POTUS
by Selina Fillinger
Directed by Susan Stroman
Sam S. Shubert Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
I’ve long since come to the conclusion that there are times when being a critic means being a chronicler of the experience rather than a deconstructive analyst. It’s all well and good to expound upon why a thing doesn’t really work; but it’s a fairly lonely POV when the audience is clearly enjoying the hell out of it. Such realities cannot be denied. In which case, the best you can do is try to understand the dichotomy.
Which brings us to the farce-comedy POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive by Selina Fillinger. A farce with an all-female cast, it takes place in the White House, starting with the President’s Chief of Staff (Julie White) and Press Secretary (Suzy Nakamura) trying to manage a fantastically sexist remark made by the (unseen) President that has gone viral…which management spirals further out of control, involving the First Lady (Vanessa Williams), the President’s unabashedly bull-lesbian sister (Lea DeLaria), a Press Corps reporter (Lilli Cooper), the President’s air-headed but sexually resourceful young mistress (Julianne Hough) and a hapless assistant (Rachel Dratch).
What are my beefs with it?
It starts loud and stays loud. Some of this may be due to the direction of Susan Stroman, but I think some of it is baked in too, given an intentional shock-value opening line of dialogue, spoken likewise in shock and exasperation.
Additionally: As farce construction goes, it misses the Swiss watch mechanics of building complications you can find in the standard literature, like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Boeing-Boeing and various/sundry by Alan Ayckbourn. (There are those who would include Noises Off, which I love, as well, but which I think claims a somewhat unique territory, for reasons that are fodder for another essay.) By contrast POTUS keeps simply escalating its chaos, never truly paying off its threads with impeccable seed-planted logic. And in denouement it just kind of forces resolutions that seem improvised. (The characters themselves are improvising, but of course that’s the magic paradox of the best farces: The characters spin madder and more desperate improvisations while the playwright has an impeccably logical Rube Goldberg construction under his complete control.)
On top of all this…a basic tenet of comedy is that there needs to be a sense of truth at the heart of it; you have to buy into the relationships and the premise and I just didn’t.
Why then does the audience genuinely love POTUS? I think because it celebrates the empowerment of women in a manner that is very much a part of the current Zeitgeist. Crazy things happen to all…but all cope. Per the subtitle, these are the behind-the-scenes women propping up the shaky world of men.
More than this, farce is a genre that often objectifies females—but in POTUS women are not objectified nor portrayed through the filter of male perception. And a cast of seven strong women are playing their characters with shameless—or should I say fearless—abandon. It’s the bracing affirmation that satisfies a hunger, and addresses a feeling that it’s overdue. And nothing wrong with that; and POTUS may even keep its place in the literature by dint of being the first such comedy to occupy that slot in this time.
So I can’t in good conscience say it nay.
I can only affix an advisory to the label.
And leave it at that.