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Diehard fans of former President George W. Bush and his pals may want to take earplugs if they go see The Fourth Wall, a four-character comedy by A.R. Gurney (Love Letters, Sylvia), opening today and continuing weekends through Aug. 30 at the Tarpon Springs Cultural Center.
Originally written in 1992 during the presidency of the first Bush, Gurney updated the play a decade later so his characters aim their fiercest barbs at Bush No. 2.
The anti-Bush lines were likely a soothing tonic for distressed Democrats in 2002, but could make the play seem dated in 2009 were it not for new allegations of misconduct during the Bush II White House years.
Of course, the characters also lament the mediocrity of modern theater, the audience, the world and themselves with clever put-downs and a bombardment of literary allusions — Waiting for Godot, Streetcar Named Desire, A Doll's House, G.B. Shaw's version of Saint Joan — that recall a better and more substantial time.
Set in Buffalo, N.Y., in the early 2000s, The Fourth Wall centers on Peggy (Gail Eberhardt), a usually level-headed homemaker who has rearranged her living room so that all the furniture faces a blank wall and modified her conversations so they sound as though she's delivering lines in a play.
Her exasperated husband Roger (Benjamin Taylor) has called in Peggy's high school pal Julia (Lisa Obst) for help. He explains that Peggy started transforming the living room "right after the Supreme Court handed the election to Bush," went further when he gave tax cuts to the rich, and took it all the way when the president took the country to war.
Julia, who is very much a New York City girl, thinks that Peggy "doesn't have a plot" to her life and advises Roger to go along with Peggy's strange behavior in hopes she can work one out and get back to normal.
Julia turns the situation into a soap opera by making a pass at Roger, which he rejects; and Roger turns it into a sitcom by calling in a college drama professor, Floyd (Rich Aront), who begins critiquing the set and theorizing on the differences between life and theater, which turn out to be not so different after all.
From there, the actors play out scenes as characters playing characters in a play and as real people observing what is happening ... with an added touch of Broadway musical in the form of some Cole Porter numbers that seem to spontaneously emerge from the piano.
It sounds surrealistic, but it looks natural and logical as written by A.R. Gurney.
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