POTUS – 22 March 2025

POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive at City Gate Productions utilized a talented cast of diverse women to shatter the glass ceiling of masculinity, while also being introspective about how women can inadvertently uphold it. The women in this play were not a united front who supported each other, no matter what. This room full of women was also a room full of judgment. Everyone wanted power and each had resorted to her own way of attempting to claim it. Power hungry, and vicious, these women, like the POTUS they abhorred, never questioned the optics of their actions or the effects of their actions on others. All of them demonstrated intensity and commitment, yet they also all demonstrated incompetence. Through the end, their strength prevailed, yet at the end, it was clear that none of them would be running the world anytime soon, because the world is also, frightfully, intense and incompetent.

Casting choices at City Gate Productions were dead on, each representing a different stereotype about women while also transcending their caricatures into fully fleshed out human characters we could care about. Dressing stage crew as interns/press secretaries and creating unique on stage space for each location were beautiful touches that, in conjunction with the Bitch Beats Playlist, kept the continuity seamless and kept the audience engaged through necessary transitions and resets. Lighting was less of a storytelling element and a little more practical at times, which was really what this production needed given that the staging was so elaborate and had so much going on at any given moment, that dramatic lighting would have made it harder to know where to look. In the end, these tangible moments of struggle represented women’s fight for power and liberation as everyone’s fight – from the slutty farm girl from Iowa to the First Lady of the United States. The fight choreography itself felt a little forced— in particular the throwing of the Alice Paul bust did not look anywhere near convincing enough to knock someone out. This was a moment where lighting and sound could have supported a little better.

Ultimately, the show pulled off an incredible feat at a time like this— it gave the audience permission to laugh at presidential failures, when lately they make a lot of Americans want to cry and tear their hair out. We need this kind of relief and POTUS really gave it to us. It was also a great reminder how many people it takes for a government to actually do anything. Behind every position of power are people who have their sights set on something greater and therefore have something greater at stake. It was a nice reminder that people in the White House do care. They may not be the names and faces that we know in our households, but they are there, looking ahead to a better, or, as playwright Selina Fillinger would say, “cunty” dawn tomorrow.

I attended this performance on a press pass through special arrangement with City Gate Productions.