Vanessa Williams and Julie White in Selina Fillinger's POTUS (photo: Paul Kolnik)

 

 

 

The subtitle of Selina Fillinger’s unbridled farce, POTUS, which just premiered on Broadway, is Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, which means that Fillinger is aware of one of the greatest political and social satires, Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove—Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

 

It’s no surprise that POTUS is nowhere near Strangelove’s level: it’s spotty and messy, even if it has moments where it’s freshly, even nastily, funny about the fractured state of our politics. Fillinger is clever enough to know that, in a comedy about a bumbling, adulterous president, he should remain offstage and the women in his personal and professional life are front and center. 

 

Fillinger’s play comprises seven women: First Lady Margaret, the president’s sister Bernadette, chief of staff Harriet, press secretary Joan, secretary Stephanie, and pregnant mistress Dusty, with journalist Chris rounding out the cast. There are jokes aplenty about what even the most accomplished women must deal with in the workplace, the fact that capable women are still under the thumb of unseen men. 

 

But if Dr. Strangelove dared to riff on nuclear annihilation in the middle of a nervous cold war in the mid ‘60s, unafraid to shock viewers while making them laugh, POTUS is more tentative in its approach. 

 

For example, Harriet brings up abortion for Dusty’s baby, but Fillinger seems content to simply bring it up and quickly move on to other matters. There’s also a lot of literal door-slamming, just as in other farces as Noises Off, Lend Me a Tenor and Boeing-Boeing, with the many White House rooms where the action takes place shrewdly finessed by the resourceful designer Beowulf Barritt’s  roundtable set, which seems to be moving constantly, especially in the even more breakneck second act.

 

Happily, the entire production is in the expert hands of veteran director Susan Stroman, who makes sure that it all doesn’t collapse under the weight of sheer dizziness and instead zip along frothily for 100 minutes. In the Tony-winning musicals The Producers and Contact—as well as in Young Frankenstein and Bullets Over Broadway—Stroman impressively shapes large casts into cohesive, consummate ensembles, which she does in POTUS as well. 

 

There’s Vanessa Williams as Margaret, elegantly funny even while wearing clunky crocsto make her seem more approachable. There’s Suzy Nakamura, amusingly exasperated as the always harried Joan. There’s Julianne Hough, whose dancing background provides the energetic physical humor of the not really bubbleheaded Dusty. 

 

Lilli Cooper’s levelheaded Chris gets the chance to set act two’s lunacy in motion by throwing a marble bust of suffragist Alice Paul. Lea Delaria and Rachel Dratch—Bernadette and Stephanie, respectively—are allowed to play to their obvious strengths, with Delaria’s butch, drug-dealing felon as exuberant a character as Dratch’s woozily inept assistant.

 

Best of all, however, is Julie White as Harriet, who must come up with a solution to every new POTUS disaster. White, one of our most naturally gifted stage comedians, always knows when to underplay and when to play to the last row of the balcony, and that expertise helps put over even Fillinger’s crudest dialogue, like the play’s very first utterance, the dreaded “c” word, reiterated in minutely modified ways. 

 

And when she screams “Get off my dick!?!” in response to Joan blurting it out to Chris (anonymously, of course), White gloriously makes POTUS into more than merely SNL-level sketch comedy.