I’ll Be Damned!
Phinneas Kiyomura’s Nimrod at Theatre of NOTE
By Steven Leigh Morris
RECOMMENDED
One of many riffs on Shakespeare: Kirsten Vangsness and Chloe Madriaga (Photo by Jenny Graham)
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There’s a weird tenderness to Alina Phelan’s staging that cuts through the farce and gives this play a kind of gravity.
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Content Advisory: Phinneas Kiyomura’s Nimrod at Theatre of NOTE may bring back all kinds of traumatic memories of the former administration. There’s the Orange Guy himself, named Nimrod, portrayed by Kirsten Vangsness as a kind of mad-sad King George III intermingled with. . . sorry, I can’t say his name, I can’t even write it: Too much psychic damage, too many flashbacks of Alec Baldwin impersonating the Orange Guy on SNL. There’s Melania, here named Lani (Hiwa Chow Elms), having a fling with her bodyguard Carver (Edward Moravesik) while angling to cash in on her pre-nup. Then there’s the imperial couple’s emotionally scarred son Barron, reimagined as Dukie (Asha Noel Iyer), who is as out of his mind as is everyone else on the stage. There’s Giuliani as Ghoulani (Sierra Marcks) and so on.
Is this really the time to bring such horrors back into the psyches of innocent spectators? Or is this an exercise in Theater of Cruelty? The thing is, Nimrod is running (again) for president. Is this too literal a parallel? Is this yet another example of theater plucked from the newspaper headlines?
No. It’s a play. As in the verb, play. Kiyomura has penned Nimrod in verse and you could play a parlor game identifying the countless tropes from plays by Shakespeare that Kiyomura has gleefully borrowed — no, stolen.
Think of Barbara Garson’s 1966 farce MacBird! (also written in verse) which took on LBJ and his wife, Lady Bird, living in imperial Washington in the wake of JFK’s assassination, all imagined through the lens of Macbeth.
Think of Alfred Jarry’s 1896 farce Ubu the King (currently on stage at The Actors’ Gang) — an unfettered exercise in nihilism as it follows a despotic prince, while trafficking in summary, mass beheadings. Like Nimrod, it’s a kind of grotesque fairy tale.
The world of Nimrod is more Imperial Roman than Roman Republic. It would be pointless to survey the plot because the plot twists are so lunatic, reflecting our lunatic, political world, which is the entirety of the point. Did we not already know that? Of course we did, unless we’ve been orbiting Saturn for the past decade. On one level, Nimrod is a kind of standup routine employing 15 comedians on the shoebox Theatre of Note stage. Who complains about SNL because we already know that? To be transparent, I admit that I do.
But there’s something different, more elevated about Nimrod. There’s a weird tenderness to Alina Phelan’s staging that cuts through the farce and gives this play a kind of gravity. This farce is not just mayhem, which would grow tedious; rather, there’s a familiar sadness to, say, Dukie, cursed by being born into such a family, rebelling against his mom, perhaps the only character who gives two hoots for his welfare. So that the entire play is not really about the former administration and its machinations, it’s more about the question that Kiyomura poses to all of us: How do we endure such Shakespearean malevolence that continues unabated? How do we get out of it alive, and sane?
The biggest pillar of support for this play’s humanity lies in Vangsness’s portrayal of Nimrod, costumed by Kimberly Freed in all manner of 18th century silks and ribbons. Her eyes are encircled with orange bags, and she follows Kiyomura’s stage directions to a tee: “We should see the soul of the characters, not the shell of them.” This is something the entire ensemble gets right.
Vangsness captures a few of TFG’s vocal idiosyncrasies and physical ticks, while leaving us to fill in the rest. More to the point is the soulfulness she brings to Nimrod, a king utterly out of his depth — friendless, mean and sad, and terribly lonely. This is not a mockery of a character, this is a character.
That said (another content advisory if one is sensitive to bestiality), there is one scene in which Nimrod fucks a pig (Chloe Madriaga).
I don’t know how Phelan or Vangsness do this, but it genuinely comes off as a love affair. There hasn’t been anything quite like this since Edward Albee’s 2000 The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?
There was a play performed in Prishtina, Kosovo last November (The Handke Project) in which an apologist for Serbian dictator Milosevic also fucked a pig. What is it about these despots and their imagined love affairs that captures such an internationally shared, bestial response?
The trap of political satire is that if it sinks to the level of the idiocy that it’s railing against, it fails to provide a beam or a beacon. It’s just more yelling.
I loved this production for the way it enveloped its fury in a blanket of humanity, excavating compassion, if not wisdom, from the depths of its rage. The endeavor is to pave a road out of the cesspit that it portrays so convincingly. How much control do we have over any of this?
Our only power is to remember who we are, what we believe in, and who we can be. If that power is sufficiently cosmic, we might just be okay.
Nimrod, by Phinneas Kiyomura; Theatre of NOTE, 1517 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through Mar. 19. https://theatreofnote.com.
Coming Next Week: The 2023 Stage Raw Theater Awards Finalists.