Start spreadin' the news: The Strangerer's headed to New York

Another chapter in the New York/Chicago play exchange: Theater Oobleck’s hit satire The Strangerer, a loose meditation on Camus’s The Stranger framed as a 2004 Bush/Kerry debate, will play the Barrow Street Theatre for six weeks starting next month. The intimate downtown space is the spot where Steppenwolf’s Orson’s Shadow played a few years back and where TJ and Dave make the occasional late-night appearance. Scott Morfee, the crack producer behind the New York productions of Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe and Bug, as well as the recent prize-bedecked transfer of Next Theatre’s Adding Machine, adds another dynamic fringe credit to his considerable resume with this show.

It will be interesting to see how the play is received by a new audience 18 months after it debuted. The heinous red-state/blue-state America that made The Strangerer so bracing in early 2007 has been replaced, at least in media and popular culture, by a fetishized primary-race America. Frankly, it’s easier than ever for the fact that Bush is still President to slip one’s mind entirely. (Please forgive the civic irresponsibility of that sentiment, but it’s true.)

The New York run of The Strangerer should have unique appeal. In addition to playing at a time of year when there are fewer Broadway openings, the text has two new target demographics at its disposal: wealthy Upper West Side liberals who hate the President and are always interested in new plays, and impoverished Brooklyn liberals who hate the President and are interested in anything trendy.

The original Chicago A-Team cast—Guy Massey as Bush, playwright Mickle Maher as Kerry, deadpan Colm O’Reilly as Jim Lehrer and Brian Shaw—are all coming with the package. So now that New York has seen Chicago’s biggest ventures (August: Osage County) and its modest, mid-sized experiments (Adding Machine), even the scrappiest variety of off-Loop play proves worthy of showcasing beyond city limits.

And while New Yorkers chew on The Strangerer, Chicago fans can take comfort in knowing that the 2008 election means another of Oobleck’s quadrennial election plays is in the pipeline for the fall. For those keeping count, this will mark Oobleck’s fifth quadrennial election play, dating back to—as we all remember—1992’s Embrace the Serpent by Marilyn Quayle and her Sister and Theater Oobleck.