Presidential Pratfalls.('November')(Theater review)

A professional skeptic and an inspired word jockey, David Mamet can lay claim to the same connoisseurship of human folly as H. L. Mencken, who once observed that, in America, "only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night." Mamet's new Oval Office satire, "November" (well directed by Joe Mantello, at the Ethel Barrymore), is a hilarious demonstration of the fact that we live in an age of equality: all classes are criminal.

As the curtain rises on "November," the President of the United States, Charles H. P. Smith (Nathan Lane), who is on the eve of losing his bid for a second term (his numbers are "lower than Gandhi's cholesterol"), asks his trusted aide Archer Brown (the expert Dylan Baker) what has happened to his public support. "Why, why?" he moans. "You've fucked the country into a cocked hat," Archer replies. (The guffaws from the audience acknowledge our outrage and disillusion with our own current leaders.) For farcical purposes, Mamet is quick to add financial desperation to Smith's woes. In the last days of his election campaign, Smith has no money for TV ads. He has no money for a Presidential library or to guarantee his own future; even his security guards have gone walkabout.

At once a barbarian, a bully, and an idiot ("I always felt that I'd do something memorable--I just assumed it'd be getting impeached," he says), Smith brings oxygen to Mamet's rhetorical brilliance--so much that Mamet seems almost giddy with pleasure as he makes his cretinous creation squirm. Bombast is Smith's defense; he has a good line in homophobic and racist vitriol. In a telephone conversation with the hulking chief of the Native American Micmac Nation (Michael Nichols)--"His wife died hunting a fuckin walrus, and it's not on the card," Smith says, looking up from the phone and his blue prompt card--he manages to offend the chief to the point where he threatens to come to Washington to exact revenge for Smith's "hate crime." "I CAN'T SAY I CARE," Smith brays down the line. "You know why? Because I can't be convicted of crimes. I can resign tomorrow and my Vice-President . . . what's his name? . . . will pardon me for crimes yet uninvented. Yes, while you, 'Tonto,' are on a plane to nowhere. And I hope your second wife gets eaten by a walrus." He adds:

I'll tell the Secret Service to come by and put you on the piggyplane to Prybschych fuckin Bulgaria with a priceless view of the Bumfuck Mountains, 'cept you will not see them, being encased in sixteen cubic feet of concrete, 'til the flesh molts on your body and falls in a tidy pile around your fucking, fucking "terrorist" ass. Now you talk.

As the heavyset and hectoring President, Nathan Lane is as good as I've ever seen him. Except for a little swishy lapse at the finale as he scurries to evade the Micmac chief, who really is on the warpath, Lane is in fine, frenetic macho masquerade here, and his camp bravado works well for Smith, who is a hollow drum making a loud noise. Orchestrated with Lane's pitch-perfect timing, the poetry of Mamet's pugnacity--with all its half notes of contempt, rage, and terror--really swings. "Pee fucken ess," Smith blurts out, on learning that his loyal lesbian speechwriter, Clarice Bernstein (the superb Laurie Metcalf), has spent her vacation in China, adopting a baby. "What in the world do you think all these cute lil' Chinese baby girls are gonna do when they grow up, having eaten our food, learned to play the cello, bested all the white children at math, and slurped up all the jobs, under affirmative action? . . . THESE LITTLE FUCKEN BENEDIK ARNOLDS, seeded, seeded here . . . by a wily Oriental nation." With his bowwow belligerence, Lane is a kind of pint-sized Jackie Gleason, roaring and retreating at the same time. For the audience, it's bliss on toast.

"You can straighten a worm," Mark Twain joked, "but the crook is in him and only waiting." So it proves with Mamet's ...