A REVIEW: PRESIDENTIAL NEWS CONFERENCE
A NOTE:
I promised myself at one point in this isolation that I wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t look upon a Presidential Press Conference as a stage show and review it. I was going to talk about hope and helping one another and rising up to meet the next challenge life was bound to throw at us, but then, I dunno, I found myself watching and making notes and getting a sense of the character being created within the drama. 50 years of performance and reviewing will do that to you. It’s hard-wired into my very being. So, once again, my apologies.
— Greg Moody
THE PRESIDENTIAL PRESS CONFERENCE (PANDEMIC EDITION)
Venue: The White House, Washington, DC
Shows: Daily, About 6pm ET (Curtain is Flexible)
Available: Fox News and an Ever-Shrinking Number of Cable, Network, Digital and Local News Outlets.
Watch the eyes.
It begins, for me, as it always has, with the eyes of the performer.
The eyes of a performer immediately indicate their commitment to the role they are playing. Are they smiling, do they flash with anger or dread, dedication to an ideal? Or, are they flat and listless, uninterested in the lesson or information being conveyed, merely reading, tonelessly, looking up from the script on occasion, as if making a required contact with the listener, while showing absolutely no interest in doing any such thing.
These eyes are dead.
They say, “I don’t want to say this, I don’t want to be here.”
“They told me I had to be here.”
Watch the eyes.
Hear the tone.
Great actors believe in the script. They know what they are going to say and how they are going to say it for maximum impact. Listen to the delivery. If it is stern or light, but full of life, then you know that the performer has read it, digested the meaning, considered the tonal shifts and best places for emotional “sting” to give the greatest impact to the performance and the piece as a whole.
Here, we have flat and uninspired reading. The actor has not, in any way, done his homework: read the material beforehand, considered the material, found it’s emotional strong points, or, digested its potential impact in any way.
The actor shows, with each line “reading” that he has absolutely no interest in attendance, no interest in the audience, no interest in the subject matter (the pandemic) and no interest in ceding the stage to any of the doctors, experts or even the Understudy surrounding him, despite the very real fact that the audience has come to rely on those same secondary characters for the majority of their insight and information.
Hear the tone. It’s flat, noncommittal, uninterested in conveying anything other than the image of one person standing on stage before a national, if shrinking, audience, as if to say, “Look at me.”
The only time this character, this actor, does come alive, is when he is attacked from the audience. When he is questioned, about, really, anything: positive, negative — it doesn’t truly matter.
The tone jumps suddenly from flat and uninterested, positively dispassionate, to fiery counterpunching, rising up to full height from what had been the stance of a man impersonating a sack of wet rice thrown on a concrete floor, a soul falling in upon himself.
Suddenly, the character is alive. The tone is bracing. The eyes flash with hatred. The character is, for a moment, interested — not in the subject at hand, not in the information that needs to be expressed to a nation, but in simple self-defense.
This is a man, an actor, a character at war with everyone, determined to win at any cost, through lies, evasion and deceit, even if he destroys everything around him, everything that he pledged to protect.
He’s Lear, in a tie. Hamlet, crumpled on the floor, whispering “I sure showed them.” An empty suit.
The character is a show in and of himself, playing not to the audience, but to his own ego, and in doing so, giving an entire nation nothing to embrace.
They can only find relief in each other, among those fellows who remember an ancient scrap of paper they still hold dear, and a unique ideal seemingly lost four years ago.
Showing Nightly.
No stars.
— Critic-at-Large Greg Moody
