I want to go into every show I see without preconceived notions, but it’s impossible to enter a theatre without baggage. Especially in a show called POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive in the current political climate.
It’s
arguable that American Politics has been farcical ever since Donald Trump descended
an escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce he was running for President on
a platform to Make America Great Again. His candidacy was absurd. But the
political class didn’t factor in that name recognition and a kind of right-wing
bravado was what enough people might want after eight years of the first Black
President.
In the nearly
ten years since that fateful descent, the United States has been spiralling and
politics in America has been impossible to satirise. Even whatever is deemed
cream-of-the-crop from Saturday Night Live that filters through
social media to the rest of the world has often just been a blunt-force replica
of whatever Trump has said that week.
Now that
Trump is back and oligarch Musk is in power, POTUS exists in a whole
different landscape than when the play debuted on Broadway in 2022. If a week is a
long time in politics, less than three years can make a play feel naïve and
dated when the world has changed so much. The West Wing was always a
liberal fantasy and now it is a relic of a time when Hollywood had to reckon
with the hick stylings of warmonger George W Bush.
Fillinger
wrote the play in response to Trump’s first term and in the light of Hilary
Clinton’s loss. The central premise – look at the mens' mess than women need to
clean up – wants to set the world on fire with its rage and hope for a future
that is female. But now that Kamala Harris has lost to Trump, the new dawn they
sing about at the end of this play just feels so hollow. By the end, I was
thinking about how these women forgive men their sins when it keeps them close
to the seat of power. Only when their own power is threatened, do they fight
back.
This is an
American comedy through and through. A lot of its laughs are based on supposedly
shocking language that would obviously cause a ruckus in the White House (and
here in Parliament House), but doesn’t necessarily work for an Australian
audience. There was a few shocked laughs when the word “cunt” is dropped at the
start of the play, but its repetition throughout suffers from diminishing
returns.
The
production by Lightning Jar Theatre, which opened at Fortyfive Downstairs last
night, is very loose. Farce needs to feel like it’s out of control, but is
actually carefully controlled. Sometimes it has everyone speaking at once, but the
audience still needs to know what’s going on. The staging of the end of act one
was so muddy and imprecise, I didn’t really understand what had happened until
the characters recapped the situation at the start of act two.
Sophie
Woodward’s set – several rows of sheer golden curtains with doorways cut out – is dynamic
and clever, evolving from the corridors of power and transforming into the wings of a stage.
Shifting the curtains in and out was dynamic and added to the sense of chaos,
but occasionally it felt fussy and in the way.
Rachel Lewindon’s
sound design is effective – dropping in sound bites from news programs as the
disasters continue to unfold, adding to the pressure the characters and the audience
feels. Even in the quiet of the office, the show wants us to overhear things to
shift our focus. And coming out of the act break, Lewindon’s soundscape is suitably
intense.
Carolyn
Bock’s Chief of Staff is striking in her ability to take control. AYA’s breast-milk-pumping
journalist spirals ever so out-of-control that it’s impressive they find a way
to escalate their shouting and the laughs. Liliana Dalton is saddled with a character
who accidentally takes psychotropic drugs (a comedy cliché that is very tired) but
isn’t shy about taking it all the way over-the-top and then some.
Candy
Bowers brings the right kind of poise to the First Lady, while answering
questions about what she as a Black Woman has done for other Black Women – and
delivers a killer speech about her love of hunting. But this piece of satire
about the effectiveness of a President’s wife now appears to be commentary
about Kamala Harris, who decided to lean Right with her own admission – “If
somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”
The press
release calls it a cross between 9 to 5 and Veep. Some of the
jokes do feel like they are from a 45-year-old film and Veep couldn’t
maintain its early edge once the 45th President took office.
This play
would have played differently six months ago. Hell, given the flurry of punitive
Executive Orders since January 20, this play would have felt different even six
weeks ago. But, for me, the script is full of such cliches – women being
criticised for mannish haircuts, lesbians loving prison, the President has sex
outside marriage, sex-positive women are compared with prostitutes – and beats
every joke with a hammer, I’m not sure when it would have gone well for me.
But there was another man in the theatre who laughed raucously every time someone said “anal play” and they said it a lot.
Early in the play, the journalist character does accuse the women around her of being enablers - "he's the pyromanic and you gave him the kindling". Fillinger knows these characters are stuck in a system, but trying to have it both ways is unconvincing. They are either the better choice to lead - as they keep telling us - or they are just as likely to rely on the privileges of power as the dumbass in charge.
POTUS was planned for Fortyfive
Downstairs long before Trump won again. It was the right time to stage the play,
given the extra fanfare of an American election season. This production is its
Australian premiere. But combining farce with satire – even in 2022 – is a
strange choice, especially with its focus on women who maintain the scaffold that
props up an awful man in a high seat of power.
They want us to think a change is coming and we already know it’s not.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
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