THEATER: “44 Plays for 44 Presidents”

I am a bad American. This is true for many reasons, but for
the purpose of this review we’ll focus on the fact that I am woefully ignorant
about our country’s presidential history. I got a 90-something on my American
history Regents exam, but I’ll be damned if I can remember any of our former
commanders-in-chief beyond the big ones (you know, the guys with their faces on
money or engraved on mountains) or the ones who have been in office since I’ve
been alive (that would be Carter to the present).

It’s shameful, truly. So I was excited when Geva first announced that it would be doing “44 Plays for
44 Presidents” as part of its offerings for the Rochester Fringe Festival. Not
only did it sound entertaining, but I hoped that I would
learn something about the men who have guided this country as well.

The show — a Geva Theatre
Conservatory production, directed by Sean Daniels — succeeds on both fronts. It
does entertain, throwing at the audience a non-stop series of short plays (generally
two minutes or less) that range from dramatic reenactments to comedy skits,
musical theater to mime. Some incorporate audience participation, many feature
actual quotes by or about the presidents they regard, and one even includes a
thrilling double-dutch jump-rope sequence.

Some of these pieces work better than others — some just
downright don’t work at all — but I found that I did learn at least a little
bit about the 40-some presidents in our nation’s history. In some cases, I was
amazed just to know they existed; I had totally forgotten about James K. Polk.
While in others, I found my previous vague perceptions completely altered. (I
always thought of William Henry Harrison — who died after 32 days in office —
as a joke, but it turns out that he was apparently a ruthless SOB.)

The show is a brilliant choice for an election year,
and in the spirit of bipartisanship (yeah, right), I found that it came down
pretty evenly on both liberals and conservatives. For instance, Richard Nixon
of all people gets a fairly celebratory segment focusing on all the good he did
for this country (like helping to empower the National Endowment for the Arts —
who knew?), while Bill Clinton gets pretty much savaged in his section.

Five writers are associated with the project, which explains
why most of the plays feel so incredibly different from one another, save for a
clever repeating trope for both presidents named Johnson. I found that the
pieces that relied more on comedy or musical theater worked best (the bit for
George H.W. Bush, which features droning lyrics over electropop
and a human disco ball, is just priceless). Less successful are virtually all
of the silent/mimed plays, many of which are inscrutable if you know nothing
about the presidents they concern. For instance, the piece on James Garfield
left me utterly baffled, and tells the audience nothing about the
man except that he was religious, and he was shot. Surely there’s more to him
than that.

There is, in fact, more to Garfield, and to
all the rest of the presidents for that matter. If the brief morsels of
information (and innuendo) in this show pique your interest, I highly recommend
heading over to the play’s page on the Geva Theatre
website, where you can download the educational document put together by dramaturg Gustave Rogers. The 100-page
PDF delves more deeply into the lives and political careers of every
president, and gives context to some of the choices made by the show’s writers.
(Example: the reason Ben Franklin acts as roastmaster
in the Thomas Jefferson play is that TJ was reportedly painfully shy — so it
makes sense that he wouldn’t take center stage even in a play about him.)

The Geva Theatre Conservatory
program features young actors who are either in college or just recently out of
it. This production featured Danny Kincaid-Kunz, BreMelino, Brooke Paolotto,
Christine M. Rose, Courtney Scheer, Ricky Thomas, and
Jonathan Wetherbee, all of whom played myriad
characters, everything from actual presidents to “maniacal hunchback No. 2.”
Each actor got a chance to shine, and all displayed a wealth of talents that
included singing, dancing, drama, and comedy.

Depending on what happens in about a month, we may have a
45th president to add to the line-up. Fittingly the show ends with the players
leaving it up to the audience to vote on how to close the show: an extended
version of the Barack Obama play, or another play about Mitt Romney. The
audience on the Sunday matinee I attended was apparently predominately
Democratic, so we got to see Obama take it from, “You know, you could all be
jumping with me.” But if anyone has
seen the Romney version, please post your take in the comments section below. I’m curious to know more.

This article appears in Sep 26 – Oct 2, 2012.