A.C.T.’s November

Last weekend I went up to San Francisco to check out ACT’s November. It was my first time seeing a show on The American Conservatory Theater stage, although I had seen David Copperfield make a cadillac disappear there about seven years ago. It was also the first Mamet piece I’ve seen staged, and was a great introduction to his witty, rapid-fire dialogue. I say “staged” because around the same time last year I attended a wonderful reading of November here at UC Santa Cruz, in which my professor Danny Scheie played the lead role – but I’ll get to that in a moment.

This play is a farce about fictional American president Charles Smith (Andrew Polk) and takes place just before election day. His current term as president has gone so badly that re-election is all but out of the question, and he now realizes that he has no money or source of income for his bleak post-presidential life. (Though there are clear connections to George W., the fictional president Smith, sadly, comes off as a bit smarter than the real one). Smith and his stone-faced assistant Archer Brown (Anthony Fusco) jump on the opportunity to black mail A Representative of the National Association of Turkey and Turkey By-products Manufacturers (Manoel Felciano) who comes wishing to endow his turkeys with the annual pre-Thanksgiving presidential pardon. The deal Smith dreams up is that the turkey rep will give him two million dollars, or he will pardon every turkey in America. Throw some much-needed morality into the play in the form of gifted lesbian speech writer Clarice Bernstein (Rene Augesen) and what is created is a wonderfully concocted piece which make the idiocy and corruption that goes on behind closed doors palatable by throwing it in the ring of the ridiculous.

Watching this play I realized that a Mamet comedy is no easy task. The difficulty lies in the fact that it is both totally absurd and completely realistic at the same time, which gives the actors a very difficult task. They have to be naturalistic without being boring, and be funny without being campy. This brings me back to my professor Danny Scheie. When he played Smith he was, as he generally is, outrageous and hilarious. However this level of comedic ridiculousness did not take the part of the president to a dishonest or unrealistic place. Because I was laughing at, and sometimes with, his character I found myself connecting more and more to him, the other actors, and the showing its self.

What was missing from ACT’s production was a real sense of comedy coming from the central figure of the play, president Smith. It seemed that the actor, Andrew Polk, was tied to the realism of the play, and the production suffered because of this. There were many comic lines which were brushed aside for the sake of naturalism (and even Mametism), and if a little reality was sacrificed in order to create fuller comic moments this play would have been much more engaging from as a whole.

One thing I did really love about this play was its style and look. The way the oval office was set up and lit, and the and the hint of exaggeration added to the costumes, make-up, and hair (especially the hair) complemented the show’s strange but perfect balance between complete verisimilitude, and total absurdity.

For this play I’d say: This is a finely crafted, well done production of probably the best Thanksgiving play there is, but because of a lack of focus on comedy I never found myself really engaging with the production.

“November” closed Nov. 22, at ACT’s American Conservatory Stage, 405 Geary Street San Francisco