Coastal Elites is a wry, even defiant title for Paul Rudnick’s quintet of monodramas on the personal and political chaos of the day. Though each speaker does reside on a coast, they don’t really represent the “elite” in the sense of that spiteful, all-encompassing label applied by the far right to the media and glitterati liberals convinced that Donald J. Trump is a failed leader and menace to the Republic.
No, Rudnick’s people are everyday folk, beginning with a New York widow (Bette Midler) with personal grounds for loathing the incumbent. A purveyor of YouTube good vibrations videos (Sarah Paulson) strains to cope with her staunchly red Midwestern family. An out Hollywood actor (Dan Levy) would make it to the big time if cast as the cinema’s first gay superhero, but at a cost to his pride. A registered nurse (Kaitlyn Dever) takes a break just after a shift this past April at the height of the pandemic hospital crunch. Even a daughter of African-American privilege (Issa Rae), dragged by her millionaire dad to Washington, is acutely aware that she’s seen as other-than-elite in a Lincoln Bedroom encounter with a former boarding school classmate, Ivanka Trump.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
Because the planned in-person performance at New York’s Public Theater was scotched by the lockdown, each speaker has been given a characterological reason to address someone unseen and unheard in front of a webcam—Levy is catching up with a substitute shrink; Rae contacts a girlfriend because she’s busting to tell her tale—and the experiences of all dovetail with the concerns of the current moment. Separately and together, the characters bear witness to cluelessness, corruption, bigotry, and cruelty, ticking off the familiar Trump boxes (he’s a narcissist, a bully, a sexist) and amounting to a blanket repudiation of the current Administration that, as all five and a large portion of the likely HBO viewing audience would doubtless agree, cannot be gotten rid of fast enough. (The author’s note in his welcoming speech that “everyone is entitled to his opinion” doesn’t ring especially sincere in this context.)
Most of the narratives follow the typical Rudnick playbook, that being a surfeit of brassy, sassy quips that pivot on a dime into seriousness and high emotional stakes. That strategy succeeded extremely well, to my mind, in 1993’s Jeffrey but has been spotty since, and it tends to undo two of the performers. The usually impeccable Paulson struggles to abandon a Stuart Smalley-ish serenity routine to get real about her Trump-loving relatives, as if a snarky Amy Poehler caricature suddenly began earnestly asking the audience to donate to a children’s hospital. (As I wish they would.)
Meanwhile, the showbiz pizzazz Midler brings to her one-liners—“Sure, I’d fly over them,” she says of those in the heartland, “but I’d wave!”—works against full belief in the frail but doughty matron trying to stay patient with a sneering punk in a MAGA hat in Starbucks. Of course the lady herself has borne more than her share of Trump’s personal animus over the years, and Rudnick and director Jay Roach must have found it irresistible to offer her a chance to fire back both barrels in this fictional context. (It can’t have been hard to summon up the moxie for her not-to-be-forgotten, balls-kick of a last line.)
The others fare better in maintaining a believable emotional throughline. Levy completely inhabits the naked desire of a gay man and avid comic book fan who knows what playing this breakthrough lead role would mean, combined with the humiliation when asked to “gay it up” more and more at each callback and being unable to say no. Rae, for her part, is spectacularly good at creating what acting teachers always call “the illusion of the first time.” She still hasn’t processed what went down with Mrs. Kushner upstairs in the White House, so neither she nor the character ever steps away to comment on it. Her wonderment is real, and it’s a pleasure to share it.
Best of all is Dever, who is least saddled with one-liners and so gets to be real from beginning to end. Rudnick has clearly researched the specifics of first responders’ experiences in the first awful weeks of this crisis, and they’re layered into her narrative, every stressful hour, every detail coming through in her cracked voice and weary bones. If anything in Coastal Elites is going to change anyone’s vote, I’d guess it’d be the implications of the medical community’s intrepid heroism, as embodied by Dever, set against the Administration’s indolence, mendacity, and ineptitude. That the softest voice among the cast should make the strongest impression strikes me as a marvelous, and most un-Trump-like, state of affairs.
Coastal Elites premiered Sept. 12 on HBO and HBO Max, and on HBO On Demand Sept. 13.
