When I first started working at a certain Southern institution of learning in the mid-1960s, there was a traditional Spring ceremony called “The Order of the Chair.” The chair was a toilet placed on the main quadrangle in front of the chapel. There on a warm Spring day, members would be inducted into the order as a recognition of some particularly disgusting act they performed at some fraternity party or other public event. These acts involved vomit or other body fluids or some virtuosic act of public sex. The Order of the Chair didn’t last into the politically active late 1960s. Indeed, the young woman who seemed most actively involved in the ceremony morphed into one of the leading campus firebrands. The order of the chair was intended to elicit laughter through its tastelessness and shock value. 

I thought about the Order of the Chair as I watched Sarah Fillinger’s farce POTUS: OR, BEHIND EVERY GREAT DUMBASS ARE SEVEN WOMEN TRYING TO KEEP HIM ALIVE at Steppenwolf. Fillinger was twenty-eight when she wrote the play. Unlike most plays, POTUS moved to Broadway without the usual tryout period in a regional theatre or Off-Broadway. The producers had such faith in the play’s commercial potential that they moved it into the 1400 seat Shubert, which is usually the home of musicals. Susan Stroman, best known for musicals like THE PRODUCERS, directed a cast including veteran comediennes Julie White, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, and Vanessa Williams. Despite this star power, POTUS lasted only 121 performances.

 Why did Steppenwolf choose this Broadway flop? Perhaps the powers that be wisely saw an audience hunger for comedy in our terrifying times. Perhaps someone thought POTUS was good political satire. What bombs in New York doesn’t necessarily bomb in Chicago. POTUS has been a hit for the financially troubled theatre. 

In my six years of Chicago theatregoing, I have come to understand Steppenwolf’s style. Subtlety and elegant wit are out: they prefer the bludgeon to the rapier, shouting to rational dialogue. We certainly see this in their production of Selina Fillinger’s POTUS: Or, Behind Every Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (running through December 17). Actually, the title is a misnomer since the seven women almost manage to kill the president. If Fillinger’s thesis is that idiot males need bright, competent women in order to function, her play suggests otherwise. These seven foulmouthed women are incapable of constructive action.

We never see the president, an adulterous idiot with peculiar sexual tastes. We only see the women in his circle: his not-so-loving wife, his pregnant young mistress, his drug-dealing sister, his chief of staff, and his personal secretary. Also in the mix is an ambitious journalist who spends much of her time pumping large quantities of breast milk. As the detail suggests, Potus is full of tasteless anatomical jokes. The play is a farce, so it has lots of people running in and out of doors. Director Audrey Francis has wisely kept it at a breakneck pace. There were two understudies on at my performance of a play that requires tight ensemble work. There was lots of shouting and running around, but it seemed a bit sloppy. Farce requires clockwork precision.

There are some funny moments in the play, but on the whole Potus struck me as a theatrical version of The Order of the Chair. Most of the big laughs it elicited from the audience were from the shock value of its crude, sexual references. The first word of the show is a four letter word beginning with C repeated a number of times. The humor descends from that low point. It’s the kind of play an undergraduate might write after a few too many beers plus some other chemicals.

The young people in the audience with me loved its crass language. We are much in need of humor in our troubled times, but POTUS is a stew of cheap, tasteless gags.

THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, a clever, absorbing adult comedy now at TimeLine Theatre in Chicago, also had a limited run on Broadway despite the starriest cast possible (Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale). In his New York Times review, Jesse Green called the play, “terrifically engaging but not as smart as it thinks.” That may be a fair assessment, but the play is like a breath of fresh air, especially after POTUS.

The Lifespan of a Fact (written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell), is based on a 2012 non-fiction book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, who are also its central characters. In what we call “real life”, Harpers Magazine commissioned an essay from D’Agata on a Las Vegas teenager who jumped to his death from the top of a hotel. D’Agata presented this suicide as an expression of Las Vegas culture. Harpers turned down the essay because of D’Agata’s many divergences from the facts. He then submitted it to a small San Francisco-based journal, The Believer, who assigned a young college graduate intern, Jim Fingal, to fact check the essay. The fact checking and Fingal’s arguments with D’Agata went on for years. D’Agata’s and Fingal’s book on the experience, which prints D’Agaga’s essay with Fingal’s corrections and, in the margins, their arguments over the corrections, is an extended argument on fact vs. art. D’Agata claims that he doesn’t write articles (mere journalism). Because he sees himself as an essayist in the tradition of Thoreau, George Orwell, and Mary McCarthy, he claims a right to stretch the facts. Fingal believes that facts are facts. In our age of Fox News and “alternative facts,” the argument can be extended to journalism in general, particularly political journalism. We won’t get into what has happened to truth in politics in the age of George Santos. 

 The play condenses this extended argument into ninety exciting and amusing minutes of theatre. In addition to the D’Agata, a cynical and defensive writer who believes that a good story is more important than the details, and Fingal, a young Harvard graduate intern eager to prove his editorial ability, the play gives us an editor, Emily Penrose, who is intent on keeping her magazine alive in an era of dwindling, aging readership and declining ad sales. She believes D’Agata’s essay will bring in new, younger readers, but is also sensitive to the legal implications of D’Agata’s disregard of facts. 

I always worry about plays written by committees, but this one is constantly engrossing and full of genuine funny moments. THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT is more situation comedy than serious drama. Only D’Agata has a backstory that fleshes out is character, and given his talent for stretching the truth, one wonders if the backstory is even true. Fingal and the editor, Emily Penrose, don’t seem to have any life outside of the play.  The writers have wisely kept the play to ninety minutes, so it doesn’t stretch longer than the situation can bear. Some may find the non-committal ending frustrating.

The acting couldn’t be better. Timeline artistic director PJ Powers as the acerbic D’Agata and young Alex Benito Rodriguez as the eager beaver fact checker are equally matched adversaries. Juliet Hart is passionate as the editor caught in the middle of their argument. THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT is excellent entertainment. It reminded us writers of the love-hate relationship we have with the Jim Fingals of this world.