`Strangerer' puts Dubya at the debate podium again
By Tony Adler
Special to the Tribune
Published March 2, 2007
It's an odd experience to open a door and find George W. Bush standing on the other side of it. Odd even when you know it's not Bush at all, but Guy Massey, who plays the president in Theater Oobleck's "The Strangerer," running now through March 25 at the Chopin Theatre.
Massey showed up in costume, right down to the American flag lapel pin, to be interviewed about the show. He's had some experience playing Dubya, after all--in an earlier Oobleck production "The Passion of the Bush" (about his religious and Texas backgrounds). In "The Strangerer" he portrays the president participating in the first of the 2004 campaign debates. Iraq II is in full swing and Bush II is squaring off against Sen. John Kerry at the University of Miami Convocation Center in Coral Gables, Fla., arguing foreign policy while PBS's Jim Lehrer asks the questions.
Yet where the most-reported oddity of the actual debate was a suspicious looking bulge in the back of Bush's suit jacket, things here get, well, stranger and strangerer.
Or, as playwright Mickle Maher sees it, truer and truer. Maher (who plays Kerry) has made it his business to bring out subtext the candidates refused to acknowledge. "My principal frustration with the debate, as a viewer and a voter and a citizen and a new father," he says, "was just that
were talking and debating while so many bombs were being dropped and thousands and thousands of people were dead from the actions taken--and that was never even allowed as a subject in this debate about foreign policy. That was the most appalling thing to me: Why isn't that a talking point?"
More at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/stage/chi-0703020201mar02,1,2417919.story
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