Theater Review: In ‘POTUS,’ starring Vanessa Williams, White House wackiness morphs into feminist rebellion

Not unlike tragedy, farce demands an ever-intensifying explosion of chaos. And what better location for such manic goings-on than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where a president shooting from the hip is lighting fires like a kleptomaniac with a gift for improvisation?

The name Trump never is actually mentioned in Selina Fillinger’s entertaining “POTUS,” cleverly subtitled for the all-important female ticket buyer “Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive,” but the Orange One stalks this new play at the Shubert Theatre as surely as he does the verdant halls of Mar-a-Lago.

Well, albeit with a few implicit nods not to No Drama Obama, heaven forbid, but to the more colorful era of President William Jefferson Clinton, whose White House was hardly immune to scandals of its own.

The premise of the knockabout piece, directed with manic but crafty intensity by Susan Stroman, is that the White House is kept afloat by a bevy of weird but individually gifted crisis counselors, all spinning like tops in a hapless attempt to get ahead of a POTUS so out of control, they all fear for democracy itself.

Fillinger, a talented Broadway newcomer, puts together a First Lady (Vanessa Williams), a chief of staff (Julie White), a harried press secretary (the superb Suzy Nakamura), and a nervous White House functionary (Rachel Dratch, doing a deep dive into the absurd). She adds in some outsiders: a harried reporter (Lilli Cooper), desperate not to be replaced by some annoying kid; the president’s jailbird sister (Lea DeLaria), replete with ankle bracelet; and an unusual young woman named Dusty (Julianne Hough), whose relationship to the president the other women mightily struggle to discover, only for their worst fears to be realized. No nerd prom needed for Dusty. She’s the kind who got to rock the real thing.

The structure of the show, staged on a funny revolving set by Beowulf Boritt, is that POTUS is a walking scandal machine and the women collectively are running the place, at great cost to their own sanity.

This is hardly an absurd premise: Who among us did not wonder, at various points in the Trump presidency, what it must have been like to actually work around that man, to have to deal with his tweets or his unsavory pals, or his off-the-cuff reversals of the policy of the United States government, or any number of other such workplace explosions of that gone-but-not forgotten era? Heck, we all did. Whatever our politics.

Farce works best as an amoral and apolitical genre (ideally with power as its main target), but these are moralistic times on Broadway and Fillinger has to thread the needle of making these characters sympathetic and sufficiently progressive, even as they serve this kind of sexist boss without running for the hills or inviting the contempt of the audience. She achieves that most by making sure that her play stays away from its own implicit questions and rolls on to the next sight gag.

The characters aren’t versions of Ivanka Trump or Kayleigh McEnany so much as amped-up imports from the “West Wing,” especially in the case of chief of staff Harriet who, as played by the rock solid White, has a lot in common with Allison Janney’s C.J. They even talk a bit like they were written by Aaron Sorkin, albeit without the macho bluster, and they alternately bicker and form mutually beneficial alliances, only to quickly see them get blown up by their boss.

Like a lot of farces, this one runs out of steam before the end, partly because the mostly unseen antagonist (we do get his legs) becomes sufficiently incapacitated that he can no longer do much to roll the events to a climax and partly because the play doesn’t quite know what to do with an underwritten reporter who does not seem to want to report. And the craziness dial is so far to the right, so early in the show, the play doesn’t really save enough of itself for a full-on Act Two build.

Of course, you could argue recent history demands this level of panicked absurdity to depict the White House. Fresh, funny and full of spunk, “POTUS” may in fact be saner than the truth.