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| Amy Steiger, Ben Gierhart, Stephanie Adams, and Colby Ballowe in The Bard's Town Theatre's production of 44 Plays for 44 Presidents. Photo by Doug Schutte. |
44 Plays for 44 Presidents
Written
by Andy Bayiates, Sean Benjamin, Genevra Gallo-Bayiates, Chloe Johnston and Karen Weinberg
Directed
by Scot Atkinson
Reviewed by Keith Waits
44 Plays
for 44 Presidents is a stunt, but it’s a pretty good stunt: a
rapidly paced series of vignettes and scenes (none are, strictly speaking,
plays) that represent each of the American presidents in some fashion. It is
being simultaneously produced by 44 different companies across the United
States in the days leading up to Election Day. The need for compression of the
subject forces a range of approach that makes this show a veritable catalog of
theatrical style and technique: monologues both solemn and comic, musical
numbers, slapstick physical comedy, pantomime, blackouts and tableaus, as well
as video pieces are all effectively employed to deliver a message about the
parade of politicians who have served as chief executive.
As with any show of this nature, there are mixed
results. A few of the bits fly by with little impact, but most are good for at
least a laugh, and there is substance enough to provoke thoughtfulness and at
least a modicum of enlightenment and understanding for most audience members.
It certainly reminds us that the rancor and absurdity we are witnessing in our
current campaign season are nothing new to the Presidential campaign dynamic.
Not unexpectedly, the most impactful scenes are
often concerned with the better-remembered Presidents. An absorbing account of
the four-time elected Franklin D. Roosevelt proved genuinely moving – not for
revealing any new information as much as for how it balanced a clear-eyed critical
perspective with a reverence for this titan of mid-century American politics. Abraham
Lincoln received an equally complex treatment that was slightly more abstract
but still forceful. When we reached JFK, the entire sequence was rendered as a
video piece displayed on two large screens – an apt choice for its emphasis on
Kennedy’s position as the first President “elected” by television, even if the impact
was slightly diluted in contrast to the onstage action.
Some of the best and most succinct pieces observed
the utter mediocrity of some of the men. The early part of the 20th century
seemed to be the dog days of the office as an institution, with a dull stretch
between Woodrow Wilson and FDR. But my favorite was the quote from William
Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor who wanted more than
anything to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: “I don’t even remember
being President.”
The staging employed several good gimmicks, such as
quotation marks that lit up whenever an actor was directly quoting a President
while in character; the aforementioned video screens were liberally employed to
augment the activity and several times took the lead, as with JFK; and the
accumulation of states as blocks on a giant scale on the back of the stage
neatly chart the progress of Manifest Destiny. For all of its free-wheeling and
anarchic stagecraft, this is a dense and weighty script trying to impart a
great deal of information in a brief span of time, and the clever use of all of
these techniques goes a long way in accomplishing that goal while keeping the
proceedings entertaining enough to keep the audience engaged.
The ensemble of five worked well together, adroitly
trading off duties as a unified troupe of players. They were Stephanie Adams,
Colby Ballowe, Ben Gierhart, Doug Schutte and Amy Steiger.
By the time we reached the climax, a tidy metaphor
that sees Barack Obama feverishly skipping rope like a double-dutch champion,
the cumulative effect of the comprehensive, if decidedly, offbeat history lesson
manages to engender enough patriotic and civic pride to allow the final,
earnest plea to vote on November 6 to feel genuine and welcome.
44 Plays for
44 Presidents
November 1-10 at 7:30 p.m.
The Bard's Town Theatre
1801 Bardstown Road
Louisville, KY 40205
thebardstowntheatre.org
(502) 749-5275
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