"How to Survive an Election: Laugh With 'POTUS'"

by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho

[Avid theatergoers are quite familiar with political plays, like Gore Vidal’s 1960 The Best Man (revived on Broadway as Gore Vidal’s The Best Man in 2012; see “Best Man” by Kirk Woodward, 19 July 2012, and “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024), Part 2,” 25 September 2024), which is literally about politics and politicians, or Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (1983; see “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009), which examines politically sensitive issues.

[But Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is here considering a play we can look at as therapy—laughter is the best medicine, as the saying goes (from the Book of Proverbs, popularized by Reader's Digest)—for recovering from today’s politics (specifically, 5 November two weeks back).  

[That’s how Furtado Coutinho sees POTUS, the 2022 political farce.  So have many spectators, it seems.

[This article was posted on American Theatre’s website on 28 October 2024.  It didn’t appear in the magazine’s print edition.  (All dates in the article, unless otherwise noted, are 2024.)]

Selina Fillinger’s popular farce about women taking control of the White House hits different this fall.

Selina Fillinger didn’t set out to write a play about electoral politics. But events in the current presidential election have transformed how audiences receive her play POTUS, Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, a farce about women having to step in for an incapacitated president. Sound familiar? POTUS, among the most-produced plays in the country for the second year running, was scheduled at 11 TCG member theatres well before Vice President Kamala Harris advanced to the top of the Democratic ticket in the aftermath of President Biden’s June debate performance. 

[Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the publisher of American Theatre, is a nonprofit membership service organization that promotes professional nonprofit theater in the United States. Its services and publications focus exclusively on its member theaters, though its publications are available generally.]

Of those productions, 10 are programmed in September and October, before Election Day on Nov. 5. (One brave theatre, Zoetic Stage in Miami, has slated it for Jan. 9-26, 2025.) There are a few tried-and-true ways to cope with election jitters: inhaling ice cream straight from the carton, obsessing over bad TV, piercing the ceiling with existential gaze every morning and night. POTUS has been offering a communal alternative: shared laughter. Said Suzanne Tidwell, house services manager at Trinity Rep ([Trinity Repertory Theatre, Providence, Rhode Island] where POTUS ran Sept. 5-Oct. 27), of reactions to the show, “I’ve heard it repeated over and over: ‘Thank you. We needed that tonight. We really need to laugh.’”

Tidwell recalled the experience of debate night in particular, “They were quick to respond to every joke. They chose to be at the theatre that night instead of watching the debate. It became a sanctuary.”

[The second presidential debate (Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris) took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 10 September at 9:00-10:30 p.m. (EDT).]

Artistic directors and house managers shared with me how this sentiment is ringing true for theatregoers across the country, in spite of the abysmal divides among Americans. The play’s hilarious confrontation of power, patriarchy, and “the pursuit of sanity” already felt timely when it opened on Broadway in 2022 and ran through the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

[POTUS opened for a limited run at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway on 27 April 2022 after 13 previews starting on 14 April. (For those not familiar with the acronym, 'POTUS' is the common shorthand designation for “President of the United States,” referring to the current executive.) The show closed on 14 August 2022 after 126 regular performances. It was playwright Selina Fillinger’s Broadway début (and only her second play presented in New York City).  

[The production was directed by Susan Stroman (in her non-musical Broadway début), with scenic design by Beowulf Boritt, costume design by Linda Cho, lighting design by Sonoyo Nishikawa, and sound design by Jessica Paz. It starred Lilli Cooper (Chris), Lea DeLaria (Bernadette), Rachel Dratch (Stephanie), Julianne Hough (Dusty), Suzy Nakamura (Jean), Julie White (Harriet), and Vanessa Williams (Margaret).

[POTUS received 2022 Tony nominations for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for Rachel Dratch and Julie White and Best Scenic Design of a Play and was also nominated for 2022 Drama League Awards for Outstanding Production of a Play and Distinguished Performance Awards for Dratch and White.

[The show got mixed reviews from the New York Times and the New York Post, but the ensemble cast was generally praised for their comedy work by Variety, the Washington Post, and other outlets. Show-Score, the theater review aggregator, gave POTUS a score of 85%, with 92% positive reviews.

[The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade (22 January 1973) was issued on 24 June 2022.]

But it feels especially bracing right now to watch an all-femme cast avert disaster at the White House.

Take Trinity Rep’s first impulse toward the script: As artistic director Curt Columbus put it, they “picked it as an antidote to two old white men talking at each other. Then two weeks before rehearsal, one of the old white men dropped out and the world changed. It was such a different environment in the rehearsal room.”

At [Baltimore] Maryland’s Everyman Theatre, where the play ran Sept. 1-29, associate artistic director and POTUS actor Tuyết Thị Phạm said her rehearsal room also buzzed with “a shot of adrenaline” when it became clear that [Vice President Kamala] Harris would be the Democratic nominee.

The day that news broke, Curious Theatre Company [Denver] artistic director Jada Suzanne Dixon drove through picturesque Colorado to rehearsals for POTUS, which would play Sept. 7-Oct. 13. She wondered, “Do we need to do anything different? That was the question I was mulling over. By the time I got into the rehearsal room, there was this buzz and energy in the room. I said to everyone, ‘The beautiful thing about this play is it’s already on the page. Yes, the world is doing something different. Yet we don’t have to do anything different with our storytelling, because it is already here: women’s rights, feminism, and intersectionality.’”

Some productions responded to the historical significance of Harris’s campaign with subtle nods, adding Beyoncé’s “Freedom” [2016; from Lemonade] to the bow music or to the “Bitch Beats” playlist referenced in the show. Tracking such changes was self-professed theatre enthusiast “Broadway Bekah” Walsh, who has traveled around the country since the play premiered on Broadway to catch as many productions as possible. So far she’s seen POTUS 34 times at 20 theatres.

[A musical bow is an ancient musical instrument that can be picked, struck, or bowed to create sound.

[On her website, Susan Stroman notes: “As part of the plot, Harriet encourages Stephanie to listen to a playlist called ‘Bitch Beats’ – a compilation of songs that are the quintessence of female power, like Rihanna’s ‘Breakin’ Dishes’ or Bikini Kill’s ‘Rebel Girl’. She motivates Stephanie to find her confidence by dancing out a series of Power Poses.”

[Bekah Walsh, who describes herself as “theater obsessed,” is a theater writer and influencer from Baltimore, Maryland. In August 2023, after having seen POTUS twice on Broadway (see above) before its limited run ended, took off on what she dubbed the “POTUS Trail,” during which she traveled around the U.S. and Canada to see as many regional productions as she could. Starting at the Laboratory Theater of Florida in Fort Myers (4-19 August 2023), she posted her experiences online on several different websites, ending her trail in May 2024 with the production at the Sylvan Adams Theatre of the Segal Centre for Performing Arts in Montreal, Quebec, Canada (12 May-2 June 2024).]

Walsh said she’s watched the tone of the play go “from a place of commiseration, laughing about being stuck represented by men, to suddenly having hope, to having the potential of a woman in this position.” Few things hit the same, she said, in every production: Some have leaned more into the ending’s dramatic edge, while some went further with the farce throughout. Many were staged in thrust, Arena‘s [Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage; 13 October-12 November 2023] was in the round, and Everyman’s had actors running through the audience (while they improved clever DMV-specific references). 

[“DMV” is a local appellation which stands for the “District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia.”]

But across all the productions she’s seen since July, one line has jumped out: “Why isn’t she president?”

Fillinger anticipated these nuances but worked to ensure that the script would remain evergreen. The dynamics in the play, she said, “translate to any institution, office, or household.” At any moment, she said, “People are going to project it onto whatever the electoral moment is.” There’s been a “breadth of interpretation.” At one opening, she was especially caught off guard when, at the end, an audience member exclaimed, “Nikki Haley for President!” Laughing at the memory, she said, “But I hope that people can also see what’s happening underneath, because that’s where the real work begins.”

“Whoever is president, it is going to be on us, on the people, to make our voices clear, and that will always be the case. Patriarchy and white supremacy exist across parties, and there are fundamental issues with our democracy,” Fillinger concluded.

All the theatremakers I interviewed about POTUS said it brought in new audiences and fuller houses than expected. Even in Tampa [Florida], where audiences are more conservative than in other cities where the show has played, the turnout “cracked our all-time Top 10 list. The community really embraced it,” said David M. Jenkins, artistic director of Jobsite Theater, where it ran Sept. 4-29.

Indeed, the nonpartisan play has proven its expansive resonance not only in the number of U.S. productions over the past year, but also in how well it translated abroad. Back in April, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus production in Hamburg, Germany played with a compelling postmodern take.

[The German translation of POTUS by Nico Rabenald (Die Schattenpräsidentinnen – “The shadow presidents”; nb: the word Präsidentin in German means a female president), directed by Claudia Bauer, premièred at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus (German Playhouse) on 12 April. It ran until 31 May.]

Still, Curt Colombus of Trinity Rep reminded me of a sobering U.S. reality: “It might be harder to laugh after Nov. 5.” That’s why he—and presumably most other theatres—steered clear of programming the play post-election.

Zoetic Stage will chart that great unknown as the team revs up to tell the story around Inauguration Day, regardless of the election outcome. Instead of a POTUS fall slot, they went with Martin McDonagh’s [2003; Broadway: 2005] The Pillowman [24 October-10 November] for spooky season, which “Miamians really get into,” said stage manager Vanessa McCloskey. But it’s not all innocent thrills: She and Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer shared they were excited about Pillowman’s cautionary, unfortunately relevant depiction of a totalitarian government.

“Miami gets a lot of election exhaustion,” said McCloskey. As a former resident, I can vouch for this: I’ve personally witnessed political tension rift even the closest of Latine families living in South Florida. The political proves personal, with trauma from citizens’ original homelands informing voting decisions in this heavily immigrant and first-generation-American community.

Meltzer elaborated, “In our community, we weren’t sure how POTUS would be received amid that tension” in the run-up to Election Day. But by the time January comes around, they reasoned, “The decision will have been made,” as McCloskey put it, “and there will be more space to laugh together.”

Creatives hold their breath to see not only how the election will turn out, but how the play will feel as a result. 

While artists may swing the energetic pendulum of public discourse and crave revolution, they still live in context, the Florida productions reminded me. Jobsite’s Jenkins employed intentionality similar to Zoetic’s with a politically diverse city. The goal in Tampa, Jenkins said, was not to alienate audiences before they even came into the theatre.

Other theatres around the country, meanwhile, marketed the material’s edgy side, from language and slur reclamation to protest. At Chicago’s Steppenwolf [Theatre Company; 26 October-3 December 2023] last November, for instance, the dramatic final moment saw Harriet (played by force of nature Sandra Marquez) flicking a cigarette butt onto the American flag, which went up in smoke. Tampa had to tread in the opposite direction.

“We truly avoided even using the term ‘feminist farce,’” said Jenkins. “It’s a trigger, and the work does speak for itself. Sometimes a theatre might want to prescribe a reaction—we feel a need to stress the importance of what we’re doing. But sometimes it’s not conducive to bringing in an audience. So we relied on the experience; we talked about ‘girls night out’ and levity.” A few patrons, he said, sent angry emails after seeing the show, but they were a minority. Cheers were heard at key lines most nights. But when it came to Dusty’s, “Affordable, safe reproductive health care is a basic human right,” at a time wherein Amendment 4, Right to Abortion Initiative is on the ballot, the room pulsated with a different kind of energy. 

Observed Jenkins, “You could feel that people wanted to respond in a positive way, but at the same time, they weren’t laughing or applauding; there was some alternate energy. As if that moment crosses the line too much into our reality. As a producer and theatremaker, I appreciated that, having this mixed company sit in discomfort together.”

Surprisingly, Bekah Walsh said, at performances she attended around the country she noticed the most intermission walkouts not in Florida, Texas, or Tennessee, but in California. “You could see some seats were emptier at this one performance, which I thought was funny, being in a liberal area,” she recalled. “Maybe it was just the audience that day. You never know.” 

You really never know. “Maybe personally I had some nervousness around how the audience might receive it,” said Jada Suzanne Dixon, even at edgy Curious Theatre Company in Denver [7 September-13 October]. “But then there were stories—like, someone came with a friend who lives in the neighborhood, blocks away, and had never been to our theatre. And they shared, ‘I’m going to become a subscriber.’ This play opened up doors for us.”

Each theatre had its own wraparound programming, from voting information to pantsuit nights, but one that stood out to me was Trinity Rep’s “Femme Night” [11 October]. That iteration opened up dialogue about the rarity of femme-centered professional spaces. Suzanne Tidwell, Trinity Rep house services manager, shared with me how impactful it was to her, working the event.

“I’m usually busy and focused on logistics,” she said. “But I looked around at the lobby with the pre-show reception and realized I was in a space entirely filled with femme-identifying audience members, board members, and staff members. I saw this beautiful space to feel seen. As a woman of a certain age, when I started doing theatre, I was the first female to have been on the technical crew at my university. To be able to look around at the femme-identifying lighting ops and sound ops and run crew and know we’re doing the work of reclaiming our language and vocabulary and space has been a really moving experience for me.”

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece that extrapolated on my complicated relationship with mirrors, with looking on my femme and Latine body. As each staff member involved with POTUS productions described mothers bringing their daughters and daughters bringing their mothers to this show, I heard their glimmering hope. The image of Kamala Harris’s niece looking up at her during the DNC came to mind.

[The first link above takes readers to an article, “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias” by Furtado Coutinho, the author of “How to Survive an Election.” It’s posted on this blog in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3” (9 October 2024).]

The women depicted in this play are complicated, imperfect, messy, and complicit, and the fact that they’re allowed to be so gives me hope that we as a country can have more complicated, imperfect, messy conversations with one another about our systems of power. One by one, mirrors transform and small glass ceilings break, as femmes of every age watch POTUS’s women live large. We recognize the largest parts of ourselves. Dark, decisive, daring.

Fillinger has said that conservatives think the POTUS in question is Clinton, and liberals think it’s Trump. But that offstage body was never the invisible matter that mattered. Close your eyes and see it: Across the country, across many lines of division, we are all laughing at the same play. Fillinger might have given us the one POTUS we can all agree on. I consider it a win.

[Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and raised in the vibrant immigrant community of South Florida, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho is a U.S.-based actor, writer, director, cultural strategist, and graduate of Northwestern University (Theatre/English Creative Writing BA).  In addition to now guest lecturing at Northwestern, she serves as Chicago Associate Editor of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine.  

[In addition to previous work with various Chicago collectives, as well as The Kennedy Center in their theater education/TYA division and Emmys/Television Academy in development of new kids’ TV, Furtado Coutinho has experience in developing new work, curating tangible care practices, writing in lyrical verse, and embodying power classical roles.

[On ROT, Coutinho’s writing appears in “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias” as referenced above and “‘Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,’” 6 July 2024.

[Born in Berkeley, California, in 1994, Salina Fillinger grew up in Eugene, Oregon.  Working one summer at Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she saw a production of Julius Caesar and started to envision a life in the arts.

[She left Eugene to study acting at Northwestern University in Chicago and took her first playwriting class in her sophomore year.  Her teacher encouraged her to enter the university’s Agnes Nixon Festival, established by the creator of the classic soap operas One Life to Live and All My Children.  Fillinger’s play, inspired by a headline about a man who walked into a bar and swallowed a pickled human toe used as a gimmick in drinks, was selected.

[The student dramatist went on to win the 2015 national Judith Barlow Prize for an original one-act play that was inspired by the work of a historic woman playwright.  In Fillinger’s case, it was 1928’s Machinal by Sophie Treadwell (1885-1970) and Fillinger’s play was Three Landings and a Fire Escape, about three women who become improbable friends and help one another through difficulties, one of whom summons the fortitude to take on the troubles.

[Fillinger morphed from a would-be actor to a writer, and in 2016, she heard the broadcast of presidential candidate Donald Trump “bragging about grabbing women by their genitals.  I, in turn, sat down to write a farce.”  By 2017, she had written POTUS, Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive, a farce in which the President of the United States inadvertently spins a verbal gaffe into a worldwide crisis and seven brilliant and stressed-out women on whom he relies risk everything, including their sanity, to keep him out of trouble.

[“The play is highly political, but it is not partisan. Republicans think it’s about Bill Clinton, Democrats think it’s about Donald Trump,” says the playwright.  Nevertheless, she had some difficulty selling the script—but “in 2022, well into Biden’s first term, POTUS premiered on Broadway.”  It became the third most-produced play of 2023—and remained on the list in 2024 at number seven.]