Imagine a President of the United States who’s a loose cannon, an impulsive creature of pure id barely held back from the brink of disaster by the various women tasked with keeping him out of trouble.
That hypothetical scenario might not be quite as hard to imagine as it once was. And yet the titular figure at the center of “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” is left to the imagination, unseen and unnamed. Scrambling to do damage control during a diplomatic debacle are the President’s chief of staff, press secretary, first lady, sister, secretary and lover, plus a journalist caught in the middle of the shenanigans.
After its acclaimed premiere last year on Broadway (where its original stars included Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch), playwright Selina Fillinger’s madcap political farce is now kicking off Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s new season.
“It’s hysterical, it’s fast, it’s funny, and I think the message really hits you at the end without hitting you over the head,” says director Annie Tippe, who also staged Dave Malloy’s chamber musical “Octet” at Berkeley Rep last year. “This play, even though it’s deeply funny, helps us to look at how we might share a complicity in the current system we have, and how that complicity contributes to the subjugation of certain people.”
Fillinger says she started writing the play in 2016.
“The idea was floating in my head as I was watching the Trump campaign,” Fillinger says. “I was really interested by the orbit of women around him. There was something maternal about it. There was just this sense that he wouldn’t be able to get through the day without their help, and I think that’s the case for so many people in power. And then with the (expletive)-grabbing tape, I was not shocked that he said it. That seemed pretty in keeping with everything that we knew about him at that point. I was mostly fascinated with how the media responded, because people didn’t know if they were allowed to say it on air. One offhand statement by this presidential candidate completely shifted the rules around what was OK to discuss in the media.”
Fillinger was born in Berkeley, where her parents went to college, but she grew up in Eugene, Oregon, doing theater camps and dance classes. She says it was in high school that theater suddenly seemed like a viable path.
“I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a summer camp there, and that was my first time that I saw how theater makers balance being a theater artist with the stability needed to build a full life,” she says. “That really opened my eyes to what life could be as an artist, and that was ultimately when I decided to pursue it. But when I told my parents, they were like, ‘Yeah, we know!’”
Even then, life as a playwright wasn’t something she envisioned.
“I was always writing, but it didn’t occur to me that it was something I could do professionally,” Fillinger says. “It felt like this private precious thing that I gave myself as a way of processing the world. I went to Northwestern identifying as an actor only and continued to do acting throughout Northwestern. But I took an intro to playwriting class that really changed my life.”
Life continued to change quickly. Her play “Faceless,” a drama about a teenage American aspiring terrorist, got booked at Chicago’s Northlight Theater while she was still an undergrad. She made her New York debut at 25 with “Something Clean,” a drama about the mother of a sex offender, and her Broadway debut at 28 last year with “POTUS.”
Despite its initial inspiration, the fictional world of “POTUS” isn’t limited to any one administration.
“As I was working, the themes took on such a larger scope than just electoral politics or just a single office,” Fillinger says. “I put it in the White House because when you’re working on a farce, you want the stakes to be life or death. But it was a story that I very quickly realized you could put in any institution, any office, many homes. It’s about the people being complicit in enabling certain patriarchal and white supremacist behaviors and systems. It’s a very political play in terms of it being about systems of oppression, but it’s not partisan.”
“I think this play is important because it doesn’t take a political side, but it is extremely political in its offering to audiences, which is that women deserve to have a seat at the table,” agrees Tippe.
“When plays are written by women and they have female cast, sometimes the play can be siloed as a woman’s play about women’s issues, and this play is so deeply not that,” Tippe says. “It’s really potent for an American audience to just take in how much of a circus our political system feels like at times. And to remind us, we actually do have a say if we band together and are active in fighting for what we believe.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘POTUS’
‘Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive’
By Selina Fillinger, presented by Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Through: Oct. 22
Where: Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley
Tickets: $45-$134; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org