Rachel Dratch, Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams star alongside Lilli Cooper, Lea DeLaria, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White in playwright Selina Fillinger’s farce about ladies and the patriarchy.
Courtesy of Paul Kolnik
An anxious power permeated the ambiance within the months and years following the election of former President Donald Trump. An absurd marketing campaign had resulted in a win, after which an much more ludicrous administration. Some Individuals have by no means been in a position to financial institution on the improbability of the inconceivable, however for others — often white, cis, liberal — the election of Trump upended actuality and compelled recalibration. If a crass, narcissistic entrepreneur could possibly be elected to the best workplace within the land, what else might occur?
It seems rather a lot. The Trump years introduced with them catastrophic legal guidelines and judicial appointments. Every day started with a recent wave of headlines that includes a solid of characters so preposterous, it appeared surreal. Selina Fillinger’s POTUS: Or Behind Each Nice Dumbass Are Seven Ladies Making an attempt to Maintain Him Alive would have been an ideal manufacturing for these years. The play, now at Shubert Theatre, is an intentional farce, a dramatic comedy that peddles in crude jokes and slapstick to light up American society’s relationship to ladies.
POTUS offers with the patriarchy and the way it capabilities even when its major beneficiaries aren’t current. However the method wherein the play approaches its topic doesn’t all the time serve the broader level. Fillinger desires to toy with the ridiculous concepts underpinning the system, however harbors an comprehensible impulse to guard her characters, to make us snigger with them as an alternative of at them. The play teases a degree of desperation and hysteria it doesn’t, finally, see by. And the manufacturing teeters considerably awkwardly between positions — skewering the patriarchy and uplifting the girlboss.
It’s the music that originally clues us into the strain. Because the viewers throughout my preview shuffled into their seats, a P!nk anthem blared from the audio system. I assumed it complicated to preempt viewers expertise with such an earnest pop tune, however chalked it as much as irony as a result of the start of the play guarantees subversion.
The theater goes darkish and the stage lights as much as reveal Julie White and Suzy Nakamura as, respectively, Harriet, the White Home chief of workers, and Jean, the press secretary, litigating the severity of the unnamed president’s newest antic. Their rhythmic and caustic dialogue instantly confirms the sharpness of Fillinger’s pen. “Cunt” is the primary phrase uttered — a deliciously abrasive begin.
It’s the phrase the president used to reference his spouse throughout a gathering earlier within the day. Technically, he mentioned “cunty,” and it was folded into an apology to reporters from main information shops and three Chinese language diplomats: “Please excuse my spouse’s absence. She’s having a cunty morning.” To make issues worse, his spouse, Margaret (Vanessa Williams), was current. She’d been there for 10 minutes; he simply didn’t see her.
The state of affairs sends the chief of workers and press secretary right into a frantic state. They've spent their careers saving the president from his misogynistic fumbles, and this newest occasion threatens to wreck a ladies’s management occasion (Feminine Fashions of Management Council, or its mordant abbreviation: FML) they organized for the night.
Performances are key in POTUS and the solid, beneath the path of Susan Stroman, exceeds expectations. They ship their traces nimbly, which retains the play agile and appropriately tense. White, along with her screeching, nervous pacing, huge eyes and gesticulating arms, enhances Nakamura’s deliberately stiff stance and staccato cadences. Their realization and brainstorming periods hit the correct mix of comical and disturbing.
Their scene cuts and the stage, superbly designed by Beowulf Boritt, rotates to a different encounter — this one between Margaret and the president’s meek secretary Stephanie (an exceptional Rachel Dratch). The 2 are verbally tussling, with Stephanie attempting and failing to maintain Margaret from getting into the president’s workplace. He’s very busy, Stephanie insists. Margaret, wearing a clear crimson swimsuit and crocs (as a result of she’s attempting to come back off “earthy”), doesn’t care. (I’d be remiss to not shout out Linda Cho’s costume design, which makes the primary girl’s foray into crocs trend one of many present’s strongest bits.)
Margaret wonders if the president is making use of tea tree oil to his anal abscess, the one he developed after an evening with one among his dalliances. Everybody suspects the mysterious mistress is Dusty (Julianne Hough), a peppy, doe-eyed lady who bursts right into a White Home rest room midway by the primary act, asserting horrible information. As if the day couldn’t get any worse, there’s now a problem with the president’s sister Bernadette (Lea DeLaria), who, by a sequence of profitable connections, will get out of jail for the day to ask her brother for a pardon. Hovering on the perimeter of that is chaos is Chris (Lilli Cooper), a journalist attempting to smell out a narrative she suspects goes deeper than the “cunty” fake pas already making headlines.
The play’s first act builds chaotically — characters roll in, the stage revolves and everyone seems to be panicking as they attempt to handle a number of crises. The stunning second proper earlier than intermission makes it straightforward to excuse among the repetitive jokes, but it surely’s tougher to train related endurance by the second half, wherein the present’s contradictions turn into extra obvious.
When the viewers takes their seats once more and the curtains rise, the shenanigans (my vagueness right here is meant to keep away from spoilers) ensue at an anticipated tempo. Up till this level, the quippy, expletive-laced dialogue elicited laughs, however now the jokes develop redundant.
Trudging towards its finish, POTUS takes an earnest flip. It stays cosmetically absurdist, however its chew is dulled. The ladies turn into extra sympathetic, transferring the comedy away from its unique intent. Is POTUS nonetheless a farce or one thing else all collectively? The playwright Michael Frayn’s ideas on the style come to thoughts: “Farce is a brutally tough type [….] In laughing at it you've got misplaced your ethical dignity, and also you don’t wish to admit it afterwards — you don’t wish to concede the ability of the individuals who have diminished you to such conduct.”
I believe that applies to programs, too. The patriarchy harms everybody and encourages undignified decision-making, however some ladies perceive that and make the most of it. It might be foolish to assume in any other case. I wished POTUS to lean into that grey space just a little extra. After all ladies turns into farces in a patriarchal system — however not all the time so innocently.
Venue: Shubert Theatre, New York
Solid: Lilli Cooper, Lea DeLaria, Rachel Dratch, Julianne Hough, Suzy Nakamura, Julie White, Vanessa Williams
Director: Susan Stroman
Playwright: Selina Fillinger
Set designer: Beowulf Boritt
Costume designer: Linda Cho
Lighting designer: Sonoyo Nishikawa
Sound designer: Jessica Paz
Hair & wig designer: Cookie Jordan
Struggle and Intimacy director: Rocio Mendez
Make up design: Kirk Cambridge-del Pesche
Casting: Taylor Williams
Offered by Seaview, 51 Leisure, Glass Half Full, Degree Ahead, Salman Al-Rashid, Runyonland Productions, Sony Music Masterorks, One Neighborhood, Jay Alix & Una Jackman, Jonathan Demar, Think about Equal Leisure, Lucas Katler, David J. Lynch, Leonid Makaron, Mark Gordin Footage, Liz Slager, Ted Snowdon, Natalie Gorman/Tish Brennan Throop, The Shubert Group, Mark Shacket