From Sept. 25 to 28, the word repeated across the Emerson Greene Theatre stage was, to the probable horror of the few 60 or 70-somethings scattered throughout the audience, “cunt.” Not just in its noun form either, but adjective, adverb, verb –– you name it. The Emerson College Stage’s three-day run of “POTUS, Or Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” spared not a single raunchy detail (or repetition of the c-word) from Selina Fillinger’s original play script, which ran for a limited four months on Broadway in 2022. I nearly choked from laughing so hard. I also left feeling strangely emotional.
What do you get when a fictional, unnamed male President refers to his wife having a “cunty” morning in front of the media, several international diplomats and the woman in question herself? Care to add one of the President’s sexual affairs (resulting in pregnancy) to the mix? Or his drug-dealing lesbian sister –– recently out of prison and begging for a presidential pardon — arriving unexpectedly at the White House? Or the looming endorsement deadline for a gubernatorial candidate? Or the fact that the President can’t sit down due to an unfortunate skin condition from various anal sex-capades with the mother of his unplanned child? What do you get? You’ll get “POTUS,” a farcical tour-de-force of theater that is all that, and somehow even more.
Left to clean up the President’s many messes are, as the play’s title suggests, the seven women in the Oval Office who eventually bond through the attempt to avoid international catastrophe. There’s Margaret, our croc-wearing FLOTUS; Harriet, the culturally out-of-touch Chief of Staff; Jean, the tense but soft-hearted Press Secretary; Stephanie, an anxiety-riddled Presidential Secretary; Chris, a working mother and White House reporter extraordinaire; Bernadette, the sister of POTUS and ex-girlfriend of Jean; and last but certainly not least, Dusty: a peppy, slushy-drinking, fellating farm girl and future mother to POTUS’s child out-of-wedlock.
As chaos inevitably ensued throughout the play’s 90-minute single act, I left the theater stunned by the extraordinary nuance each Emerson student actor gave to their character. There may be seven of them (and often all on stage at once), but Fillinger’s script lends itself well to individual comedic interpretation, even if the writing itself is chock-full of slapstick comedy gold. It’ll take a while to get Grace Lenore Rodgers’s performance of Stephanie out of my head; her timid character’s sudden descent into a drug-fueled mania that leaves her covered in POTUS’s blood (trust me, I’m not making this up) was hysterical. Or Sky Fortes’ rendition of FLOTUS Margaret –– who made the room stand still with her character’s powerful yet improvised speech on the White House lawn, and shake with laughter at her crocs, her shoe of choice which she appeared to bedazzle after changing into formal evening wear.
“We’ve all just shared the space so well,” said Lulu Royce, who played Jean, in a ‘Meet the Cast’ video from Emerson Stage. “And given room for all of us to make mistakes and work well together.”
“Being with an entirely non-male cast has been really awesome,” added Rodgers. “Working on a show with so much physical comedy is hard . . . it’s funny because it’s so silly, but we have to take that silliness very seriously because there’s so much storytelling and so much chaos going on that it has to be very intricately choreographed.”
Choreography indeed. “POTUS” would no doubt succeed with just its comedic dialogue, but it excels in tandem with its choreographed physicality. And, as Ella Hagg (Harriet) aptly put it, “Comedy is only funny when it speaks to a truth that is recognizable to the audience. [POTUS is] ridiculous, but it’s real. It’s so ridiculous that it can only be real life.”
While I can’t say for sure if senior staff members in the real White House have ever had to (spoiler) wheel a presumably-dead President out of sight in a trash cart, Hagg speaks a truth herself: the ridiculousness of “POTUS” is unfortunately all too relatable. Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confessed to leaving a dead bear in Central Park. Just last week, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson (R-NC) stood next to cardboard cutouts of Donald and Melania Trump during a campaign stop, devoid of the real figures because of his recent personal controversies –– including his unearthed and highly incendiary comments on a pornographic website. “POTUS” speaks truth not in its specific plotline, but through the existence of truth in farce itself.
When five-time Tony Award-winning director Susan Stroman reviewed “POTUS” on Broadway in 2022, she wrote, “We don’t know if the unseen president is Democrat or Republican, we just know he’s someone who practices his position with the same narcissism, arrogance, and abuse that we’ve come to expect from people in power.”
Watching Emerson’s take on “POTUS” rang similar bells in my mind. In the two years since “POTUS” closed on Broadway, the American political climate has only become more polarized and violently strained from one end of the spectrum to the other. However, the possibility for net positive change in politics remains. As student Sky Fortes (Margaret) said to her fellow “POTUS” castmates, “Being a Black woman and seeing how there possibly could be a Black woman in office, I think that [“POTUS”] relates in that way as well, and the audience may get a kick out of it.”
The audience certainly did. When applause erupted in the theater after one of Forte’s many fiery character monologues, it became clear that despite the chaos around them, Margaret would be a far better President than her husband. So would Press Secretary Harriet, or reporter Chris, or hell –– any of them.
“On the eve of the 2024 election, POTUS encourages first-time voters to consider what Americans have to lose, register to vote, and make their choice heard,” wrote Emerson Dramaturg Sam Evans ahead of the show’s opening. “POTUS” shines a light on intelligent but chaos-prone women in politics, challenging the notion that women in the White House can only exist as side characters. But of course, as a cathartic yet vicious farce, “POTUS” doesn’t wipe them clean of imperfections.
“It’s not that voters like the President, so much as they’re scared of the alternative,” says Bernadette in the final moments of the play. When questioned as to who or what that is, her response is pitch-perfect for the moment and yes, hilarious:
“Us.”
Contact the editors responsible for this story: Norah Catlin, Anabelle Meyers
