In a playwright’s note in the Playbill for his new drama N/A, Mario Correa insists that his play about the battle between the high-profile Democratic congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “heavily researched and lightly imagined.” Would that it had been more deeply researched or even more imaginatively executed. As it stands, the show clearly tips the balance toward the octogenarian in this battle of the wills, perhaps a nod to the older-skewing subscribers of Lincoln Center Theater, where it opened Thursday.
Holland Taylor, herself an octogenarian, seems tailor-made for the role of Pelosi, perched precariously on four-inch heels and sometimes stumbling on her lines extolling the practicalities of passing legislation over the virtue signalling of liberal principals that have no chance of winning a majority vote. And Ana Villafañe, best known for playing Gloria Estefan in Broadway’s On Your Feet!, is a dead-ringer for AOC in her black pant suit, bright-red lipstick, and smart phone ever at the ready for a last-minute livestream.
Indeed, the show opens with the upstart livestreaming her visit to Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office in 2016 just after she pulled off an upset primary win over an incumbent Democrat seen as a potential successor to Pelosi as House Speaker. Despite Correa’s note, the scene is a complete fiction — according to journalist Ryan Grim, the two first met by phone, and later that summer at a lunch with their staffs at a San Francisco restaurant. While Grim notes that AOC’s victory removed a potential threat to Pelosi’s speakership, Correa sees it only as a generational revolt threatening the old guard.
The device does allow Correa to dramatize the gap between a Baby Boomer career politician (albeit one who managed to raise five kids and outmaneuver misogynistic rivals and peers) and a Gen Z upstart who became a hero of young progressives with her social media savvy, radical policy proposals (abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency! Green New Deal!), and quickness to dismiss politics as usual as practiced by longtimers like Pelosi herself. “Forty years in, you are so compromised that you are officially — COMPLICIT!” AOC declares late in the show.
Granted, this is a pol who skips the post-election orientation session to join a sit-in occupying Pelosi’s office and who bristles at criticism of her protest votes against Democratic legislation. Pelosi memorably derides them as “holy pictures,” like images from a long-ago First Communion that look nice on the wall but are meaningless. If she put Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal to a House vote, Pelosi tells her young charge, the Democrats would emerge with only “a beautiful holy picture. What does it get the Republicans? The perfect attack ad. And the Earth? It’ll just keep getting hotter.”
It’s a telling point, but it also underestimates the value of having principled back-benchers who can articulate core values or even nudge their peers to expand the notion of what kind of previously unheard-of change might be possible. Still, Correa seems clearly aligned with Pelosi’s practicality — and sets up their encounters as something akin to the office-hours exchanges of a professor and a promising young student. “This isn’t a college,” Pelosi ironically says at one point. “I’m not Plato, you’re not Aristotle, and we’re not here to contemplate the Republic. We have real work to do, urgent work–right now. You can be a part of it.”
There’s a superficiality to the portrayals here, one that seems to be borne of Wikipedia bios, quotes from speeches and interviews, and yes, even, social media posts. Despite Diane Paulus’s crisp direction, the characters too often seem like animatronic figures from Disney’s Hall of Presidents rather than flesh-and-blood people. Over on Broadway, Shaina Taub’s Suffs is offering a richer, more nuanced portrait of the generational conflict between American women seeking to advance the cause of equal rights. Where Taub succeeds is in showing how suffragist factions who seek different tactics to achieve common goals come to recognize the virtues in each other’s approach, even as they are frustrated by the potential blowback and the interpersonal tensions that result.
Perhaps the problem, though, is the timeframe Correa has chosen — ending the play with Pelosi’s loss of the speakership in 2022. That was before the Republicans took over the House and discovered how stubbornly idealistic back-benchers could stymie basic government functions, ignoring the numbers game of legislating in favor of standing on principle at any cost. It was also before AOC herself retreated from some of her more extreme positions and began to play along with party leadership — voting to break a strike by railroad workers last fall and even steering hundreds of thousands of dollars this year to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that she previously derided (and refused to fund). Her recent willingness to play a more traditional Washington game have prompted outcry from some progressives, who express a “nostalgia for the old AOC” that’s akin to mid-2010s, pre-breakdown Kanye West. Without the spat with Pelosi, whose frustration with the young firebrand spilled into public view in sometimes impolitic ways, AOC shows signs of morphing into a savvy work-within-the-system politician very much in the Pelosi mold.
You just wouldn’t know it from watching N/A.
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