By Bob Hoover
Don’t you love farce? Of course you do, and City Theatre is giving you one of the most raunchy, pratfall-filled comedies ever staged in Pittsburgh.
With its awkward subtitle, POTUS opens City Theatre’s 50th season, starting with a word I can’t repeat and throws in a dozen more. The off-color words were a shock to the region’s usually polite audience until the opening-night crowd finally went with the flow – in more ways than one.
Selina Fillinger was only 28 when her play opened on Broadway two years ago, but she seems wise beyond her years. “I love farces, but they typically rely on sexist and racist tropes,” Fillinger told the New York Times.
POTUS tries to pull the rug from under the classic farce as its all-women cast slips and slides around an incompetent male president by cooperating and scheming with each other to keep the nation afloat.
Missy Moreno, Amelia Pedlow and Lara Hayhurst. (Image: Kristi Jan Hoover)
City Theatre threw its production crew all out into this production, from its clever revolving White House set decorated with paintings of politicians to its cast of energetic, pull-no-punches cast. Tami Dixon, with her “Ronald Reagan hairdo,” is the dedicated chief of staff, Harriet, who knows the most intimate details of POTUS but is exhausted from screening his stupidity and philandering.
She isn’t helped by press secretary Jean, played by first-time City performer Amelia Pedlow, a seasoned New York actress whose distracted approach to lying to the press while hiding her choice of a lover leads to sticky situations.
Referring to those situations is the character of Dusty, the president’s bimbo, a shape-shifting Lara Hayhurst who goes from wholesome Midwest farm girl with a blue tongue from a frozen drink to full-time sexpot who will happily entertain Secret Service agents – for a worthy cause, of course. She proves more than just a “woke puffball, however.”
Enter the First Lady Margaret, the regal Tamara Tunie, our region’s superstar. Margaret is more accomplished than her husband with “five nonprofits,” degrees from Stanford and Harvard, author of several books, and head of the Women’sHunt Club who enjoys watching the life drain out of some useless animal. She’s also a taekwondo expert.
Physical comedy is the heart of farce. Throw in a kid’s inner tube for Theo Allyn to squeeze into, and she practically spells farce with her amazing performance. As Stephanie, the president’s personal secretary, she takes her job too seriously until she gobbles down pills like candy and goes off her rocker draped in an American flag and not much else.
The pills are supplied by the president’s sister, Bernadette, who has just been released from her jail sentence for international drug trafficking and is still wearing her ankle monitor. Played by Missy Moreno, a busy performer here and in Chicago, her butch character has eyes for silver candlesticks and Jean.
No White House would be complete without a snooping journalist like Chris, played by the talented Saige Smith – Ophelia in Hamlet and Shanita in Skeleton Crew among several standouts – whose connections to breast pumps (a tasteless feature) limits her prying.
Stripped of her scandal-filled phone, she turns to a bust of famed suffragette Alice Paul and hurls at her attackers, only to miss by an unfortunate margin. Inspired by Richard Nixon’s “It’s not the crime, but the coverup,” the gang goes into full-time conspiracy mode.
Fillinger turns the farce construct on its head. Her female characters have made the mess, and now they try to clean it up, no patriarchy involved. But trouble approaches as members of a feminist group called MLF (I’ll let you translate the acronym) gather for a White House dinner.
Finely attuned at the beginning, Fillinger’s play loses its focus in a jumbled plot that rushes to a conclusion, probably because the actors are exhausted.
But Dusty and Stephanie have one more dance number to bring down the house. It’s called “Talk to the Pussy,” and they’renot referring to Miss Sassy, the Springfield, Ohio cat who is still purring.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
City Theatre’s production of POTUS Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive By Selina Fillinger and Directed by Meredith McDonough runs through October 13, 2024. Tickets and more info at: https://citytheatrecompany.org/play/potus-or-behind-every-great-dumbass-are-seven-women-trying-to-keep-him-alive/
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
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