In her new play, The Pain of My Belligerence, Halley Feiffer lays bare the chaotic tRump era. Taking place on three successive presidential election days (2012, 2016 and 2020), the bluntly-titled black comedy takes the measure of an emotionally abusive relationship between New Yorker writer Cat and the obnoxious, narcissistic Guy, who has a wife and two young daughters at home. This “charmer” makes tRump himself look angelic, and as Feiffer writes him and Hamish Linklater plays him, he’s a roguish bad boy with no redeeming features except an astonishingly self-confident arrogance. Of course—as we see in the first scene, which chronicles their first date—Cat doesn’t mind his physical pushiness, foulmouthed racist and sexist remarks and sexually charged innuendos: despite feigning disgust, she ends up hungrily falling into his arms.

The second scene is set four years later, and Cat is sick and bedridden, her toxic relationship with Guy and tRump’s candidacy physically and mentally affecting her. Guy shows up bearing groceries (or, as Linklater pronounces it, “grosh-eries”) and the two continue their mind games of nasty insults and self-pitying behavior, punctuated by bouts of oral sex and—after Cat turns on the TV to see that tRump will probably win the election—full-fledged intercourse.

Four years after that, the third scene chronicles Election Day, 2020. Guy’s wife, Yuki—whom Cat had interviewed years earlier, which led to that fateful first date—and one of their daughters greet Cat at their home. Cat is there to ostensibly interview Yuki again but actually to discover what happened to Guy after he stopped visiting her. It turns out that Yuki has also been damaged by her relationship with Guy; they have passed on their emotional and physical baggage to their two daughters. Yet, in an improbably happy (or at least bittersweet) ending, Cat and Yuki become friends of a sort, and there’s a glimmer of hope for the future—whether or not tRump is reelected.

Feiffer has (as she admits in her program note) taken on a lot to fit into her play’s 75-minute running time. Cat, like the playwright herself, has Lyme disease and awful experiences and relationships with men. But such autobiographical details don’t necessarily translate into thought-provoking theater. The characters’ one-note toxicity might be truthful, but Feiffer has been unable to balance that with any crucial insights into or observations about them: just having one or another of them say something belligerent followed by the exclamation “joking!” does not count.

The play ends up as an endurance test: if you can stomach these people and their self-destructive ways, then you might get more out of it. In the end, it works best as an actors’ exercise: the onrushing back-and-forth dialogue is especially intricately worked out by Feiffer and Linklater, as are the sexual acrobatics they engage in. You applaud the performers, but not what they’re performing.

Trip Cullum directs with his usual precision and the fearless Feiffer is unafraid to present herself naked emotionally and physically, both as playwright and performer. Too bad that doesn't make The Pain of My Belligerence any less desultory.

The Pain of My Belligerence

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