November

HELL TO THE CHIEF The desperate Lane, left, seeks help from Baker.

Photograph: Scott Landis

In last week’s issue of TONY, the comedian Emo Philips shared his philosophy about stand-ups who work blue: “A comic who needs the f-word to get a laugh is like a martial-arts expert that needs a gun.” Pity David Mamet, then: a black-belt playwright who apparently feels so overmatched by the perfidy of American politics—the subject matter of his new comedy, November—that he must whip out the verbal equivalent of a machine gun. The f-word and variants thereof turn up 167 times in this brief farce; yet Mamet’s scattershot fusillade still hits no targets of consequence.

What Joe Mantello’s Broadway production has going for it is a tremendous comedic turn by Nathan Lane as President Charles Smith, a blustering blunderbuss who is up for reelection but has been abandoned by the leaders of his unnamed party. Cornered in the Oval Office—along with two key advisers, well played by Laurie Metcalf and Dylan Baker—Smith conceives a plan to extort money from the turkey industry. (Thanksgiving, inexplicably, seems to have moved up a month.) The play has been compared to a sitcom, but it is actually an attenuated sketch, larded with dated insults about various minorities—under the smug aegis of “political incorrectness”—and rarely taking off into the flights of comic absurdity that might justify its utter divorce from reality. Though sporadically amusing, November ultimately seems like an exercise in cynical apathy: a political comedy that, for all its profligate profanity, doesn’t give a fuck about anything.—Adam Feldman