A political strategist and a social-media influencer find themselves trapped in a hotel room with a beauty-pageant winner.
No, it’s not the setup for a joke; it’s the premise of Lauren Gunderson’s play, The Taming, which is currently running at Sparks’ Restless Artists Theatre through Sept. 8.
The play would appear to have been inspired by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, just as Gunderson—a rapier-witted, prolific playwright who is a master at parody—has done with some of the other plays by the Bard. But aside from the title, really nothing about this political farce resembles the Elizabethan play. For starters, it’s acutely, painfully American.
Written in 2013, during the 16-day federal government shutdown that occurred that October, this play does what many of us who remember that time wanted to do: Force the two warring factions to sit in a room together and work out their nonsense.
Set at a Washington, D.C., hotel where the finals for the Miss America Pageant are taking place, the story opens as Katherine Chelsea Hartford (played by Alexandra Jobe), the reigning Miss Georgia, introduces herself and performs a rousing, full rendition of “America the Beautiful” to the dismay of the judges who are concerned with brevity. Katherine’s overly loud and enthusiastic display of love for her country, made visible with her handmade cape of stitched-together flags, is the catalyst for the conflict ahead.
Contrasted against this utter devotion are Patricia (Wendy Feign), a domineering political operative working for an increasingly powerful and corrupt GOP senator; and Bianca (Rachel Douglass), an insufferable, far-left social-media influencer with a penchant for activism on behalf of little-known (and little-cared-for) species—in this case, the rare panda shrew. (OK, so there are two nods to the Shakespeare play.) In short, the women are archetypes who represent everything abhorrent about today’s political parties.
The two women, who have come to the Miss America Pageant to take advantage of the platform for personal gain, wake up the next morning in an unfamiliar hotel room, missing certain items of clothing and their phones. The room is locked on the inside, and to make matters worse, they’re both stuck listening to the ridiculous political ideas of the other. Then, out pops Katherine, Miss Georgia herself, to explain: She roofied them. It was the only way to get them to shut up and do what she wants them to do. It’s simple, really—just call a constitutional convention (perfectly legal and provided for by the founding fathers), and fix everything that’s outdated about the troublesome document (and that’s a lot), so Katherine can win the Miss America crown. Once that’s done, they’re free to go.
As you can imagine, Patricia and Bianca are too outraged by their circumstances and each other to give this loon what she wants, but Katherine is a lot cleverer than she seems. And she seems to know a lot more about the Constitution than anyone else in the room.
This soon leads us to a dream sequence in which the three women become founding fathers themselves: Patricia is James Madison, considered the father of the Constitution; Bianca is his foil, Charles Pinckney, a slave-owning Southern gentleman; and Katherine is Ben Franklin, whose influential intellect brings reason to an otherwise confounding process.
Though the stereotypes are strong in this one—eye-rollingly so—and somewhat dated, they’re still, sadly, relevant. The hypocritical conservatives preaching family values can’t keep it in their pants, and the liberals fight so hard for the most trivial issues that they look ridiculous and accomplish little of real importance. Yet the character of Katherine turns the blonde-beauty-queen-from-rural-Georgia stereotype on its head as she manages to outmaneuver Patricia and Bianca with her keen wit, relentless optimism and sound logic.
As Katherine, Jobe is a wonder, managing to somehow be both a dimwit and a genius at once, and delivering some of best lines of the play with razor-sharp accuracy and comedic timing. Feign is a nice choice for the part of Patricia, with her raspy voice that nicely conveys the character’s masculine energy and accustomed pushiness and intolerance. Douglass makes Bianca more annoying than necessary, and she struggles to deliver lines effectively—clumsily racing through them by rote rather than conveying the words’ meaning—though it’s only fair for me to say that I caught a final dress rehearsal, while the kinks were still being worked out.
Despite the play’s age, its ideas about creating the America we want bring a fresh and interesting perspective to the chaos of today’s political showmanship. I left feeling strangely optimistic about what could be—if only we could all care as much as Katherine does.
Restless Artists Theatre Company, at 295 20th St., in Sparks, presents The Taming. Shows are at 6:30 p.m., Monday, Aug. 25 and Sept. 8; 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, Sept. 5 and 6; and 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 7. Tickets are $25 at the door, or $20 (plus fees) in advance with discounts. For tickets and information, visit rattheatre.com.