The Strangerer

Christopher Piatt, TimeOut Chicago

Critic’s Pick - "“All of the show-room–floor qualities of The Strangerer—the handsome but pulled-from-stock scenery; the pointed, parody-ripe setting (2004’s Presidential debate narrated by Jim Lehrer); the spot-on performances by three character actors at the top of their game—might make Mickle Maher’s new play look like an SNL lampoon. But don’t get too cozy: The Strangerer is anything but satire as comfort food. Instead, this weird Camus allegory, for all its dazzling erudite humor, has the kind of haunting resonance to which most political theater ascribes but doesn’t have the maturity to summon. In the last decade, President Bush has been easily caricatured as an illiterate despot void of humility. Were he to see this expressionistic, thoughtful and humane permutation of himself (credit Massey with all three), he might be conversely humbled. Sparked by Bush’s 2006 announcement that he’d read The Stranger during a brief sabbatical, The Strangerer frames the man Molly Ivins dubbed “Shrub” as a murderer experiencing an existential meltdown. (He tells us offhandedly that his mother’s screaming, undead corpse has been keeping him up at night; the coroner, it seems, has yet to take the body away.) Although the play is written in soaring, sorrowful oratorios conveying Bush’s crises of conscience and intellect, Maher’s heady writing can still have a Beckett-like distancing effect—a chilly breeze blows across even the humorous apexes. But as this modest brain-candy fantasia makes a bigger villain of Kerry (portrayed by the bouffant-wigged author as a literal somnambulist), and priceless O’Reilly transforms bloodless, stone-faced Lehrer into a sterling critique of media amorality, the haunting result is far stranger than fiction"