Chicago's Neo-Futurists Lend Satire to the Oval Office
If the Minutemen did theatre instead of sonic nuggets, the result might be something like 43 Plays for 43 Presidents. The Rough and Tumble Theatre company's latest gem plays at La Val's in Berkeley through Jan. 27, 2007.

by D.M. Holler
posted January 20, 2007 @ 11:48am PST

There are, let's face it, too few theatrical imperatives in the Bay Area. One production nearing the end of its run is absolutely worth one of your precious weekend nights. Part Pynchonesque farce, part post-Schoolhouse Rock history lesson, part snarky schadenfreude, and part elegy (inevitably), 43 Plays for 43 Presidents, now playing in Berkeley, is thoroughly informed with wit, charm, and surprise. There are enough inside jokes for history majors to laugh disruptively, yet anyone with even the slightest grasp of the weird arc of America's most disturbing popularity contest will find something amusing within these 43 playlets (average length appears to be 2 minutes). The plays' authors -- Andrew Bayiates, Sean Benjamin, Genevra Gallo, Chloë Johnston, and Karen Weinberg -- can be proud of Cliff Mayote's incisive, pace-savvy direction. Each of the cast's exceptionally energetic actors, Joshua Pollock, Norman Gee, Stewart Evan Smith, Louise Chegwidden, and Arwen Anderson, take turns -- with great élan -- as presidents. (Rather than relying on wigs, makeup, or some other potentially hokie premise, each president is easily identified as whoever is wearing the coat with an American flag sewn on the back; and rest assured, thanks to Mayote's directing talents, the trope of possession of the coat is handled with a cleverness that never gets cloying.)

At times openly partisan (particularly with certain 20th century icons), this play pulls no punches from either Democrats or Republicans (or Whigs for that matter). Direct quotes, cute meets, petty thefts, pillow barrages, white-board scribblings, white-bread-obscured pontificating, lip-synching, dumb shows, epochally correct bumper music, poignant off-stage lo-fi warblings, and other strange happenings all combine to create a brilliant collision of fragments that all coalesce, somehow, into a coherence that might make you envy the sheer creativity of Rough and Tumble's capacity for rapid-fire satire as much as it might make you swallow a note of despondency, pining for what America Might Have Been. And because so many of us are still bogged down in our "Requiem for America" phase, such levity is, now more than ever, essential.

If theatrical Darwinism is alive to any degree, this show will play again elsewhere in the Bay Area. Originally produced by the empirically brilliant NeoFuturists of Chicago, evidently to enthusiastic response, this production does, indeed, clearly deserve to tour nationally. Go see it now, before you have to pay top dollar off-Broadway.

For ticket information, go to www.randt.org
La Val's is located at 1834 Euclid Ave, Berkeley