By Tessa Solomon
On the eve of the Miss America pageant, three women — dichotomous in ideology and profession — face off in a Georgia hotel room. One is a liberal social-media activist, hard-pressed to find an unfamiliar digital platform. Another is a Republican senatorial legal aide, her integrity deteriorated by the compromises of her profession.
Between them — and at the center of this farce — is Miss Georgia, a fiery, Lady Liberty-like figure eager to heal the fissures among these women and use her platform to correct the chasms in America’s political system.
The hotel room is the sole setting — and these women the only players — in Riverside Theater’s The Taming, opening 7:30 p.m. at 213 N. Gilbert on Friday.
“We were watching the past debate, and the last question was is the Constitution a fixed document or a living document,” said Kristy Hartsgrove Mooers, who plays the aide, Patricia. “That’s kind of what this plays asks a lot. Will we ever know what the Founding Fathers intended? Or was it intended to change?”
The play, a farce drawing its inspiration from Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, approaches America’s tumultuous presidential election — one often more ludicrous than humorous — with rare self-deprecation.
“When it comes to the two-party system, the best way is to make everyone make fun of themselves a little bit,” said Cara Clonch Viner. “No one wants to go to a show where we’re trying to change someone’s mind.”
The three cast members act as caricatures of familiar figures — and attitudes — on both the far left and right of the ideological spectrum. While members of the cast were emphatic about keeping the more nuanced details of the plot secretive — there are some great surprises, promised Clonch Viner — they hint at surrealistic elements, both technical and emotional, that explore the partisan divide that has defined modern politics.
“I feel like everybody gets made fun of equally; that’s the way that the humor is used. In our culture, conservatives and liberals will shut down if they feel like a joke,” Mooers said. “I would feel completely comfortable telling a conservative or liberal friend to come to the show; there’s something in there for both of them.”
History, both literary and American, is invoked with subtlety. The confined setting of the hotel room — in which the characters battle over personal and public philosophy — echoes the urgency of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. “Stay in one room until it’s done” was the delegates’ attitude as they formed the foundation of our country.
It is an approach painfully abandoned.
The identity of “the shrew,” though, is more interpretative.
“It’s inspired by Taming of the Shrew, so there are weird Easter eggs throughout. But none of us are really the shrew,” Mooers said. “The shrew that ends up getting tamed, well, you’ll have to watch the play to have to see it.”