The Totalitarians (Peter Sinn Nachtrieb)
Currently Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is my favorite playwright. I am voracious for political satire. I adore wildly premised comedies. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb writing a political satire about how the lieutenant governor’s race in Nebraska will usher in a wave of totalitarianism is the kind of play that seems so absurdly tailored to my interests that it’s practically unfair for it to have not been delivered to my doorstep when he finished the manuscript.
In short, I love it. I was always going to love it. It’d have to have tried to make be not love it.
Still, I don’t love it as much as boom, Bob, or even Hunter Gatherers which was a lot more intimate, so we can scratch around the 2.5% of the play which took it into the murky depths of a 98.5%.
The Totalitarians follows a married couple, Francine and Jeffery, and how they get drawn to opposite ends of the political spectrum by their own weakness. Francine is a campaign manager who has never won a race and has now resigned herself to working for Penelope Easter, a wacky woman who presages your Taylor-Green or your Bobert’s. (It’s important to note that this play premiered in 2014, so Nachtrieb is extrapolating with unsettling accuracy from Palin and Bachman.)
Her husband Jeffrey is a spineless doctor who can’t even tell his patient, Ben, that he’s dying of cancer. Ben, as it happens, is a revolutionary who dedicates himself to ending Penelope Easter’s rise to the top.
Easter’s campaign is going nowhere until Francine writes a magnificently uncomfortable speech which strikes a chord. Even as she doesn’t respect the woman Francine is unable to ignore the pull of success and continue to follow it in a deranged fashion until she’s at the precipice of handing over Nebraska to an absolutely insane person.
Meanwhile, the success widens the gulf between Jeffrey and Francine, and a newly chastised Jeffrey finds solace in the violence and change that Ben promises, and the fear of a rising totalitarian regime if Easter should win.
Really, what more needs to be said about a play that finds emotional triumph in an activist proudly saying that he knew he was meant to be activist when he incited a mob to kill his brother?
It’s top to bottom funny and disturbing, and really only fails in being a political satire without a lot to say, except maybe that extremism is no virtue. Nachtrieb excels at writing compelling characters with essentially no redeeming traits, especially weak-willed men, and he uses that to great aplomb here.
