LANDSLIDE VICTORY

A key moment in Steppenwolf’s triumphant new Chicago premiere production, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Great Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, features a buxom young White House aide named Stephanie (Caroline Neff) clad only in her underwear, high on THC-enriched Tums, drenched in blood, and racing around the office of the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) with an enormous, translucent, lime-green inflatable flotation donut around her ankles.  

All of this has a perfectly reasonable explanation.  You see, the President of the United States has an abscess on his anus.  That’s what the flotation donut was intended for — so the President of the United States could sit comfortably at an important diplomatic dinner.  But it’s also a visual analogue of the desperate attempts by Stephanie, the President’s personal secretary — who’s neurotically competent and dedicated when she hasn’t accidentally ingested edibles — and several other women on the White House staff to keep the sexually reprobate President afloat on what will prove to be the worst day of his career.  As far as the source of the blood and the supplier of the Tums, that’s best left for the audience to discover.  

POTUS, Selina Fillinger’s raucous and incredibly funny but deadly serious black comedy, is about abcesses — the corporeal kind, and, less explicitly stated but more importantly, the moral variety.  The President’s extra-marital, back-door sexual predilections result in not only a pregnant mistress and a throbbing ache in his fundament, but a royally pissed-off First Lady (he calls her the ‘c’ word at a press conference) and several diplomatic disasters with Bahrain, France, some elderly veterans, and a feminist organization called FML.  

Steppenwolf ensemble members Sandra Marquez and Karen Rodriguez play the putrid President’s Chief of Staff and Press Secretary, respectively.  Each, along with Stephanie (before her pharmaceutical mishap) try desperately to rescue the un-named President from his own political, PR and venereal disasters.  In this, they are sometimes aided and sometimes obstructed by a reporter played by Celeste M. Cooper, who pumps breast milk noisily and hilariously throughout the production, the President’s drug-dealing jailbird sister, Meighan Gerachis — she once had an affair with a performer from Blue Man Group and reports that she was “queefing cobalt for days” — and the President’s gangly and gravid mistress Dusty, in an indelibly funny performance by Chloe Baldwin.  

And, at the heart of this all-woman play (the President, or rather just his shoes, is only briefly glimpsed) is the FLOTUS herself, a prideful, vain, self-absorbed phony that could have been created by Moliere played in a delectably amusing performance by Karen Aldridge, whose subtle physicalizations of her complicated emotions are a joy to watch.  She is not the source of the POTUS’ sexually transmitted carbuncle, and indeed, after years of his infidelity and her own extreme self-absorption, treats his condition as no more  consequential than a sneeze, but hates and disdains him for his own disdain for her.

Despite all the hilarity, the heart of this silly-on-the-surface but deadly serious play is the clownishness, vulgarity, aggressive stupidity and brazen incompetence we have allowed to infect our real-world body politic.  Parallels with the genital-grabbing Donald Trump and his own stickily sordid affairs will be apparent to all, but Bill Clinton will come to mind too, as will a solid plurality of the other politicians, political commentators and hustlers that currently infest this slowly declining nation. 

Steppenwolf Artistic Director Audrey Francis does an exceptionally impressive job of choreographing the frenetic action, which requires the impeccable timing of a classic stage farce.  (Though certainly farcical, POTUS isn’t actually a farce per se, as there are none of the usual romantic and sexual entanglements, coincidences and near-misses, only desperate attempts to cover up depravity and stupidity.)  One of the most interesting elements of POTUS’ staging — scenic design is by Regina Garcia — is a slowly rotating turntable that allows the Chief of Staff and Press Secretary to do a wry parody of those dialogue-heavy “walk and talk” scenes that fans of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing will remember fondly.  The costume design, by Raquel Adorno, is impressively on point too. 

This is one of the funniest plays I have seen in aeons.  There is hardly a line of dialogue or a bit of physical business that does not evoke helpless hilarity in the audience.  Much of this dialogue is vulgar.  The dialogue that isn’t merely vulgar is, instead, extremely vulgar.  References to orifices abound, to the degree that the Oval Office itself comes to be seen as not the seat of American power and moral authority, but rather a seat of soreness and end-of-empire depravity. 

Way back in an ancient era called 1960, the great American novelist Philip Roth said in a speech that “the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

That was a long time ago, when American reality was in many ways less sickening and stupefying than it is today.  But Selina Fillinger has taken up the challenge fearlessly and rammed America’s hypocrisy and moral degradation right up its Oval Office.  For any theatre goer who isn’t disturbed by frequent vulgarity — and perhaps more to the point, for any theatre goer who is — this play is not to be missed.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented October 26 – December 10 by Steppenwolf Theatre at 1650 N. Halsted

Tickets are available at Steppenwolf.org and at the Steppenwolf box office.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com