The hypocrisy of politics and politicians is a favorite target of both comedians and playwrights. So perhaps it is no surprise that, a month before the midterm elections, two Off-Broadway productions take aim — in very different ways.
"Tail! Spin!" a remount of a 2012 Fringe production, is based on a gimmick: it uses as its text only the actual words spoken, written, tweeted and texted by the figures at the center of four of America's recent political sex scandals. The 70 minutes are divided up into four sections, each a rehashing of a scandal in salacious detail.
There's New York's own Anthony Weiner, the former Congressman and mayoral candidate who tweeted inappropriate photos and sexy innuendo to female fans. There's Congressman Mark Foley, who emailed suggestive notes to high school boys who were former Congressional pages. There's former Gov. (and now Rep.) Mark Sanford, whose aides told the public he was "hiking the Appalachian trail" without his wife, when really he was in Argentina with his lover. And there's former Sen. Larry Craig, whose infamous "wide stance" lead to an arrest for sex solicitation in an airport men's bathroom.
Director Dan Knechtges has mounted Mario Correa's play in a sleek production, with a pitch-perfect, debate-style set by Caite Hevner Kemp (the most clever part of the show, in fact, is the super titles reminding us who everyone is adding comic asides). And the actors, who all play multiple roles, are well-cast stage vets, with the addition of the talented comic actor Rachel Dratch, who is underutilized here as a series of wives and lovers.
Yet if you've read the news — or watched the Daily Show — in even a passing fashion over the last few years, you'll find very few new details and no new insight in this pastiche of a script. In fact, it's less pointed than most late night political comedy and far less entertaining.
"A Walk in the Woods," Lee Blessing's Pulitzer-nominated 1988 play, was originally written for two men. But director Jonathan Silverstein cast the extraordinary Kathleen Chalfant as Botvinnik, the world-weary Russian arms negotiator — and what an inspired piece of casting it was.
It's 1982, and Russia and America are facing off both ideologically and militarily. Bored by the acronyms — SALT, START — bandied around the negotiating table, Botvinnik drags her American counterpart out for strolls in the forest. They wax philosophical about the characters of their two countries (Botvinnik is fond of Mickey Mouse) and the futility of treaties.
Chalfant was dazzling in the 1991 play "Wit" and she brings that safe fullness of character to her charming Russian diplomat. She is both mercurial and solid, charming and authoritarian. It makes you think that if both sides had more negotiators like her, perhaps more would get done.
The play itself can occasionally feel dated — in our days of drones and terrorism it's hard to remember why we got all worked up about global thermonuclear war — but it still resonates, because the central idea is truly scary: perhaps our leaders don't want peace the way they claim. Perhaps they're just conning us all in a quest for power.