The Strangerer is a 90-minute attempt to murder Jim Lehrer that goes nowhere. The premise of a theater-loving, existential hero Bush is absurd, and the format of reinterpreting the first 2004 Presidential Debate only adds to the absurdity. What is the point of committing such a pointless, arbitrary act for the purposes of theater? The point, my fellow Americans, is that the premise of The Strangerer demands it, a fact of which playwright Mickie Maher was only too self-conscious.
This experimental work of meta-theater, which coyly plays with the fundamental conventions of theater and examines the theatricality of life outside the black box, has arrived Off-Broadway in New York on the strength of its almost unilateral raves by Chicago critics. Its fate will be a litmus test for the future of creativity in New York theater. For as enticing a labyrinth of themes as the play presents to theater-minded New Yorkers who know what they’re looking for, it will be an alienating, exhausting bore for just about anyone else.
The same was said, of course, when Waiting for Godot opened. The Strangerer also alludes to a particularly experimental production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that provided the fictional inspiration for this version of the Bush/Kerry debate. It’s a fitting parallel for a play that continues in the grand tradition of a Beckett/Albee baffler, a format that has drawn as much praise for its structural innovations as it has criticism for its obtuseness.
But the play’s got creativity up the wazoo to back up its weighty goals. It takes the presidential debate format, one of the most overtly staged and artificial contemporary theatrical practices, and turns it into a wildly unpredictable and constantly shape-shifting event. It inverts our commonly held beliefs about figures we've known for years. The absurdity of the evening raises the question: how far from The Strangerer does the subtext of an actual debate actually stray?
On the political end, it’s taken two of the most important world figures of the past decade—figures whose mannerisms have caused us to tune them out instead of challenge them—and forces us to listen to them speak as nakedly as possible. It’s the longest 90-minute play I’ve ever attended. No matter how aware you are of the intellectual nuances of the play, The Strangerer’s sheer banality in its first half begs you to tune out to some degree. The twist is that the actual dialogue of the play directly attacks the audience for doing just that. It’s very hard to tune out a mockingly narcoleptic Kerry (played by Maher himself) and a Bush (Guy Massey) who, despite using the same grammatical weaknesses we’ve heard for the past eight years, has explicitly promised to commit a murder before the night is over.
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