Benjamin Barlow
Cast members of "POTUS: Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive."
Cassie Carney, left, as press secretary, Julia Houck as a presidential sibling and Abigail Hindle as a love interest in Strollers Theatre's production of 'POTUS: Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive.'
Opening the same evening that a New York jury found a former president guilty on 34 felony counts, Strollers Theatre’s POTUS offered hilarious, feminist catharsis to those frustrated with incompetent men in power.
The full title of the play is POTUS: Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, and it features an all-woman cast. Though the plot revolves around the antics of an unnamed president of the United States (POTUS), he never makes an appearance (except for a foot). Instead, the seven women closest to him — including his chief of staff, press secretary, wife and mistress — take increasingly drastic measures to smooth over public relations snafus, salvage negotiations for a nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and deal with an “oozing pustule on his anus,” allegedly the result of POTUS’s extramarital “ass play.”
The play is fast-paced, chaotic (in a good way), and irreverent. There is no shortage of profanity, sex jokes, or drug-induced mania, all in service of a hilarious story that reminds viewers (who likely don’t need reminding) that competence and smarts are not pre-requisites for being elected president. In a recurring line that drives home the show’s themes, one woman asks another, “Why aren’t you president?” and receives the answer, “That’s the eternal question, isn’t it?”
The acting is phenomenal and dynamic, and each character rises above any stereotypes you might expect them to fall into in a farce. Laura McMillan particularly stuns as the first lady, a sophisticated and highly educated woman who has founded countless nonprofits but continuously attempts to come across as “earthy” to boost her public approval. Stephanie Monday commands the stage as a forceful chief of staff, who’s been running the country for years, in part by becoming very good at forging the president’s signature. Anyone who’s ever been overworked and undervalued, especially women, will see themselves in any number of the characters on stage.
Julia Houck both directs and performs in the show, playing POTUS’s sister Bernadette, an “international drug mule” out of prison wearing an ankle monitor who appears to be supplying half the cabinet with cocaine and LSD. Houck says in her director’s note that she’s been waiting for equal representation for women since 1975, when she first got her hands on a copy of Ms. magazine. “Through Shirley Chisholm’s bid for president, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro for vice president, four years of graduate school in feminist theory and theater, Hillary’s bid for president and the resulting catastrophe, I waited impatiently,” Houck writes.
That impatience with women’s underrepresentation in a country that seems to reward male ineptitude shines through in every scene — but in a way that lets audiences laugh instead of rip their hair out. The ending of the show is a little confusing — without introducing a spoiler into this review I’ll just say that the conclusion doesn’t seem fully earned, given the hopeless chaos that precedes it. But ultimately, POTUS provides a hilarious release from the presidential election tension that will only keep building as November 2024 inches closer.
Performances run at the Bartell Theatre through June 15 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays (except 2 p.m. on June 15) and Sundays at 2 p.m.
