What does political theatre look like in the age of Trump? The specimens, so far, have been scattershot. There were the eerily relevant works that just happened to be ready to go: Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sweat,” an empathetic look at the economic plight of the working class in Pennsylvania; “1984,” a West End staging of the George Orwell novel that became a timely best-seller the month of the Inauguration. There was the meta-theatre of high-profile audience members in the hot seat: Mike Pence at “Hamilton,” Ivanka Trump at the anti-xenophobic musical “Come From Away.” There was Michael Moore’s one-man theatrical broadside, whose chief triumph was to bait the President into a Twitter war. And, of course, there was the Public’s controversial “Julius Caesar,” in Central Park—though whatever it had to say about democracy and sedition got drowned out by the firestorm over the right to say it.
Now, a year and change after the election, we have “The Parisian Woman,” at the Hudson Theatre, pitched in response to and set on the outskirts of the Trump White House. Its author is Beau Willimon, who has proved himself a jaundiced chronicler of Washington horse-trading. His play “Farragut North,” inspired by his work on Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign, became the George Clooney film “The Ides of March.” He created and was the showrunner for the American version of “House of Cards” through its fourth season. On Twitter, he’s an incisive critic of the President. And now he’s teamed up with Uma Thurman, who seems, for good reason, to be harboring her own stock of white-hot rage.
So why does the play have such trouble finding its angle on the enraging political scene? Despite being self-knowingly au courant, “The Parisian Woman” feels as creaky as an old boulevard entertainment; in fact, it’s a loose adaptation of “La Parisienne,” an 1885 play by Henry Becque that was the basis for a 1957 film starring Brigitte Bardot. The first moments of Pam MacKinnon’s production fling us back to a bygone theatrical era: lights come up on a well-appointed living room in a Washington town house, complete with a sofa (where trysts will inevitably unfold), a liquor cabinet (for conflict-greasing cocktails), and upstage French doors (where the star can conveniently pause for entrance applause). And there she is: Chloe (Thurman) is back from a doctor’s appointment—or is she?—and home to meet Peter (the amusing Marton Csokas), a British banker and big-money political donor. (It takes a few minutes to sort out whether Chloe is also British, but that’s just Thurman’s mid-Atlantic accent.) As Peter is begging Chloe to remain faithful to him (“The day you start lying to me . . .”), keys jingle in the front door, and Chloe says, “It’s my husband.” The twist arrives right on schedule.
Chloe’s husband, it turns out, is Tom (Josh Lucas), a tax lawyer who’s up for a judgeship in the Fourth Circuit. The decider? Our very own President Donald J. Trump, who doesn’t seem too worried about Tom’s inexperience; the Donald just wants to pack the courts with loyalists. Not that Tom and Chloe’s politics appear all that Trumpian. Chloe is a Democrat, but one who knows how to use the chaos of the new Administration to her benefit. At a soirée a few nights later, she deploys soft influence on the hostess, Jeanette (the sturdy Blair Brown), who is the nominee for the chair of the Federal Reserve. As they share cigarettes on the balcony, Chloe is disbelieving that she and Tom have been invited instead of more moneyed acquaintances. “Yes, but none of them are as interesting,” Jeanette replies. “Or as real.”
And herein lies a central problem: while the play informs us of Chloe’s allure, it’s not much in evidence. As written, she’s a sexual adventurer with at least two lovers in her pocket, a romantic who lives for “pleasure and beauty,” though cannier about the Washington game than she lets on. (Her one pastime, besides infidelity, is reading bad vampire novels.) In a late monologue, she reveals herself as the Parisian woman of the title, having long ago pursued a decadent affair that seems cribbed from every Gallic cliché, down to the chain-smoking. If people are drawn to Chloe, it’s not because Thurman has injected her with charisma. In her Broadway début, Thurman is a blank, swanning and sighing as if impersonating the leading lady of an old drawing-room comedy. You long for Quentin Tarantino to show up and supply her with a scimitar and a kill list. (I’m guessing Harvey Weinstein would be No. 1.) As it is, she can’t seem to locate the mystique behind Chloe’s poker face.
Compare Robin Wright, who has turned Claire Underwood, on “House of Cards,” into Willimon’s most fascinating creation. Claire, too, is a Washington operator who knows not to show her hand, but Wright is brilliant at playing barbarism alongside grace: we’ll never get to the bottom of Claire, but we know there is something there. This season of “House of Cards” took me several months to finish. What seemed in the Obama years like an escapist fantasy of a maniacal Commander-in-Chief now hit too close to home—I had to stop watching after the botched-election episode. Strangely enough, the sexual-misconduct allegations against Kevin Spacey (which resulted in his firing from the series) drew me back in, the off-screen subtext somehow neutralizing the real-world political subtext. Willimon created a back-room universe so handsome and sinister that it seemed plausible for a snake like Frank Underwood to slither to the top, but it’s Claire who keeps us guessing whether these people have souls. Willimon’s real eye, though, is for the machinery: the press secretaries and cub reporters and solicitors general, each playing a self-serving game and, more often than not, getting crushed on the political train tracks.
“The Parisian Woman” is also concerned with the small fish who populate the circles of the Beltway élite, and with the way that self-interest opens the door to depraved tactics, including blackmail. But Chloe isn’t playing three-dimensional chess so much as one-dimensional checkers, with a single (surprising) move at her disposal. What does any of it say about 2017? Aside from some pandering jokes about Ivanka and “locker-room talk”—which get knowing laugh-grumbles from the audience—“The Parisian Woman” could really be about any era in Washington, harking back as far as Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man,” from 1960. There, too, favors were traded, threats issued, the public interest disregarded. “The Parisian Woman” is cynical, but on the grounds that this is all dirty Washington business as usual. What’s happening now is worse than business as usual, even if hacks like Tom and Chloe tell themselves otherwise. It may take dramatists, like the rest of us, many more years to process this parlous political moment.
