‘POTUS’ carries a clown car of caricatures onto Broadway
Welcome to Curtain Call, our mostly queer take on the latest theater openings on Broadway and beyond.The Rundown:POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive tells you what it is: a farce.
But this new play boasting a megawatt cast, including Julie White, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, and Lea DeLaria, seems to have taken a swallow of the very male toxicity it pokes fun at.No Tea, No Shade:Plays written by women, directed by women, and starring women are rare — if not non-existent, making POTUS a unicorn on Broadway.But POTUS is not a high-minded beast.
Its tone is borrowed from the same zeitgeist that elected a man whose attitude towards women was to “grab ’em by the p*ssy.”Playwright Selina Fillinger (The Morning Show) appears to have sat down at her keyboard in an especially “c*nty” mood (her word, not mine) and laughed off her heartbreak by creating a pandora’s box of political parody seething with bodily fluids, failings, and functions.The plot is centered on the President of the United States — by all accounts, literally an *sshole — as seven women try to cover his absence after he is taken ill — I kid you not — by a festering abscess on his anus allegedly caused by rough anal play.
When he is accidentally rendered unconscious by a member of the press, the women are sucked into a whirlpool of their own making as they struggle to keep his potential death secret from the nation.
