In the Oval Office of David Mamet's November, it's a few days before an election that seems likely to defeat the widely unpopular incumbent. There's no cash to buy television time, and the party committee isn't helping. But perhaps worse for this prez is that he's likely to leave office without enough money to set up a proper presidential library -- and his wife has designs on a White House sofa.
If you're on to those allusions to White House occupants and aspirants past and present, you'll laugh at November, getting its southeastern premiere at GableStage in a swing-state run that straddles Election Day 2008. It isn't that November is outrageously funny or particularly insightful, but that its jokes seem mostly the type you might hear from comics on TV (cable if you leave in all Mamet's signature f-word variations, and broadcast) or even from friends around a water cooler.
The biggest surprise, though, may be the relative restraint of Mamet's cynicism. Not that there aren't relatively easy but nevertheless amusing send-ups: gay marriage, Native American land claims and casinos, and the rightness or wrongness (and price) of pardoning turkeys at Thanksgiving time.
November had a January-to-July stint on Broadway this year with Nathan Lane as the president and Laurie Metcalf as a lesbian speechwriter. At GableStage in South Florida, those roles are filled ably by David Kwiat as President Charles Smith, who from certain angles and with certain vocal inflections brings to mind erstwhile '08 campaigner Ron Paul, and Stacy Schwartz as Clarise Bernstein, the speechwriter who returns from an adoption trip to China sniffling and coughing.
Schwartz's patriotic speech for Smith has some good lines, but the ones that seem most salient in the last days of the real campaign refer to America as a nation of "shade-tree inventors" lines penned by Mamet months before the advent of "Joe, the Plumber" in the world beyond theater.
Kevin Reilly gets laughs as the increasingly worried representative of the turkey industry, as does Dave Corey in a brief but loud role as a Native American. Deskside in the Oval Office is presidential aide Archer Brown, who habitually calls the president "Chucky," and here Wayne LeGette's readings seem inappropriately flat rather than pointed.
