Voting No on "November"

Politics, or at least political satire, makes particularly strange bedfellows as foul-mouthed David Mamet and frolic-making Nathan Lane have teamed up to create November, a comedy about a bumbling White House incumbent trying, by whatever means necessary, to be reelected president. And I made an uneasy voyeur of their goings-on.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a Mamet fan. I even once had “a date” with him. An old boyfriend gave me the phone number of a playwright pal of his when I moved to Chicago for a short time in the early ‘70s. I called and the pal offered to show me around town one evening, introducing me to the Art Institute of Chicago and the deep-dish pleasure of the original Pizzeria Uno on Ohio Street. I never saw him again after that; I was stunned when I later saw Sexual Perversity in Chicago and realized it had been written by my tour guide.

Lane is even more beloved in my household. My pit-musician husband K played in the orchestras of the 1990s’ revivals of Guys and Dolls and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Lane’s onstage antics in those shows, particularly in Forum, cracked K up almost every night and we have made a point of seeing just about everything that Lane has done since then. But K decided to pass on November. That seemed strange to me at first because K is also something of a political junkie. But, after seeing the show, it occurred to me that may have been why he passed on it.

November tells the story of Charles Smith, a hapless and unpopular president whose poll numbers are “lower than Gandhi's cholesterol.” He and his adviser, a wry Dylan Baker, scheme about how they can stay in office and their plan ropes in Laurie Metcalf’s comically earnest speechwriter Clarice Bernstein, a lesbian with a bad cold and a good cause; a representative of the turkey industry played by Ethan Phillips and a disgruntled Native American played by Michael Nichols. The seemingly ubiquitous director Joe Mantello puts them through their paces nicely and the equally ubiquitous set designer Scott Pask recreates a recognizable, and yet amusing, version of the Oval Office. As one would expect from Mamet, there are lots of undeleted expletives and no political correctness—every group and every political issue gets skewered. And as one would expect from Lane, there are lots and lots of laughs.

And yet the whole thing seemed kind of pointless to me. It wasn’t that the situations were so ridiculously silly; I loved “Wag the Dog,” the equally silly 1997 film satire that Mamet co-wrote about a president who tries to divert attention from a sex scandal by invading Albania. And it wasn’t even that so many of the jokes were predictable in a Borscht Belt kind of way; Mel Brooks was sitting across from me and although he was clearly aware that people were looking at him to gauge his response, I caught him nodding his head a couple of times in apparent "ta-da" recognition of the shtick. I think it was that the show’s underlying messages that politicians can be puerile and that democracy is important seem superfluous coming in the midst of an historic campaign.

Mamet has been campaigning hard for November, giving almost as many interviews as Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama or John McCain and even maintaining a blog in the voice of his presidential character (click here to read it). But for me, there’s no contest: November can’t compete with the drama, the inspiration or even the humor of the real thing.