by Richard Farr
If we could dig up Karl right now, he might be tempted to look at all the current drama in D.C. and say: “Red Scare Theatre repeats itself, but the first umpteen times it’s tragedy and then eventually it’s farce.” That’s not quite right though, because this kind of perennial crowd-pleaser always did have a strong element of farce — and the show that recently opened on Pennsylvania Avenue may evolve into something even more tragic than the others. Still, it’s important to record the fact that Trust Us, We’ll Save You From the Communists is getting a revival, and perhaps even more important to note how farcical it is.
Skipping over the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s, let’s take a moment to recall that in the 1940s this type of theatre had an especially good run at “The House,” that grand old venue for popular schlock on Capitol Hill. Especially fondly remembered are Lenin is Coming for Your Children, Your Mother Is A Trotskyist, and Only Balding Rich White Men Can Save You. Classic American Theatre of the Absurd — but gradually it became too screwball for its own good. Even box office receipts for Reds Under Your Bed dwindled at last. The era ended not so much because it was all nonsense as because leading man Joey “Senator” McFraud kept tripping over the flag he used as a costume and exposed to public view the fact that underneath he was both naked and shockingly ugly.
Yet American Conservative Theater never quite forgot that it was money in the bank to describe anyone mildly uncomfortable with haute-bourgeois authoritarian class warfare as a radical leftist traitor. This is why stock commedia dell’arte characters evolved, notably the hilariously incompetent extremist “Hillary Clinton” — red beret, bandoliers jangling against the pearls, teeth full of baby parts and hands covered in the blood of innocent entrepreneurs, shrieking about the immolation of all that true patriots hold sacred from a podium at Goldman Sachs.
Now the lights have been lit again, the handbills are printed, and a new show, a new apotheosis of the Absurd, is upon us. Most exciting of all perhaps, we learned recently that it will star one of the greatest melodramatists and over-actors of his generation, Russell “Nutter” Vought.
Vought is best known as a leading author of the sci-fi musical horror comedy 2025. His boss, theater mega-impresario Donnie Cheeto, has described 2025 as “the bigliest drama of all time,” though he also denies ever having seen the script. Vought, having kissed Cheeto’s ring and other parts besides, is taking over the coveted “OMB” dressing room where all the ticket money is kept, right next to Cheeto’s own office.
Trained in improv and sleight-of-hand at Christian Nationalist Academy, and a devotee of the Imaginary Past Method, this comic thespian genius has developed a whole new Red Scare stock character called … Vought. (Clever!) In rehearsal, “Vought” wears nicely tailored costumes, looks as bland and innocent as a suburban dentist, and foams at the mouth about “Marxists,” even attacking the recently concluded four-year run (The Only Other Players, or OOPs, in Old Father Biden) as “the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country.”
Brilliant, that, you have to admit. Deadpan delivery, absolutely classic. It took me half an hour to stop laughing. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia too — not so much for all the earlier Red Scare thigh-slappers it reminded me of, but for a once-famous Brown Scare comedian. You may recall his brilliantly convincing turn as another stock character, General Fool, during the gangster dramedy Trumpleone Part One: Keep Out the Aliens. I refer of course to Mickey Flynn.
In one indelible scene from that earlier masterpiece, ol’ Flynnovich claimed his place in the history of laughaloud by saying that Islamic terrorism was “the single greatest threat to American National Security.” Audiences and critics raved — the only apt word was hysterical. For, as everyone not from another planet knew, there were many plausible candidates for ‘great threat to National Security’ and Islamic terrorism, despite its enormous convenience for keeping people looking in the wrong direction, actually wasn’t one of them. There was a whole constellation of things that the censors did not and do not permit writers to mention in this context for fear of unrest among the groundlings, such as falling life expectancy, the enthusiastically brutal authoritarianism of your average “libertarian” overseer’s workplace, polluted drinking water, uncontrolled incarceration, collapsing schools, a catastrophic healthcare non-system, and waking up to realize that a bug-eyed whack-job who under no circumstances should be put in charge of a latrine is the President’s National Security Advisor. Then there were all the threats that leading dramatists did and do put into their scripts, like Chinese expansionism, Chinese cyberwarfare, Chinese products, or a 200-megaton India-Pakistan nuclear exchange that leads to a global nuclear winter in which a hundred million Americans and a billion other people starve to death. (Remember worrying about that, before AI and the climate thing?)
Oh yes, and… AI and the climate thing. AI is a bit of an unknown but the climate not so much. It’s not easy to bar-chart the worst-case National Security cost of foreign terrorism versus the worst-case National Security cost of losing the West Antarctic ice cap, because you can’t fit both bars onto the same chart. Or into the same building.
Bear with me — I’m just establishing a baseline hilarity level here. Reminding you of the way truly great absurdist comedy can leave you doubled over, crying into your gin and tonic, gasping for breath.
We should pay attention then, with a new prince of the big guffaw in our midst. Vought’s line about Old Father Biden was not merely a classic Flynnism. Nay verily, methinks it did o’ertop the original. For, to rehearse the facts briefly: like it or loathe it, Marxism is a powerfully general and profoundly novel theory about how (despite endlessly useful appearances) the world works. The key concept here is that we are driven forward into the shining future by class warfare, which is characterized by insanely rich people in naff leather jackets using all means available to dominate and exploit those who own nothing — a key strategy being to persuade the most vulnerable of false theories about who to blame for their immiseration. Not a single one of the OOPs actors and groupies — and vanishingly few of their fans — publicly espouse this theory, nor can they plausibly be supposed even secretly to endorse it. On the contrary. For starters, by ordinary historical standards some of them aren’t even the liberals they claim to be, given how comfortably they would fit in with the dramaturgy of many of the world’s saner Conservative troupes — a category from which, we might note, Melodrama Monthly now omits America’s Golem Of Populism company (GOP). Nor are more than a very few OOPs actors properly described even as milquetoast Euro-style Social Democratic Method actors, and scarcely two or three are fully stage-left. (Not even the notorious, wild-eyed freelance actor “Ranting Bern” is truly stage-left, though it’s good for a chuckle that he keeps saying he is.)
So to say the country has been taken over by Marxists really is side-splitting. Stylistically there’s an element of slapstick here; as with Flynn, the pure pie in the face ludicrousness, the shameless reach for the cheap laugh. But in Vought’s case one suspects that the deeper purpose is satirical. People at stage right never miss a chance to claim that actual left-wing actors — such a rare breed in America, truth be told — are misusing the term Fascist. It’s sometimes fair criticism; even when it isn’t, as it increasingly isn’t, the stage-righters can’t resist claiming that it is, because doing so underlines their endless insinuation (and proud belief) that the stage-leftists are all long-hairs / juveniles / idealistic amateurs while they are the sober adults-in-the-greenroom. (On this topic, don’t neglect to check out the string of recent gems coming out of London’s Westminster theatre district. I recommend especially Self-Harm for Beginners With Boris Batshit, or Ride the Rails and Swim in the Lakes: Private Ownership is Always Best, or A Very Short Evening With Mandy Disaster.) So it’s clever of Vought, and the rest of Cheeto’s hangers-on, to parody the lefties by barking “fanatical,” “radical,” “extremist,” “leftist,” “socialist,” “fanatical radical extremist-leftist-socialist,” and especially “Marxist.” The more asinine, surreal and implausible, the more tickets you sell.
Well, it’s going to be quite a season. No one can predict what eye-wateringly gaga pronouncement will come from beyond the footlights next. If I have one prediction though, it’s that Cheeto and Company will develop novel ways to combine the venerable Red Scare and Brown Scare traditions.
I do worry though, and sometimes I wish a few major actors in OOPs would get actually a bit Marxist — or give it up and start a new company altogether. Cheeto’s takeover of the whole district has raised a troubling thought about future seasons. These guys are clear about their commercial ambitions: they will never willingly leave the theatre, not even if it burns down while everyone on stage is playing with fire. So far, despite this dire situation (and the poor returns on Old Father Biden) OOPs are still trying to get backers for other tired old scripts in their repertoire such as One Nation Under Spotlights, Greatest Theatre in the World, Aren’t We Just Exceptional?, Everyone Should Go to College Like Me, and even that perennial money-loser Everything is Basically Fine Really so Please Don’t Mention the Senate, Presidential Nepotism, Gaza, the Electoral College, the Fact That Our Original Fans Despise Us, or the Climate.
With Cheeto in control, these attempted revivals are almost certainly a doomed strategy. And the GOP (sometimes still called “the Golem,” but now rebranded The King’s Men) may seem funny at present (“Marxists! Marxists!” — absolutely love it), but no show stays funny forever.
Speaking of not funny forever, there’s one more thing. A rumor being passed around among us critics is that Vought may soon, with Cheeto’s full approval, abandon the laughs altogether to direct his nostalgic Theatre of Cruelty revenge tragedy House Unsubservient Activities Committee. If that happens, the punters may at last want to see something different. But how to get the King’s Men off the stage when Vought controls the books and Cheeto’s robot manservant “ELON” has fired the entire maintenance staff and taken control of the lighting booth?
Any playwright not in Cheeto’s pay will be in a bind at that point. Granted, a lot of Marx’s drama has dated badly. (Hard to believe that Inevitable Logic of Historical Materialism was one of his more popular works.) But we could discover that borrowing his ideas about class is the only way to move beyond the cycle of Red Scare / Brown Scare entertainment. And that might be the only way to save the theatre.
What an irony of dramatic history it would be if this “Vought” character made his own greatest absurdities come true.
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