Note From Playwright Selina Fillinger

In 2016, the soon-to-be 45th President of the United States was heard bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. I, in turn, sat down to write a farce. I wrote the first act in two weeks. The second act took me a year. After Trump was elected and the data revealed how many white women had voted for him, what began as a screed coalesced into a contemplation on culpability: the ways in which we are complicit in our own subjugation and the subjugation of others. Many regional theatres felt that my crass play about femme rage was too provocative for their audiences, and it sat dormant for several years. But in 2022, well into Biden’s first term, POTUS premiered on Broadway.

Not long after we opened, Justice Alito’s draft opinion foretelling the end of Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press. Suddenly, I was inundated with people telling me my play was “newly relevant.” I had to fight the urge to scream in response. The erosion of bodily autonomy was neither new nor unpredictable. Countless poor women, queer people, trans people, and women of color were already facing and fighting for healthcare long before the Supreme Court ruling. Much has changed, domestically and globally, in the year since the Broadway production, but I continue to find myself in the same conversation: a political crisis ensues, a headline emerges, an election looms, and suddenly people hear an old line in a new light. “It hits differently!” they tell me, shaking their heads, as if the lines I wrote six years ago about white patriarchal governance were mere shots in the dark.

People love to say that we are living through unprecedented times. Unprecedented, perhaps—but surprising? Scientists and historians and artists have been telling us where things might lead for a very long time. I think it’s time that we stop being surprised. We cannot keep navigating our present crises with the well-worn methods that got us here. Unprecedented times require unprecedented courage. I started working on POTUS when I was a very scared, very sad 23-year-old woman who needed to laugh. I wrote this play to give myself joy and catharsis and courage. I hope it offers you the same.

POTUS

OR, BEHIND EVERY GREAT DUMBASS ARE SEVEN WOMEN TRYING TO KEEP HIM ALIVE

JAN 17 – FEB 25, 2024
LOS ANGELES PREMIERE
GIL CATES THEATER

Written by Selina Fillinger
Directed by Jennifer Chambers
Featuring Ito Aghayere, Alexandra Billings, Lauren Blumenfeld, Shannon Cochran, Celeste Den, Jane Levy, Deirdre Lovejoy

A derogatory comment, a summit gone awry, an anal abscess—it’s a bad day at the White House. When the President unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, it inevitably falls on the seven women he relies on most to clean up the mess. Take a raucous romp through the halls of the West Wing in a riotous and irreverent farce about the men who hold the power vs. the women who get the job done.

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