Entertainment

WHITE HOUSE TASK FARCE

WITH a masterly sleight of hand, Nathan Lane turns slightness into giddy fun in “November,” David Mamet’s impeccably politically incorrect tale of a US president in pollster hell.

Not that all the credit belongs to Broadway’s current maestro of the aggressive put-down and the aggrieved double-take. Much the same virtuosity is shown by a suavely buttoned-down Dylan Baker and a hysterically buttoned-up Laurie Metcalf, all three directed with metronomic brilliance by Joe Mantello.

To be sure, this is minor Mamet, little more than an extended revue sketch so replete with his signature F-word that its use begins to sound like an electoral slogan comparable to “change.” But though Mamet’s laughs are pretty easy stuff – some hit, some miss – they provide a few political jibes for a seasonably political time.

The play’s unlikely hero is Charles H.P. Smith (Lane), such a lame-duck turkey of a president that a politically minded Perdue could call him fowl.

We meet him in the waning days of his disastrous presidency, before common justice – plus lack of funds – pulls down the shutter on his first term a week or so before the impossibly slender possibility of his re-election to a second.

“November” is less a political satire or comedy than a farce that has one joke: a deadbeat president so dead and beaten that his crumpled gallantry in the hungry jaws of disaster becomes oddly appealing.

It functions on two propositions: that a second-term candidacy might revive itself with a last-gasp infusion of $200 million for TV airtime from the turkey-manufacturers lobby (itself trying to prevent the end of Thanksgiving as we know it), and second, that a president might seek to establish a legacy by sanctioning same-sex marriage.

Mamet has smartly realized that farce needs few characters, and can even – as long as sex isn’t in play – do without a multiplicity of doors. Unlike comedy, it doesn’t even need a banana skin.

All it demands are clowns. Mamet has provided them, and Mantello has set their clockwork gorgeously running.

The more I see of Lane, the more appealing I find him. He wears comedy like a suit of armor, with a few essential chinks (Mamet would have made a joke out of that) of reality peeking through like sunshine.

Here – his eyebrows triumphally arched as ever, body language as self-confident as a toy bulldozer and his accent as New Yorkese as the Brooklyn Bridge in a fire sale – he occupies the stage like a fitted carpet.

He carries Mamet’s joke with an ease that would be insolent were it not for its lurking sense of unease. And his physicality – crossing the stage one moment with the mad waddle of a gay, strutting turkey – is simply masterly.

Baker, as Archer Brown, the White House Counsel, has just the right slippery amorality that we love to invest in our images of backstage political gofer-honchos, those suave greasers of bureaucratic wheels.

As the president’s chief speechwriter, Clarice Bernstein – a lesbian mother with a terrible cold, newly returned from China with a baby girl and possibly bird flu – Metcalf threatens to take over the play every time she makes the sniffle of an appearance.

There’s not much to “November,” but it’s certainly not the cruelest month. Actually, it’s empty-headed political fun, “Saturday Night Live” at its liveliest.

NOVEMBER

The Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St.; (212) 239-6200.