POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive at Chapel Street Players

Chapel Street Players brings the White House to Newark with Selina Fillinger’s raucous, fast-paced Broadway comedy, POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.

It starts with one spectacularly ill-advised presidential comment. From there, a very bad day at the White House quickly spirals into an increasingly outrageous series of crises. Fortunately for the President, seven brilliant, overworked and underappreciated women are there to do what they always do: solve the problems, manage the damage and somehow keep the leader of the free world — and perhaps the country itself — from falling apart.

The President at the center of all this chaos? You’ll never actually see him. Instead, POTUS puts the spotlight squarely on the women working behind the scenes: his chief of staff, press secretary, secretary, mistress, sister, a journalist and the First Lady. As their carefully controlled world descends into complete mayhem, alliances form, frustrations boil over and increasingly desperate solutions lead to hilarious consequences.

Playwright Selina Fillinger dedicates the play “For any woman who’s ever found herself the secondary character in a male farce.” In POTUS, those women finally become the main characters — powerful, complicated, flawed and very, very funny.

The comedy made its Broadway debut in 2022 at the Shubert Theatre in a production directed by Delaware native Susan Stroman. Its star-studded original cast included Julie White, Rachel Dratch, Vanessa Williams, Lea DeLaria, Julianne Hough, Suzy Nakamura and Lilli Cooper, with White and Dratch earning Tony Award nominations for their performances.

Now Chapel Street Players brings Fillinger’s comedic tour-de-force to its own stage with a seven-woman ensemble and a production packed with rapid-fire dialogue, physical comedy and escalating chaos.

Despite its setting, POTUS isn’t about one particular president or political party. Instead, the satire turns its attention to the people behind power, particularly the women expected to keep everything functioning while someone else gets the title, the spotlight and the credit.

Bold, irreverent and unapologetically outrageous, POTUS is one very bad day at the White House — and one very funny night at the theatre.

Content advisory: POTUS contains strong language (including gender slurs and cursing) and mature subject matter, including adult humor, alcohol/drug use and sexual references. Due to the mature nature of this content, attendance is recommended for audiences 18 and older.