris entered the race. “I felt there was no longer this prevailing idea that a woman could never become president because clearly, as the excitement around Kamala first took off, well, actually we have a lot of people invested in the idea of a woman as president, right? So then what is the thing people are actually disenfranchised with here? And that is the form of government. A two-party system. An electoral college. People don’t believe government can help them. “It means that ‘Coronation’ now becomes less about representation than how useful that representation actually is in practice.” And that, in a way, cut to the core of why Winters wrote the play in the first place. She was on a trip to Spain, visiting palaces and reflecting on its form of government, a constitutional monarchy. “It just kind of struck me as insane how democracy must have seemed. Not everyone got a vote for a long time but more people did than other countries. I was contrasting those palaces with the White House, which really isn’t that impressive a building comparatively, occupied by someone not even making the biggest salary in the nation. I wondered what if America created a monarchy instead? Then I realized, considering how often some families take office, we kind of have one.” If Harris wins the presidency, they decided, a few lines could change. But nothing much else may have to. America’s problems run deeper than any one leader. Wolff decided “Coronation” still says, for instance, that we are advancing the power of AI even as human women are facing fewer rights. A lot of the conversations they had led to the same conclusion: The play should have relevance beyond any election year featuring a woman candidate. As Winters said: “We thought of when Obama was elected president and people patted themselves on the back for having a post-racial country. Not even close, of course. If one woman wins the presidency, well, why is it still so difficult for women to get into these positions of power? Some people could decide we don’t need to elect another woman for another hundred years. People will find excuses not to vote for a woman. “But then, once the election happens, maybe no one’ll want to think about this subject ever again. People could feel that way. I respect that. So I am just going to keep writing and if this is the only moment, and audience, for this play, what an awesome moment.” “Coronation” runs through Nov. 16 at the Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave.; 773-697-3830 and thedentheatre.com [email protected]