“Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight!”
So sang (in a manner of speaking) Zero Mostel in the opening number of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” David Mamet must have been listening.”
“November,” a raucous comedy, littered with Mamet’s usual overuse of four-letter Anglo-Saxon verbs, opened last night at the Gaslight Theater in a sparkling production by the St. Louis Actors’ Studio. Alan Knoll’s masterly timing as an American president who has no idea why he’s in the Oval Office leads the way. John Krewson as his adviser and lawyer and Michelle Hand, as his lesbian speech writer, form a trio smoother and more effective than Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance were in the Cubs’ infield a century ago.
The play opened in New York in January, 2008, with Nathan Lane in the lead role, and ran for six months and more than 200 performances.
Knoll, as Charles (Chuck) Smith, is the President, though his term will end in a few days and he hasn’t the chance of a snowball in Hell of being elected. He has no money for television time, and Congress has not even appropriated enough money to build a library that will carry his name. He’s hurt as well as angry.S
Bobby Miller directed with cool efficiency; as an actor, he understood Mamet in several plays, so his directorial skill, his understanding of Mamet’s pacing and his use of the pauses built into telephone conversations underlines and emphasizes the performances in this 2010-11 season opener for the Actors’ Studio. As the old line goes, timing is everything, and Miller scores with it, early and often.
Mamet uses four letter words the way many writers use commas, and after a very short time, that’s the way we hear them.
Smith has a greedy streak wider than the new I-64, and when a representative of the National Association of Turkey By-Products Manufacturers (a delightful, impressive Chopper Leifheit) comes to call for the annual pre-Thanksgiving photo shoot of turkeys in the White House, he does some quick figuring with supermarket prices and the American population. Previous presidents had accepted a $50,000 donation from the lobbying group. Suddenly, Smith raises the ante to $2,000,000, which will buy a lot of TV time, or even a library. The sequence is not as funny as the glorious Thanksgiving turkey drop from “WKRP in Cincinnati” some years ago, but it brings lots of laughs. Speaking of laughs, Alan McClintock is just right as Dwight Grackle, an Indian chief who wants half of Nantucket so he can build a casino
As good as Knoll is, he needs a straight man, and John Krewson is ideal as Archer Brown, the President’s go-to guy for anything from calling out the U.S. Marines to finding a doctor for his speechwriter’s cold. His dry, one-line responses to Smith’s absurd requests are right on, and he has some outstanding lines. Comedy on stage does not travel to a written page (just consider this as one) very well but, for example, there’s an argument (one of many) between Smith and Hand, and Smith tells Brown that he needs the Secret Service, the response is, “They’re taking sensitivity training this morning.”
Hand is very funny, though why a 21st-century writer still is using a manual typewriter is a puzzle. Perhaps Miller is trying to distance the play from current or recent past presidents, campaigns and libraries, but the program shows no time frame (too many programs are doing that these days), nor is there a discussion of dates. Despite being in the midst of a campaign, Hand has just returned from some time in China, where she and her partner went to adopt a baby. She’s a splendid match for Knoll, although Mamet adds a lovely touch with her speeches, so filled with cliches and pie-in-the-sky rhetoric that the words may still be echoing from our televisions and radios at home. The arguments occasionally become tedious, because we hear them constantly, and Mamet slips into polemic mode from time to time, but enjoyment of those speeches may depend on where along the political spectrum the hearer stands. Patrick Huber’s sets and lighting do the job, and costume designer Bonnie Kruger’s slightly ill-fitting suit for Knoll is a perfect contrast to the one worn by Brown, which fits like a glove.
November opened last night at the Gaslight Theater as a production of the St. Lois Actors’ Studio and runs through Oct. 24
–Joe