When the metaphorical curtain rises on playwright Selina Fillinger’s “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive,” the season opener at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, two actors (Deirdre Lovejoy as Harriet, the president’s chief of staff and Kim Blanck as Jean, the press secretary) are positioned at what appears to be a carefully measured distance apart, facing downstage in equally artfully arranged, almost-frozen poses.
Harriet utters an obscene word.
Cue audience laughter.
And so it goes. As directed with perhaps too-meticulous attention to detail by Annie Tippe, the actors’ every utterance, every line, every bit of physical business, even, it seems, every facial expression, screams, “This is a farce. You must laugh.”
The audience obligingly did so on the night I saw it, often uproariously. But the whole show was so overacted and over-directed that I barely cracked a smile.
In the comedy, which was nominated for several Tonys when it appeared on Broadway last year, we never see the president himself.
Instead, we see his all-female, hysterically inept staff, which includes not only the very uptight Jean (signified by her throat-choking turtleneck) and the frazzled, ambitious Harriet (whose colleagues inexplicably make fun of her short haircut) but also his executive secretary, the nervous-Nelly Stephanie (Susan Lynskey); plus the first lady (Stephanie Pope Lofgren); Chris, a journalist who’s covertly pumping breast milk, which for some reason is supposed to be hilarious (Dominique Toney); the president’s dyky sister, just out of jail for drug dealing (Allison Guinn, who manages to make her over-the-top character truly funny); and the de rigueur squeaky-voiced, sexy blonde (Stephanie Styles), the president’s latest dalliance.
Things go haywire, as they always do in farces, with slamming doors, people vomiting, fisticuffs, flustered attempts at various, ill-advised coverups of horrendous accidents, one character (timid Stephanie) accidentally swallowing some mind-altering drugs, then ripping off her clothes and prancing around in her underwear and high heels with, for some reason, a kids’ plastic inner tube around her waist, even the squeaky-voiced blonde turning out not to be so dumb after all.
To be clear, I love a good farce. But this production is so rigidly orchestrated (despite a cast with sterling credentials) that it feels downright formulaic; missing is the suggestion of a wacky, out-of-control spontaneity that’s the hallmark of good farce.
But what of the script itself, in which the (truly awful-sounding) president’s all-female staff is presented as three nitwits? And a dithering first lady who isn’t much better? And the not-so-dumb blonde who’s a cheerful slut? And the sister who is a criminal? We’re certainly meant to cheer on the women and to boo the patriarchy, but despite a few heartfelt speeches, and a sly ending, feminism doesn’t seem worth cheering for here.
“POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” continues through Oct. 22 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley; tickets are $45–$134 at (510) 647-2949 or berkeleyrep.org/shows/potus/.