4 Seasons Total Sh!tshow
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Hollywood Fringe
Through June 25
RECOMMENDED
The extent to which we’re governed by amoral/immoral power brokers is now evident in surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Partnership for Public Service that Americans’ confidence in government to address our problems has plunged over the past decade across party lines. Only one in 10 Americans now has strong confidence in career federal government employees to act in the best interests of the nation — about the same, anemic percentage of Americans who trust that candidates running for federal office have any interest besides their own advancement.
So if you feel cynical and jaded, no, it’s not just you. And this is why it’s hard to laugh at political sketches on Saturday Night Live, or at comedy sketches such as 4 Seasons Total Sh!tshow, which is really a variation on the themes of a typical SNL political lampoon.
This isn’t a commentary on its motives for creation, or on its quality. Aaron Michnowski’s farce, directed by Hiro Korsgaard, is obviously tapping into the current Zeitgeist. It’s pretty funny and clever. It’s just hard to muster laughter, mostly because of the state of the nation.
The comedy, with eight characters, tracks the lunacy behind the planning of that excruciating Trump camp press conference in November 2020, headlined by Rudy Giuliani (who only appears on video here), in the wake of the GOP 2020 presidential election loss. With the ongoing public hearings into the January 6 insurrection of that year, 4 Seasons has found the perfect political moment to revisit the absurdities of that press conference.
Trump kept tweeting that it was going to be at the “Four Seasons,” though the hotel had never confirmed. The Trump camp — headed by Keri (the belligerent Maddy Bryan, channeling Trump’s first press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — remember her?) desperately needs to find a venue named “Four Seasons.” You may recall they landed on a parking lot outside a landscaping company of that name, lodged between an adult book store and a crematorium. No, that’s not a joke. That’s what actually happened. You may recall seeing Giuliani’s hair dye leaking down his face as he tried to peddle conspiracy theories about the “stolen” election. (Don’t recall if he’d been disbarred in NY by then.)
Ryan Leonard, Samantha Vidos, Zaya Kolia, Sarah Bruce, Caiti Wiggins, Christian Lowery and director Hiro Korsgaard also put in fine comedic cameos.
The conundrum for political sketch comedy in our age is its dubious ability to compete with the madness and mendacity of our times, and even when it does successfully compete — as this show does — it’s barely an exaggeration, just a recap.
That said, there’s a guilty pleasure in reliving and relishing the disarray of people with such hollow qualifications who are striving for power over all of us. And that’s also what so disconcerting. When such people aren’t quite so stupid, they will succeed.
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/7554 Running time 50 minutes
