In a play structured around a contest of ideologies, giving a character laugh lines is like handing them a weapon. The playwright may intend to be evenhanded, but the humor tends to be the giveaway. It can make someone seem smarter, wiser, more relatable, even if they’re espousing ideas you don’t agree with. An audience loves someone they can laugh with, regardless of what they’re saying (and so does a voter, as the Trump election has shown). In the play N/A, Mario Correa presents a thinly veiled look at the dynamic between Nancy Pelosi (referred to only as “N”) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“A”) in a series of meetings following A’s surprise defeat of an incumbent Democrat, up through the insurrection. A enters first, a flibbertigibbet narrating an Instagram live video as she tours N’s office. When N arrives, A turns around in shocked surprise: “Where did you come from?” “Baltimore,” N deadpans, to a big laugh from the crowd the night I saw it. Guess where this drama’s sympathies lie.
N/A’s press release describes it as “a battle of wills—and wits” between the two women, facing off across generations about the state of Democratic politics and the future of the progressive left. The wits, and most of the play’s will, tilt solidly in N’s favor. Correa depicts A as idealistic but exceedingly naïve. She’s obsessed with her followers on social media, unwilling to compromise her stances for the sake of effective coalition-building, turning the party into a snail eating its own shell for lack of calcium (that slightly awkward analogy is N’s, not mine). N, by contrast, has been compromised by years of playing the game but is depicted as all the wiser for it; hers is the true idealistic belief in the system. In their arguments, A may get in a few points—Correa gives her an emotional monologue about witnessing children in detention, explaining why she’s voting against funding for ICE—but the matches bend back in N’s favor. She absorbs A’s arguments and then just insists once again that any fight against the Republicans (and Trump, though he’s also not referred to by name) is worth it, no matter the cost. Correa was once a congressional staffer himself, and has since gone on to write political comedies as well as the thriller Dark Waters. He, like N, appears to believe in the ineffable magic of working out a deal through centrism. He also gives N a whirl of a jeremiad right back at idealists like A that builds to the title of the show: “You and your whole generation of navel gazers! With your wounded feelings and your precious space and your bottomless thirst for attention. Basking in the glow of all those purity tests that only you get to pass because of course you can! You’ve got no responsibilities! None! Zero! N/A!” That got a big round of applause the night I saw the play.
If you, like me, are more inclined to sympathize with A than with N, a play that keeps insisting that better things aren’t possible gets frustrating quickly. There’s plenty to object to on the level of politics: A, for instance, gets no chance to rehash the 2016 election, or make the point that Hillary Clinton’s loss might have been an indication of deeper rot in the center left than anything coming from the progressive corner. But if it’s possible to lay that aside, N/A wears quickly as a drama. It’s boring watching one generation dunk repeatedly on another for 80 minutes. Suffs, on Broadway now and produced by Hillary herself, depicts a similar dynamic with far more nuance, reckoning with resentment and respect that get tangled up in conflicts between progressive women. I chafed at Suffs’s own rosy-eyed politics, too, but it let both Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt get their licks in, and gave them texture, showing them as complete, sometimes petty people.
N/A, by contrast, is like being stuck at dinner with a relative you wish would please talk about anything else (do N and A have any thoughts on the weather?). It’s claustrophobic, and ultimately boring; the structure traps the performers in limited caricatures. Holland Taylor specializes in playing toughened older women whether as a professor in Legally Blonde or Texas governor Ann Richards. She applies all her steel to N, throwing out one-liners with hefty torque: She can get a laugh just by pursing her lips and silently offering A a square of Ghirardelli chocolate in mid-conversation. That approach tends to chop Ana Villafañe, who plays A, right up. Villafañe’s done musicals (she was Gloria Estefan in On Your Feet!) and her angle on A turns the congresswoman into something of a flustered theater kid. I’m not sure that’s true of the actual AOC, who’s shown herself to be cannier and more of a deal-maker (at times, frustrating her own base) than the starry-eyed depiction you get here. But it’s hard to put the blame on the performer when she’s unsupported by the script, and from director Diane Paulus, who allows Taylor to showboat freely.
The approach gets plenty of warm applause from a presumably center-left-minded Upper West Side audience—someone behind me started saying “period!” after each N zinger—but it’s ultimately a disservice to Pelosi, too. The version of her we see in the play resembles a familiar meme, the canny matriarch side-eyeing Republication machinations, with little space for a deeper sense of her psychology. Let her be wrong, regretful, contradictory, something! N speaks almost entirely in aphorisms and metaphors—even while criticizing A for producing a “metaphor shower”—but Correa doesn’t get her off a pedestal and let her become more human. He introduces slivers of her biography—her fight to change the rules as a newcomer to congress comes up often—that blur into hagiography. When the January 6 insurrection arrives, arguably corroborating A’s arguments about the collapse of norms, Correa decides that N is the one who was seeing clearly all along. “You do contemplate the state of our Republic,” she tells her elder rival. “Because I see now… You’re terrified.” So much for a battle of the wills. It’s well beyond clear, by that point, that only one side has any ammunition here.
N/A is at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.
