Keep an eye out for Alice Paul’s bust.
Do you remember Paul, the suffragist who helped vote women in 1920 and then wrote the still-unratified Equal Rights Amendment? If not, you can go to the public theater to see ‘Suffs’, the musical about Paul and her colleagues.
But in the upper town, Paul is a projectile. Or rather, in “POTUS,” the feisty and intermittently hilarious farce that opened Wednesday in the Shubert, is a plaster sculpture of her face. It’s Paul who pulls down the curtain on the first act of Selina Fillinger’s gritty feminist comedy—and with it, in a sense, patriarchy itself.
I’d give too much away to say exactly how one sculpture undoes Filllinger’s nameless and invisible president, who might remind you of someone who recently held the position in real life and still thinks he does. In any case, the piece is glad to be rid of him. The unwieldy subtitle – “Behind every great fool, seven women try to keep him alive” – makes it clear that “POTUS” is less interested in the incompetent man than in his hypercompetent enablers.
“POTUS” is basically an encyclopedia of enabling, a natural field guide to the various poses women who outsource their souls find themselves in. The classic cases are Harriet, the beleaguered chief of staff to the president, and Jean, his perpetually blinded press secretary. What Jean (Suzy Nakamura) says to Harriet (Julie White) applies to both: “You come in for him every day, you’ve done it for years. You clean up his mess, you make excuses, you do his job, and then you wake up and you do it all over again.”
On the day “POTUS” is enacted, that means trying to keep the president on track as he faces a series of public appointments, including a nuclear non-proliferation conference, a political endorsement, a photo with disabled veterans and a gala honoring the leadership of a women’s congregation with the appropriate acronym FML. At 9 o’clock, of course, he is already disastrous, after referring to the first lady on his first appearance with a word that should have been unspeakable and in any case not printable here.
While no love seems lost between the two, Margaret, the first lady, is not Melania Trump, save for the feline smugness that is the top note of Vanessa Williams’ sleek performance. Margaret has performed in spectacular fashion: a Stanford and Harvard graduate, lawyer, author, gallery owner and taekwondo practitioner. She nevertheless has to put up with and cover up her husband’s tawdry affairs, including one involving a “wake powder puff” named Dusty (Julianne Hough), who shows up at the White House and vomits “blue raz” slushies.
How Dusty empowers the president with her own spectacular feats, which include both adventurous sex play and flax-growing, I leave to Hough—who, like the play, is gleefully filthy.
In any case, Dusty introduces a new note to the proceedings, which until her arrival, in Susan Stroman’s prestissimo production, seems to be at least loosely connected with reality. You can imagine how a woman like Stephanie, the president’s secretary, who speaks five languages and has a photographic memory, is still despised as a loser in this environment because she is feeble-minded and has no Polish. The first lady calls her “a toddler in the menopause” – a description that Rachel Dratch, with her repertoire of cringe and moues, fully inhabits.
And Lilli Cooper, who wins even when she whines, makes it easy to imagine how a woman like Chris, a Time magazine journalist and recently divorced mother, could worry about her job despite her experience and expertise. . There are always, Jean warns her, younger male colleagues who “can out-tweet you, out-text you, chug a Red Bull, and work three days in a row.” While Chris, who’s on hand to interview the first lady, spends most of the game multitasking to stay afloat — coordinating with her babysitter, her ex, her editors, and her subjects as she pumps or leaks breast milk .
Still, you’d like to include her as one of the women about whom the piece, in frustration and shock, asks, “Why aren’t you president?”
Dusty doesn’t fit in, however gifted she is. Nor is the seventh character, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria), the exuberant butch and downright criminal sister of the president. The only country you could imagine her as president would be a despotic narco-state, the kind that ball-in-the-roll DeLaria suggests isn’t much different from ours.
When Dusty and Bernadette, as outside forces, are needed to forward the farce, they gnaw at its underpinnings. The point of the satire, so perfectly sharp in the initial confrontations—with White and Nakamura making a great comedy team—starts to get boring as the emphasis shifts from verbal to physical humor.
That physical humor isn’t always skillfully portrayed. (Dratch does a great job, but the fight choreography isn’t convincing.) And the turntable set (from Beowulf Boritt) that efficiently rotates the early action from room to room, like a White House Lazy Susan, seems to be spinning on act two from by itself, which indicates hysteria, but doesn’t give us much of a chance to absorb it. (The sitcom’s bright lighting is by Sonoyo Nishikawa.) As the women go from clearing men’s messes to making their own, you might feel some of the air, or maybe the milk, leaking from the comedy.
In a way, that’s a faithful expression of Fillinger’s belief, as she told Amanda Hess in The Times, that “if you take the man out of the room, the patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”
But by extending that idea to comedy, Filllinger, like a politician, tries to get it both ways. In this, her Broadway debut, the roads don’t always work together. As a farce, “POTUS” still plays by old and almost definition masculine rules; farce is built on tropes of domination and violence. On the other hand, and happier, “POTUS” allows us to experience the double bind of exceptional women without the intervention of the men who depend on their complicity. “He’s the pyromaniac, but you… gave him kindling,” Chris, the journalist, tells the others.
Or as Harriet, the chief of staff, puts it in a phrase that Alice Paul may have appreciated: “He won’t last if you stop saving him.” Perhaps the same goes for male-dominated farces.
POTUS: Or, behind every great fool are seven women trying to keep him alive
Through August 14 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; potusbway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.