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While City Theatre advertises its current production, “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive,” as “bipartisan,” one wonders whether bipartisan anything is even possible these days.
Selina Fillinger’s 2022 Broadway hit, set in White House back rooms, is certainly funny. It hurls those seven women into a whirlwind set spinning (but not even vaguely controlled) by a fictional, unnamed and offstage Commander in Chief. He’s begun the morning with a nasty offhand public slur against women, and as the day wears on, a host of his other indiscretions come home to roost.
The president’s chief of staff, named Harriet (Tami Dixon), and press secretary, Jean (Amelia Pedlow), snap into spin-and-deflect mode, even as they’re variously aided and impeded by a deeply insecure presidential secretary (Theo Allyn); an imperious First Lady (Tamara Tunie); an ambitious reporter (Saige Smith); a bubbly former dance-team captain (Lara Hayhurst) who says she has a, well, special relationship with POTUS; and the president’s own ne’er-do-well sister (Missy Moreno), who’s pursuing a pardon.
Then things really get bad.
An all-out feminist farce, “POTUS” is as raunchy as it is quippy. Packed with sight gags and physical comedy, on Sunday, it seemed to please a packed opening-weekend house at City’s main stage.
City Theatre has plenty of company in rolling out this political comedy just weeks before what’s likely the most consequential presidential election in decades. At least four other regional theater companies, from Seattle to Baltimore, have opened their seasons with “POTUS,” which leans into the madness of contemporary governance without actually naming any political parties.
The City production is directed by Brooklyn-based theater veteran Meredith McDonough, who says she told her cast that she saw in Fillinger’s script echoes of earlier visions of life just outside the Oval Office.
“I was like, ‘You guys should watch ‘West Wing’ and ‘Veep,’ because this show is like a very smart mix of the two of them in terms of the crassness and the quickness that these people have with each other, while also like deeply needing each other, but not ever [talking] about needing each other,” McDonough said in a phone interview this week.
That all those people in this instance are women is no more a coincidence than are the numerous framed portraits of an all-male line-up of presidents and Founding Fathers that adorn the walls of the “POTUS” set (which of course features multiple doors for slamming or throwing open at inopportune times).
In one small way, “POTUS” actually one-ups American history by positing a female chief of staff, a position no real-life woman has ever held.
Mostly, though, it’s closer to a caricature of our own culture — if not quite as extreme as what happens when the Kens seize the reins of governance in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” then still a place where men make the messes and women never get full credit for cleaning them up, or a real chance to show how they could do it all better.
Rehearsals for City’s “POTUS” began weeks after the country’s first woman vice president, Kamala Harris, launched her campaign for President —yet another position no woman has ever held. This development — unforeseen when the troupe announced its season in March — inevitably affected the troupe’s preparations.
“Look, this is a play about a bunch of women where four times in the course of the play someone turns to another one and says, ‘Why aren't you president?,’” McDonough says she told her cast. “‘And this is the time where we have a woman up for election that has to get elected for all of us to continue to live safely in this country.’”
“This is about a group of women that, even in the craziest of circumstances, will keep 18 million plates in the air and still have a plan because that is what women in leadership do,” she adds.
While “POTUS” carefully declines to name-check any political parties, it does depict patriarchy as real, harmful and ripe for a feminist comeuppance.
“Bipartisan,” after all, doesn’t mean “apolitical.”
