The Strangerer

Albert Williams, Chicago Reader

Critic's Choice - "The Democratic presidential primary campaign, with its confusing attacks and counterattacks, offers Theater Oobleck the perfect background for a remount of this 2007 hit, which views the theater of politics through the prism of Albert Camus' 1942 novel The Stranger. Set at a televised 2004 faceoff between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Mickle Maher's comedy skewers the notion that debates about candidates' positions and records can give voters what they really need—insight into these would-be leaders' secret selves and the hidden obsessions that might shape their attempts to impose rationality on an irrational world.

Like Camus' murderous antihero Mersault, Maher's Bush (brilliantly portrayed by Guy Massey) is driven by a stubborn—and perhaps mad—passion for the absolute. Maher himself impersonates the stiff, somnolent Kerry, while Colm O'Reilly and Brian Shaw alternate as PBS icon Jim Lehrer, whose attempts to moderate the absurd debate epitomize the media establishment's ineffectuality.

The Strangerer is funny, smart, scary, and frighteningly relevant"