AT A TECHNICAL REhearsal the week before previews were scheduled to begin, the “POTUS” cast rehearsed on the rotating set for the first time. Under a bust of the suffragist Alice Paul, Dratch, dressed in nude shapewear and a lace dickey, squirmed on the floor in an inflatable pink inner tube as DeLaria stomped around in camo pants and a T-shirt that read “SHUT UP, KAREN. Lilli Cooper, who played a White House reporter, was strapped to a portable breast pump attached to bottles that sloshed with milk; both Cooper and her character recently had a baby. As the set spun, Suzy Nakamura, who was the White House press secretary plays, across the rooms hitting her cue on the podium of the briefing room and tripped over the president’s disembodied legs, which had accidentally been left splayed on the floor. The cast burst out laughing.
“As it approaches this time of night, they get tired and hysterical,” said the director, Susan Stroman; it was 9 pm and the end of the second rehearsal of the day was approaching. “Sometimes we laugh so hard we cry and we have to stop.”
Stroman said that when she first read the piece, she was shocked to discover a farce that placed women not in secondary or tertiary roles, but in primary roles. “I couldn’t believe all these things had to take care of, and that it was really funny,” she said. Then she met the playwright, and “I couldn’t believe she’s 28,” said Stroman, a five-time Tony winner who directed and choreographed “The Producers.” ‘She’s an old soul. She carries the spirit of women who have gone before her.”
If Fillinger were to play a “POTUS” character, it would be Stephanie, the type A personal secretary who always subverts her own doubts in a demanding performance of perfectionism.
She knows that her early success means she leaves a very public trail of the emotional and intellectual state of her twenties. Early works are “time capsules of yours — sometimes in a good way,” she said. “But they also contain all your blind spots, and all your little work-in-progress moments, all your ignorance and all your youth. It’s so humbling to have yourself frozen at 22 in the world, just being read.But that has also been a gift: “I am forced not to become so precious.”
As “POTUS” approaches its opening, she is still tinkering. “I did a lot of work at the end trying to calibrate the tone,” she said. “POTUS” drives frantically to a shift among his seven wives, who begin to wonder why they work so hard in the service of male power. But how that change will shake out — and what it will cost — is somewhat open to interpretation.
Filllinger’s relationship to optimism in her work, she said, is complex.
“As a young person and woman, I am expected to express hope for people without having the luxury of expressing my anger,” she said. “But I feel like anger can also be hopeful.”