“This town is run by lobbyists, right?” political strategist Cornell Belcher declared on MSNBC shortly after I returned from seeing Sara Burgess’s Kings, at the Public Theater. His adamant proclamation, brooking no disagreement about Washington, D.C. chicanery, made me sit up, wide-eyed.
It was as if Belcher had been cued to utter the sentence so that I would lend complete credence to what I’d just watched Burgess maintain for 100 querulous minutes in her new play focusing on lobbying and lobbyists.
Burgess, whose Dry Powder, premiered at the Public a few years ago, proved then that she had an impressively dramatic grasp of heady finance in a first work about the manipulated takeover of a luggage business. Now she seems intent on demonstrating she has the same strong take of a corruption epidemic regularly gnawing at the confines of the nation’s capital.
She’s presenting—in a drama directed by Thomas Kail, who helmed her previous property—lobbyist Kate (Gillian Jacobs), who hustles herself around the political hub on behalf of a podiatry interest and has a curt response to whatever turn-down or turn-off she receives.
Sometimes the responses she receives are professionally pleasant. When they aren’t, she turns caustic, which is just what occurs when in no uncertain terms she tells off freshman Congresswoman Sydney Millsap (Eisa Davis). Thinking her years locomoting around the backbiting place gives her the upper hand, she receives quite a comeuppance. Rep. Millsap, whose integrity is granite-constructed, not only bests Kate at the game but also thanks her for being a bluntly honest person. The town newcomer cites Kate as the first regular she’s yet met since she’s assumed this job after leaving a low-level California accounting position.
That’s only the start of their relationship. Soon they’re tangling with powerful Sen. John McDowell (Zach Grenier) and his longtime and loyal (thanks in part to an increasing annual bonus) staffer, Lauren (Aya Cash). And by the way, Kate and Lauren are ex-girlfriends who tend to regard each other with calculated defensiveness on their frequent exchanges.
Things hot up but good when Millsap recoils at the cutting corners DC sleaziness as practiced by pragmatic McDowell—and just about everybody else. She decides to run against him in the upcoming Senate race with opportunistic but savvy Kate on her flank.
Saying anymore about Millsap and the eager double-crossers she’s been thrown in—as they meet at local eateries and far-flung fund-raisers (such as a golf retreat)—would be spoiling Burgess’s fun.
This, as between the many scenes stagehands move set designer Anna Louizos’s furniture with tightly drilled purpose.
Lindsay Jones covers these pauses with an abundance of musical stings, and lighting designer Jason Lyons keeps lights, neon and otherwise blinking on the set’s sidewalls.
Well, yes, some of Kings is fun, including a Clinton-Trump-like debate McDowell and Millsap hold and a generous offering of witty lines. Not all of it is a stitch, though. Whereas Burgess’s Dry Powder (the title refers to handy money reserves deployed in acquisitions) was a marvel of compact cunning, Kings has a two-ply feel. Somehow it registers as an incomplete exploration of the dicey subject. This applies not only to the writing—which leans too frequently on bickering (particularly between Kate and Lauren)—but also to the playing and directing.
It could be that Kail, only recently returned from reprising Hamilton to great acclaim in London, didn’t have the time he might have liked to polish Kings to the utmost sheen. Whatever, the four players are able—perhaps Grenier more and perhaps Jacobs less than the others—but could be abler. (Presumably, Burgess and Kail are now a team, as are Kail and Lin-Manuel Miranda, which at the moment looks to be the more rewarding pairing.)
An intriguing final point: Lobbyist Kate and Laurel, who does her own brand of intramural lobbying, are both women—and lesbians, at that. Maybe the largest percentage of lobbyists working DC, are women. Maybe not, but the absence of male counterparts suggests a not necessarily balanced regard for lobbying ins-and-outs, ups-and-downs. Or does Burgess mean to imply that women are the truly accomplished lobbyists?
Kings opened at the Public Theater on February 20 and runs through April 1. Information and tickets: publictheater.org.
