
“N/A” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (Photo: Daniel Rader)
In N/A, a veteran congresswoman and the ambitious interloper at her heels keep reminding each other that the stakes are high. To this viewer, though, the stakes in Mario Correa’s slim, repetitive dramedy look frustratingly low.
Take, for example, that central pair. Correa attempts to keep the reference points nebulous for his characters, identifying them only by their initials. N (Holland Taylor), the daughter of a politician herself, comes from a wealthy district in California. A longtime leader within her party, her main focus is to retain power—especially for herself, as she eyes a return to the office of the Speaker of the House. A (Ana Villafañe) shocks the establishment by unseating one of N’s favored deputies, arriving in Washington on a raft of social media goodwill and promises to shake up the status quo. Obviously, they are bound to butt heads.
Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, Myung Hee Cho’s costumes telegraph the specifics clearly: N arrives in a pink power suit, wearing a set of pearls like armor. A looks all business in her black blazer, her face framed by wire-rimmed glasses and her trademark bold lipstick. (“All-day liquid. “Color: Beso,” she tells her followers as she live-streams her way through the play’s opening moments.) Anyone who’s watched five minutes of MSNBC in the past half-decade could easily blurt out the names faster than you can say “parliamentary procedure.”
The audience flocking to see N/A in its premiere run at the Mitzi E. Newhouse certainly seems like the crowd who devour liberal cable news on a loop. (Although the production is renting theater space at Lincoln Center, it is an independent commercial endeavor.) They’re poised to pounce on any oblique reference to Democratic heroism and Republican misdeeds, starting waves of self-reverential applause before the characters even reach the end of their platitudinous sentences. At one point, when A glibly tells N that something she just said was “an applause line,” the crowd at the performance I attended dutifully complied. Preaching to the converted much?
Correa’s script does little more than rehash a series of facts that could easily be gleaned from a Wikipedia entry. He doesn’t seem interested in delving into the psychology of his characters: why N has traded radical ideals for relentless pragmatism, or why A clings to the mantle of insurgency even after she’s well ensconced within the establishment. If anything, surprisingly, he sticks his thumb on the scale for N, portraying her as a clear-eyed realist next to A’s pie-in-the-sky idealism. The undercurrent of the play drips with an unpalatable centrism that, like much of the proceedings, feels fusty and old fashioned.
Over the work’s 80 minutes, a familiar pattern emerges: A chastises N for taking the path of least resistance on an issue. N encourages A to be more practical. They try to find a middle ground, often falling short. Lather, rinse, repeat. The exercise grows tiresome quickly, and director Diane Paulus doesn’t introduce enough variation into her staging to allow scenes of similar length and feel to seem properly differentiated. It’s not until the play’s final moments, which take place after a harrowing act of domestic terrorism, that things start to feel appropriately weighty. But by that point, it’s too little, too late.
For her part, Taylor commands the stage as a tried-and-true power broker, her will as immovable as her chestnut-brown helmet of hair. She smartly introduces touches of softness here and there, a reminder that she and A are on the same team, but it’s her implacable spirit that remains memorable. Villafañe bears an astonishing physical resemblance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she lacks her referent’s singular, driven personality. Going face-to-face with N rarely comes across as a fair fight.
In many ways, N/A serves as a pleasant summer divertissement. The physical production is sleek and eye-catching, with warm lighting by Mextly Couzin, snappy projections by the collective POSSIBLE and Lisa Renkel, and a smart, abstract set design, also by Myung Hee Cho. But a play about current events and current politicians should attempt more than hagiography and pandering to its crowd. Those virtues are not applicable here.