Suffering from a toxic combination of unnatural dialogue, glacial pacing and wooden performances, Mario Fratti’s new play is a rough piece of work. Billed as a “thriller,” Obama 44 concerns the murder of Maja (Julia Motyka), an Obama re-election campaign worker obsessed with sex, the President and herself.
The first third of the play follows an interminable date between Maja and Bob (Dennis Ostermaier). Our doomed lady is meant to be captivating and sexy, but instead she comes off as weird and cloying—to say nothing of Bob, who’s supposed to be sweet but just seems creepy. The rest of the story unfolds later, during a police interrogation of another of Maja’s lovers (Thomas Poarch). He was with her when she was killed (either by a sniper or strangulation—the script says both at different points). In between redundant, uncoplike questions from a detective (Richard Ugino), we see the ham-fisted mystery teased out through flashbacks. Who killed Maja? And also: Who cares?
Fratti (Nine) is seemingly trying to say something about the fanaticism that both love and politics can drive us to. But he handles his theme so clumsily that dramatic beats often elicited disbelieving laughs from the audience. Maugans’s monotone production does little to humanize this strange, artificial melodrama. Then again, it’s hard to do much with Obama 44’s dialogue, which sounds like it was penned by a robot with a thesaurus: “Everything is allowed, human, acceptable under the wings of love.” “I’m excited, happy, moved. I’m trembling inside.” Let’s give it a try: During the play, I was bored, anxious, exasperated. When it ended, I felt relieved, liberated, eager to escape.—Jenna Scherer