The publicity for “N/A,” a two-hander that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Thursday, has been careful to point out that, despite all appearances, the N in the title is not Nancy Pelosi, and the A is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rather, the playwright, Mario Correa, argues in a program note that “N/A” is about a battle of “ideas and ideals,” which are “bigger than any one person (or even two).”
I vote nay on that proposition.
The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers, down to Pelosi’s golden Mace of the United States House of Representatives brooch and A.O.C.’s signature “Beso” red lipstick. The gimmick also gives Holland Taylor (as N) and Ana Villafañe (as A) tasty roles and a meaty conflict to sink their teeth into.
Correa frames that conflict as ideological, not personal. In five scenes starting with the 2018 midterms (when the Democrats win control of the House) and ending with the 2022 midterms (when they lose it), he broadly traces their seesawing power.
At first the seesaw is profoundly unbalanced. We meet A just after her surprise primary victory against a machine Democrat and N’s handpicked successor. (In real life, that would be Joseph Crowley.) Though still a savvy street fighter, A is awed and a little cowed by the Washington she discovers. “So, yeah, we are not in Kansas anymore,” she tells her Instagram Live followers, invoking a surprising image of fragility.
By then, N has been in Congress for 31 years. Having lost the House speakership when “that man” was elected, she intends to reclaim it. Her favorite number — the only one that counts for a parliamentarian — is 218, the number of votes needed to get work done. Anything shy of that is zero.
So even though she and A find that they agree on many policy goals, especially ending the inhumane treatment of migrants at the southern border, they are irreconcilably opposed about how to achieve them. N wheedles, calls in chits, holds her nose and plays footsie with lobbyists, and if she doesn’t have the votes to pass a bill, she doesn’t waste her political capital trying. Naturally, A wants to blow that all up.
But the conflict that Correa means to foreground as political keeps falling out of its frame. At their first meeting, N, stung by A’s win and her anti-establishment rhetoric, interviews her as if for a job, always backfooting her. The younger woman, she argues, is naïve, more interested in “holy pictures” — meaningless poses of goodness — than in the dirty work of actual change. A, at first delicately but over the months with more and more steel, claps back with lectures on the moral sclerosis of incumbency, the corruption of the favor economy.
“It’s the job of our leaders to lead,” she thunders.
“Not over the cliff, it isn’t,” N answers.
However policy-oriented the relationship was in Washington, onstage it becomes personal despite the playwright’s intentions. And happily so, because plays, performed by real people, can’t help but be personal too. In any case, Correa is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut. As N says, in aphoristic mode, “The end of every fight is the beginning of the next.”
That ouroboros gets tiring fast, or would, had the actors not long since taken over the play’s agenda. They are, after all, soul-barers, not wonks, and since few of us really know what these women are like beyond their social media images, the fire of imagination is called for.
Correa is very good at feeding that fire with snappy kindling, or at least at feeding N’s. On the phone with one of her 10 grandchildren, she explains that the strikingly tall Eleanor Roosevelt Barbie she’s given the child for Christmas does not need to fit in a toy car: “Eleanor Roosevelt Barbie doesn’t drive — she is driven.”
A great comic actress, Taylor has long since proved she can deliver lines like that; she did something similar in “Ann,” her one-woman show about Ann Richards that ran upstairs, in the Vivian Beaumont Theater, in 2013. Eleven years later, her technique is so refined it completely disappears: She no longer seems to be delivering the lines but letting them deliver her.
Villafañe, a blast in “On Your Feet!” and a hoot in “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” has to work toward the same ends through different means, just as A does with N. But because Correa’s position-paper version of the character is not as verbally compelling as the real woman — you tune out her repetitive rhetoric quite quickly — that means giving her a vivid physical life. And though Diane Paulus’s swift staging, on a set of no particular interest, promotes that by keeping the character moving the whole time, making A’s growth as a power in Washington palpable, it’s impossible to balance a play that is so heavily tipped toward the funnier character, the one who holds all the cards.
Or used to hold them; the imaginary Pelosi, like the real one, eventually gives up her gavel. Today’s House is very different — younger, more diverse, more divided — than the one she presided over. Indeed, part of the reason “N/A” so favors N may be valedictory. The playwright, in his program note, movingly thanks another House lioness, Constance A. Morella. A moderate Republican who served in Congress from 1987 to 2003, she gave him, a Chilean immigrant not even yet a citizen, a job at 18.
In that case at least, the favor economy worked.
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