Three days before the first preview performance of her first Broadway production, the playwright Selina Fillinger perched in the middle of the empty mezzanine of the Shubert Theater, peering down upon the set. “I’m sorry, I can’t look away,” she said. “It’s like a crew of fairies and angels, just making things happen.”Down below, the crew building the set was buzzing around a re-creation of a women’s restroom in the White House — star-studded carpet, cream and gold wallpaper, coin-operated tampon dispenser. “It’s so specific,” Fillinger said of the tampon machine. “And of course it would be paid.”Fillinger’s new play, “POTUS,” is a comedy about seven women in the inner circle of the president of the United States. It takes place on a day when the president’s various sex and sexism-related scandals are blowing up so spectacularly that the women in his life are prompted to take increasingly desperate measures to keep his administration afloat.The idea began developing in Fillinger’s mind during Donald Trump’s run for office. “I was fascinated by the women in his orbit,” she said. And she noticed that, with every new headline about a man abusing women — Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein — “there was always at least one woman, right there at the elbow.”ImageThe stars of the play include, from left, Vanessa Williams, Julianne Hough, Julie White, Suzy Nakamura, Lilli Cooper and Rachel Dratch.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe result is a farce about women’s relationship to male power — how they access it, what they are allowed to do with it, and who else they subjugate along the way. “I love farces, but they typically rely on sexist and racist tropes,” Fillinger said. So she wrote a comedy about women struggling to adhere to the rules of the patriarchy, which “literally causes a farce on a day-to-day basis.”In crafting the play’s characters, Fillinger wanted to create the most combustible combination — among them are the president’s weary first lady, Margaret (Vanessa Williams); his perfectionist personal secretary, Stephanie (Rachel Dratch); and his cocky convicted-felon sister, Bernadette (Lea DeLaria) — and dropped them onto a White House set that rotates dizzily like a turntable as the crisis mounts.As for the president, he is a cipher, appearing in the play only as limbs jutting occasionally into view. “I was interested in purposefully and consciously failing the Bechdel test,” Fillinger said, referring to the challenge popularized by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel that a movie ought to feature two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. “If you take the man out of the room, patriarchy still exists and we still play by its rules.”Also, she found the president character too tedious to actually write. “He’s an amalgamation of so many presidents,” she said, “and also several men that I’ve done group projects with in high school.” The play’s full title is “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.”When Trump announced his candidacy, Fillinger was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. Now, at 28, she is building a notable body of work, and her farce is being lifted straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout. Even as she prepared to open “POTUS” in New York, she was writing for the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show” in Los Angeles; she joined the writer’s room for its third season and has managed both jobs by flying cross-country and back, sometimes every weekend.When I met Fillinger on a Monday morning, she was jet-lagged and unfed in a plum jumpsuit and pale purple face mask, a look she described as “chic mechanic.” We talked until she politely announced that she should probably locate the nearest Starbucks instant oatmeal or “I might pass out.” When I asked about her relationship to her own success, she said, “I really didn’t expect it,” then joked of an alternate life: “I thought I was going to spend my early 20s WWOOFing or whatever.” (WWOOFing: visiting farms through the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program.) “It has been a dream, and also, it has been a tremendously steep learning curve.”ImageNews stories have become a tool for Fillinger, seen her on the “POTUS” set, who then takes them into unexpected directions.Credit...Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesFILLINGER WAS RAISED in Eugene, Ore., “by hippies in the woods,” she said. Her father is a sustainability-focused architect, her mother is a social worker who works as a partner in her father’s firm, and Fillinger grew up without television, except for the occasional “Sesame Street” episode and a VHS box set of Charlie Chaplin movies she watched when she was sick. “I read a ton and I wrote a lot of stories and I played a lot of pretend in the woods next to my house,” she saidBy: Amanda Hess
Title: The Playwright Making a Farce of the Patriarchy
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/theater/potus-selina-fillinger-broadway.html
Published Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:00:04 +0000
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