Presidential election years bring out some amazing takes on the current scene, and the University of Illinois’ Theatre Department this fall pays tribute to the event with 44 Plays for 44 Presidents. This two-hour dash through 250 years of executive history ranges from amazingly perceptive short sketches to mini-portraits that sound like the authors have done no research and substituted incoherent ramblings.
Yes, “authors” is the word, and they are: Andrew Bayiates, Sean Benjamin, Genevra Gallo-Bayiates, Chloe Johnston, and Karen Weinberg. So many minds on the same theme can create a variable product, and that is exactly the problem with 44 Plays for 44 Presidents. The play starts well, but the sections on James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams are insulting segments that make little sense. Ok, I know Millard Fillmore jokes are always going to be around, but to belittle his significant contribution to the Comprise of 1850 is a severe disservice to American history.
It is amazing that a script can capture so much of Woodrow Wilson, and yet miss everything on Chester Arthur and Herbert Hoover. The section on Andrew Johnson comes off as a mindless series of peripatetic verbal fluctuations that have nothing to do with his role in Reconstruction. This is the story of the stories: some good ideas followed by idiotic stage images that serve our history to audiences as insulting parodies.
Director Robert Quinlan (left) keeps his cast of seven students on-task and at high energy, which is needed when the written material is so thin. Note — one presidential portrait is silent (really, I am not making this up). Dealing with characters who are often scripted as caricatures is a challenge to any director trying to maintain the integrity of a production. Here is a play that almost shines with a young, high-energy cast that can ignore the obvious flaws of the script. If there is a case to be made for this sometimes fascinating, but constantly frustrating piece of often carelessly written portraits of our Chief Executives, director Quinlan may have made it.
44 Plays for 44 Presidents will continue in the Studio Theatre at Urbana’s Krannert Center:
Thursday–Saturday, October 11–13, at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, October 14, 3:00 p.m.
For further information go here, or call 333-6280.