POTUS on Broadway: An Unconvincing Attempt at Feminism

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how America needs a new political satire — one based on national politics, that entertains by capturing the real nuances of how our leaders operate. Britain’s Yes Minister serves as an exemplar. It would be good civic education, besides being lucrative.

I recently came across an attempt at this ideal. One evening, while strolling in Midtown Manhattan, I passed the famous Shubert Theatre. Pasted all across its windows and walls were ads for POTUS, a new comedy. It was five minutes before the show was set to begin at 8:00 p.m. With great luck, I was able to purchase an orchestra-level seat for $99 (they normally sell for $250 — sometimes the late bird gets a juicy deal on his worm) and made it into the theater in time for the performance.

POTUS, written by Selina Fillinger and directed by the Tony Award–winning Susan Stroman, is a feminist spoof on a chaotic presidency. The play’s self-explanatory subtitle is “Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.” One might think of Donald Trump, still the usual locus of political comedy in America. But POTUS is only loosely based on Trump, with its unnamed, fictional president inviting such comparisons only in his philandering (though, in that respect, he might be more of a Jack Kennedy). We infer about this unseen leader throughout the play that he combines a bit of Gerald Ford’s klutziness, George W. Bush’s clumsiness, and Joe Biden’s cluelessness. It’s a kitchen sink of presidential flaws, around which the entire cast revolves.

The all-female cast — Lilli Cooper, Lea DeLaria, Rachel Dratch, Julianne Hough, Suzy Nakamura, Julie White, and Vanessa Williams — boasts some famous names. But if you’re not familiar with all of them, you’re in good company — neither am I. In this fictional White House, each one is trying to support a thoroughly chaotic administration. One meets a mostly caricatured group: the cheated-on trophy-wife first lady, the megalomaniacal White House chief of staff, the fatigued press secretary, a hungry-for-the-scoop journalist, the unrealistically drug-dealing butch lesbian presidential sister, and (the most stereotypical character) the sweet, young, midwestern prostitute who is pregnant with the president’s baby. When a nuclear summit and gala of world leaders is set to begin, things take a turn for the worse. The ladies begin fighting over deep-seated insecurities, which culminates in a statuette being thrown and hitting the president. They think they’ve killed him, and what follows is a rather banal effort to cover it up and ensure that the summit and gala go off well.

If POTUS is trying to give theatergoers a sense of how the White House operates behind the scenes, it fails. Yet this is a comedy, and some license can be afforded for its topsy-turviness. You get what you might expect from an all-female play based on politics: subtle messaging in favor of abortion, obligatory depiction of characters as queer or lesbian, and acknowledgment of the challenges of motherhood and pregnancy while trying to build a career. The journalist, with her round-the-clock schedule, fails to see her kids in the evening. The first lady tolerates her husband’s affairs to keep up a pretense of dignity (reminiscent of the ’90s Hillary Clinton). The chief of staff has no time for personal relationships.

In its favor, the play is not as woke as you’d expect. The actors check the racial-diversity boxes, but POTUS is just progressive, in a soft way, not in-your-face campus-style woke. Broadway has a broad audience, after all. Still, the play’s caricaturing of these women’s failures in the domain of politics, which is still seen as a man’s world, seems in tension with its view of women as competent players in that world. While casting themselves as feminist trailblazers, their actions only make them — and the women they claim to represent — look incompetent. After one character’s monologue about the president’s problems, suggesting that a woman would do a better job in leadership roles, the others reply, “The alternative is us.” Frankly, though, none of the characters come off as ready or worthy of trust in high office. It would be a mistake to think they represent all women’s potential, especially given that this is satire, but their claim to do so is in any case undermined by the characters’ portrayal. The playwright made a big mistake here. In the end, for all their bluster, the male president — who was only knocked out — gets his mojo back at the summit and the gala, and ends up the public “winner,” while the women are crestfallen behind the scenes. It’s an outcome that prompts, at least in this viewer, not pity but relief. If any of these women were running for office, I’d vote for Donald Trump in a heartbeat. No favors done for Hillary, Harris, or Warren here.

Maybe what POTUS does best, in spite of itself, is capture one aspect of the Left’s contemporary worldview. With its provocative poster (the White House held by the teeth between two seductively ruby-red lips), 50 shades of pink lighting on stage, and sexual undertones, the play reflects the genderization of our politics: masculinity versus feminism, biology versus pronouns, and (marginal) feminism versus transgenderism. This may seem reductive, but consider the Dobbs leak’s catalyzing of the abortion debate, the recent U.S. Women’s Soccer Team “pay equity” deal, the fierce disputes over Florida’s education bill, Lia Thomas, and Tucker Carlson’s patently weird docuseries on the “death of men”: All herald gender as the new identity fissure of our times. POTUS is part of this progressive trend, even as it remains more pulpy than profound in plumbing this new thematic depth.

Was POTUS a good satire, per my hope? No. Was it good enough as an evening’s entertainment? I’d say yes. A political comedy, even one based on an imperfect idea, with good actors is at least worth the cost of a cheaper mezzanine seat. Paradoxically, the real satire was performed by the audience that evening: Theatergoers are still required to wear masks. During the intermission, ushers walked up and down the aisles with all-caps signs saying “WEAR YOUR MASK.” It was, without a doubt, the biggest joke of the evening.