POTUS: Or, behind every great dumbass are seven women trying to keep him alive
Arden Theatre Company
40 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Sept. 17, 2024
An intentionally timely Broadway hit, POTUS: Or, behind every great dumbass are seven women trying to keep him alive, has come to a Philly stage just in time to cash in on the comic currency of this year’s election cycle.
Unfortunately, the play — written during Trump’s first ascension to office and currently showing at Arden Theatre Company — misses its moment. The script fails to say anything meaningful about women, power and politics … at least overtly.
The show Tuesday night had the Arden audience giggling at loose puns and persistent potty talk. I felt resentment when I realized I was playing the role of “protester at the political convention” through my failure to muster so much as a smirk.
Here’s the story synopsis offered by Arden: “When the President unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven brilliant and beleaguered women he relies upon must risk life, liberty, and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander-in-chief out of trouble. Comic dynamo Jennifer Childs directs the Philadelphia premiere of this all-female farce – a hilarious homage to the women who keep things running and get the job done.”
From the description alone, POTUS sounds like a comic reinterpretation of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, which centers men as the script’s subject while barring their participation in the artistic project; the writer, director and cast of both plays were and are women, exclusively. Luce utilized that uniquely female-forward structure back in 1936 to aptly observe the contradictions of relationships between women working to sustain their spots in an artificial society. Selina Fillinger, author of POTUS, turns that tool into a trope by selling out her characters as one-off jokes rather than representations of real people.
I found myself wondering whether I had read the title wrong and was actually watching a conservative man’s theatrical debut titled Behind every great man are seven dumbass women.
Every character is a trickle-down stereotype, used to mine a modern political landscape littered with semantic gold. The first word of the play is “Cunt,” which loses whatever shock factor it might have held at the play’s start since the show’s remainder hinges almost exclusively as obscenity as entertainment. But whereas comedians like Danny McBride or Melissa McCarthy manage to spur inappropriate laughter by bringing the too-often true absurdity of underbelly America onto the big screen, in POTUS the closest we get to that is Kimberly Gilbert’s well-practiced impression of those comedians wasted on the unrealistically redneck role of the President’s ex-con sister in need of a prison pardon.
A reporter is constantly caught pumping her breasts with abandon around the White House. A farm girl from Iowa somehow knocked up by the president (whose character reads as a failed impersonation of Mia Goth’s sociopathic niche in the retro thriller “Pearl”) twerks for the nation during a random musical number. The president’s personal secretary spends the majority of the play enduring an unexpected hallucinogenic trip that, while on Broadway, gave viewers the chance to watch comedian Rachel Dratch run around stage wearing nothing but her underwear and an inner tube.
That paragraph alone should promise an entertaining performance. But even my friend who tagged along, expecting to be an easy target audience for the comedy while drunk on THC, was confused as to why the crowd was laughing along. None of the jokes translated to the stage because they’re stuffed into a two-hour play that lacks any level of self-awareness.
The lack of thought and nuance apparent in POTUS is cemented in the show’s overly-emotive conclusion (spoiler alert). The workaholic chief of staff — perhaps the only competent character out of the seven presidentially-connected women who make up the cast, and who is modeled directly after Hillary Clinton’s blonde, pant-suited sense of style — gets some troubling news about her career. After pledging allegiance to protecting the president from the repercussions of his own stupid whims, she ultimately discovers he’s been long planning her termination in order to prove wrong the people who believe she’s the “real brains of the White House.”
“They don’t love him,” the prison breaker sister says of her brother. “They’re just afraid of the alternative.” The question is posed: “Who is the alternative?”
“Us!” the staffers declare. They decide not to help the president, who is on the verge of fainting on a televised podium after being bloodied off-scene in a cat fight that erupted just before intermission, from falling over during his speech.
The play victimizes its characters for a cry and dumbs them down for a laugh. Never do the scripted women consider the immense power they carry on a global stage. Instead, they finally determine, with a wink, that a “cunty dawn” is coming.
Boom — the lights dim and the production is over. Until Demi Lovato music starts blaring and a bunch of red, white and blue balloons — similar to the ones released during made-for-TV, national nominating conventions — rain down from the sky while the actors take their bows.
The ending is intended for us to sympathize with this newly victimized chief of staff. But the development of the characters in the play lacks truth, lacks realism — they do have power. It’s hard to feel sorry for them on cue.
Based on the play we just saw, we would expect that new day to mean a million overqualified but brain dead women leading the country the same way as POTUS, but making an exponentially larger number of messes and mishaps on their way up. And yet somehow Fillinger’s play is supposed to symbolize the positive implications of woman power.
Jennifer Childs, the director, writes in the show’s playbill that “in traditional farces women are always secondary characters, never the center of the action. And too often they are reduced to stereotypical tropes next to the more nuanced characters. In this way, farce and the U.S. presidency have something in common.”
But she concludes that “my hope is that, whether it is this November or sometime in the very near future, we can accept a female leader, as we have accepted all our male leaders, with all their complications, foibles and awkward laughs.”
Is that all we have left to hope for in America? That women will one day get the chance to prove that they can match the mess of “man”? We’ve already proven our capability of such failure as a sex — whether as politicians or as a voting block — through our part in the rise of openly misogynistic presidential candidates like Donald Trump.
Childs’ comments make me think about how much funnier Trump’s act has become to me throughout my youth as I’ve learned to accept his cruelty as little else than an extra-explicit approach to America’s political wrestling pit. He’s the same as so many other evil politicians — but he has real pizzazz when it comes to self-presentation. I tune in to debates and nominating conventions, whereas I wouldn’t have in years past knowing that the televised shows wouldn’t deepen my understanding of shit, because Trump has, unfortunately, brought a lot of entertainment value to the same old production.
By constructing a play that sells tickets peddling slapstick shticks that would do better as Tik Toks, Fillinger is just like the women she writes: Using her smarts to master complicity in a sold-out industry instead of challenging her talent to make Broadway, or theater, great again.
