November: Political drama centred around a stupid, racist American president, balances between credible and mere caricature.
Todd Duckworth as The President. Photo David Pasho.
United States President Charles Smith, the centrepiece of David Mamet’s nasty and funny November, is stupid, venal, and a racist. Trailing badly in the last week before Election Day, he’d do anything to win a second term in office. If he loses the election, his one desire is a presidential libary although its doubtful he’s read a book in decades. Yet reprehensible as he is, like a train wreck you can hardly take your eyes off him.
That’s in part because playwright Mamet has created an oddly compelling character modeled to some extent on George W. Bush (the play premiered on Broadway in 2008, the year that Barrack Obama unseated Bush).
It’s also because Todd Duckworth, who plays Smith in this quick-footed production, has discovered enough tics and absurdities in this tempestuous, crude and wholly self-serving dud of a leader — he doesn’t know the difference between Iran and Iraq and equates the evils of slavery with the evils of disco music — to keep him buoyant, balanced between credible and mere caricature.
Smith, presumably through dumb luck, has a sharp-minded chief of staff named Archer Brown (Steve Martin, who makes the most of a thinly sketched character). Archer’s seen it all and, ruthless, does what he has to do to keep Smith mostly between the lines.