Tim Koll

From Politiko

DETAILS

Politiko by Ghost River Theatre
Big Secret Theatre
Thursday, May 8 - Saturday, May 17

More in: Theatre

Find It...

Big Secret Theatre

In 1992, a Hollywood studio optioned Aaron Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men before it ever saw a single stage production. It did have a lengthy run on a Broadway stage before the film’s release, establishing then-struggling Sorkin as an intelligent, commercially viable, politically minded playwright and screenwriter. With Politiko, Jason Patrick Rothery seems to be attempting to channel Sorkin, and he’s successful to a certain extent.

Like A Few Good Men, Politiko is practically on its knees begging for a film adaptation. However, Rothery hasn’t quite nailed Sorkin’s narrative concision. Politiko is a bloated, unwieldy three-hour beast that ultimately collapses under the sheer scope of its subject matter. Combined with some trite design choices, Politiko fails to be as intellectual or heavy-hitting as Rothery probably would have liked.

The play tells the story of Brock Olyphant (Geoffery Ewert), a Conservative journalist-cum-character assassin-cum-Democrat and analogue for David Brock (a now-Democrat political pundit). At the play’s outset, Olyphant has written a book smearing the name of Anita Hill, a former attorney-advisor to Clarence Thomas, a Conservative Supreme Court justice who she was suing for sexual harassment. The book is so influential that it makes Olyphant very popular in Conservative circles, and he becomes a key player in the clandestine manipulation of President Bill Clinton’s myriad scandals.

Following distinct narrative threads across themes of conspiracy, media corruption, conservative and democratic hypocrisy, Olyphant’s homosexuality and troublesome loopholes in American jurisprudence, Rothery is very careful to leave no topic undiscussed. What this gives way to, however, is a distended, unfocused story with no emotional hook, an unclear message and one too many scenes in which characters exchange four-line zingers at the speed of sound.

Despite its flaws, Rothery’s script is smart and well-researched (if extremely fictionalized), and the production is uniformly well performed. Strangely, this is in direct opposition to the design esthetic, which is so juvenile and slapdash it’s distracting. Hanging behind the stage for the entire production are three mud-covered flags: a Star-Spangled Banner bookended by hastily painted democratic and republican standards. The lighting is occasionally manipulated to make the flags appear as if in tatters, and innocuous, silhouetted Polaroids are painted to the sides of the cross-shaped stage. If this weren’t enough, the political musings of known intellectual dynamos Eminem, Green Day and Rage Against the Machine pollute the air pre-show and during intermission. These esthetic choices detract from the otherwise restrained script and create a context that makes Rothery’s arguments awfully hard to take seriously.

Specific grievances aside, the major problem with Politiko is the bloated narrative. Every other issue the performance suffers from would be easy to overlook if the script was cut by an hour and tightened around a single narrative thread, rather than sprawling out over six or seven. As it is, Politiko falls short of the elevated political commentary it’s shooting for, defining itself as strictly amateur instead.