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At MUCCC, the Multi-Cultural Community Center in Rochester, usually a place for self indulgent look-how-much-we-suffer sex relationship plays, a play of robust satirical consequence, "November" by David Mamet, fried the current state of corrupted American politics on the theatrical skillet.
An important effect of an opening beat for a successful stage production is to prove that it is there, from the word go. Taking place in the Oval Office, a clearly incompetent crook and unpopular President, Charles P. Smith (David Woodworth), will do everything he can to win a second term, raking in the dough from whoever he can when he can. Woodworth opened the play at a fever pitch, boarding on burlesque, spurred on by friends in the audience with bursts of laughter, leaving the actor with no credibility that he was the President in the Oval office. The shock that the American people were in the hands of a not only an incompetent President, but a thief tarnishing the Oval Office, who was also a klutz – well that's funny, and eminently satirical. Woodworth ultimately picked up the cudgels and went with it with increasingly hilarious comic skill and timing.
President Smith's attorney Archer, played with a quietly laid back sleeze of common sense by Rick Starpoli, used carefully phrased attempts to lead the Chief of State back into reality. President Smith is a loser. Archer reminds him that his poll ratings are at an all time low, and that he is better off getting out of it altogether. "Everybody hates you", he says, "go home". Smith, though, will take every opportunity to rake in big bucks, including selling pardons. When a Representative of the National Association of Turkey Manufacturers, played by Ed Scutt, with a worrisome manipulative urgency of a small time hustler written all over his face, urges the President to pardon a Turkey, Smith escalates the pardon to include all Turkeys by the pound. It will take a Turkey payoff in the millions to get the President to make a pardon. That's when the production took on its full measure of uproarious satire.
Bernstein, Smith's lesbian secretary, played with exhausted savvy by Gretchen Woodworth, who has just come back from China and paid for her adopted baby with a credit card, wants the President to marry her and her present female partner. President Smith accuses her of having a "one track" mind. Bernstein tells him to "fuck off". Their exchange took on a vaudeville routine of political hanky-panky, that reached its zenith with the sudden explosive energy in a conference call with Chief Dwight Crackle of the Micmac nation on the National Sea Shore preserve, Nantucket. Smith wants Crackle to do him a "favor" by declaring that the original Thanksgiving was celebrated "not with a Turkey, but a Cod Fish". When Chief Crackle (Rich Forster) suddenly appeared, with a scene grabbing shock of requisite intensity, wearing a wide black band of paint across his brow, the one-hand-washes-the-other deals in the Oval Office came to a head with an outrageous and widely hilarious flourish. Forster literally turned the play into a jam session. "Sir?" Crackle declares, "just pardon me, give me Nanturket Island, you 'n' me'll build a casino". "Jesus, I love this country," President Smith replies.
I remember well how President Bush told his fat cat backers with a smile at a dinner on television that they were his "constituency". The big time backers applauded with a laugh that revealed it all. "November" paints a wildly hilarious take on the political corruption that consumes America. This production of "November" hit the mark with a vengence and was a welcome relief from the docile Rochester theatrical scene.
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