Whether pronouncing on why he is “no longer a ‘brain-dead liberal’ ” or pontificating on the objective art of acting, David Mamet has grown pedantic of late. So his flat-out political farce, November (at the Lyric Stage Company through November 15), comes as a breath of light air. Inspired by the absurd annual presidential pardon of a single turkey (while its presumably criminal brethren fling themselves beneath the Thanksgiving gravy), the play is set in the Oval Office in the month of the title, as the incumbent Leader of the Free World, his poll numbers “lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol” and his political coffers barer than Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, tries to figure out how to get himself re-elected or, barring that, how to leave office with enough shirt on his back to fund a presidential library.
Even though the president in question has invaded Iraq and “fucked the country into a cocked hat,” Mamet is quick to point out that his Oval Office occupant is not George W. Bush. “He’s an incumbent who’s running for a second term,” the playwright protested in a New York magazine interview prior to the play’s Broadway debut in January. But just as Mamet’s 1997 film satire Wag the Dog would seem to have been inspired by William Jefferson Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, there is something of W’s uninformed, seat-of-the-pants approach to the presidency in Mamet’s Charles Smith, who in other ways resembles Bush not at all. This is especially true at the Lyric, where, under Daniel Gidron’s lively direction, the character is portrayed not by some squinting, simian cowboy but by that patrician-looking master of comic timing Richard Snee, on whose dapper person the character’s crude, utterly pragmatic corruption sits more amusingly.
Okay, November is no American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross, in which all-American greed and venality get a more pointed treatment and Mamet’s pronounced, staccato rhythms constitute a more potent poetry. But the outrageous little scenario — in which Smith, abetted by a slickly craven chief adviser (the unflappable Will McGarrahan), tries to hit up the turkey industry for $200 million, incites the Native American leader of the Micmac nation to violence, and engages in a war of wills with his lesbian liberal speechwriter (an appealingly groggy Adrianne Krstansky), who comes armed with an agenda of her own — is as provocatively hilarious as it is politically incorrect. And clocking in at less than two hours, it does not grind its alarming featherweight premise into the ground. Besides, I’m all for changing the Thanksgiving entree from turkey to tuna — could we sear it the way Mamet does the prez?
Martha Mitchell put her marriage where her mouth was, and she paid for it. Although the whistle-blowing wife of Nixon’s Attorney General had her long, loud moment of 1970s fame, complete with Life and New York magazine covers, the blabbermouth Cassandra of Watergate died young and is all but forgotten today. In Jodi Rothe’s Martha Mitchell Calling (presented by Nora Theatre Company at Central Square Theater through November 9), Annette Miller, flouncing around in a pink peignoir, her coiffure a pile of lacquered curls, her loose lips attached to a pink Princess telephone, brings the Arkansas-born matron who sank Nixon — and, in the process, her own husband — to vivacious, brave, and bibulous life for another 100 minutes.
