My one major complaint about Life After Bush is that, as sharp as its political slant remained throughout the evening, the play’s sense of theatricality was maddeningly inconsistent. The play featured occasional touches of meta-theatricality, and every time I saw one I kept waiting to see another sign. Life After Bush would turn far more heads if it used its own theatricality to make light of the theatricality of election cycles. The play that we do get always seems like a play and never like a lecture, but at many points it seemed like there was no consistent directorial vision for what exactly was supposed to be going on. Diamond and Sisk may have gotten a little caught up in their political motivations, and as a result, partially overlooked their much more essential theatrical responsibilities.
This kind of politics-first approach to political theater is exactly the kind of thing that politically-minded theater artists try to avoid like the plague. Yet Life After Bush is too intelligently written and cleverly constructed for that problem to seem all that egregious. Realizing that over 95% of the people who would attend an off-off-Broadway show in Soho would be liberal anyway, Diamond and Sisk accepted the fact that they’d be preaching to the choir and went with it. They’ve crafted an inspired, enlightening play out of that honesty. This kind of attitude towards theater will not expire on November 4, 2008. With any luck, it may even ripen.
Life After Bush, written, composed, produced and directed by Noah Diamond and Amanda Sisk; musical direction and arrangements by DJ Thacker; lighting design by Christopher Brown; sound design by Matthew Tennie; accompanied by David Hancock Turner. Photos by Tom Hubben and Tor-Evert Johansen
Starring Tarik Davis, Noah Diamond, Brian Louis Hoffman, Sadrina Johnson, Kim Moscaritolo, Avi Phillips, and Amanda Sisk.
Life After Bush is performed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 7 PM at the HERE Arts Center (145 Sixth Avenue). Tickets can be purchaed at HERE.org. The show runs through November 2, plus a special election night show beginning at 6 PM on November 4.
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