Imagine a world where politicians stand up and lie to your face. Oh, that’s not really too hard, I know. Thunder, lightning and heavy rains set an ominous tone. The power flicks on and off. Imagine a place where the infrastructure is dated and faulty. The Minutes is firmly placed in today’s America. Playwright Tracy Letts demands that we look into the mirror. It is beyond cracked.
The town council in Big Cherry meets weekly. Mr. Peel (Noah Reid; Schitt’s Creek) missed the previous meeting due to his mother’s funeral. Apparently something transpired and Mr. Carp (Ian Barford, Linda Vista) is no longer on the council. The elected officials arrive with their socially awkward occasionally cringeworthy banter and their personal agendas. No one will tell Mr. Peel what happened last week.
The meeting begins. Ms. Johnson (Jessie Mueller; Beautiful, Waitress) is the clerk. She takes attendance forgetting to leave out Mr. Carp’s name in the roll call. The elephant is in the room but only Mr. Peel seems focused on it. Next item on the agenda is the reading of the minutes from the previous week. That should provide some clarity but the minutes from two weeks ago are read instead. Why? What is being hidden?
From this premise, Mr. Letts hilariously bludgeons an enormously wide ranging series of targets. On a basic level, the inanity of meetings and Robert’s Rules of Order are taken to task for their ability to empower subterfuge. Is that a motion or a comment? You don’t have the floor. Let’s praise how the town’s football team did last week (yes, written in the minutes).
The committee members themselves are recognizable. There’s the octogenarian (Austin Pendleton, priceless) who is focused on the now departed councilmember’s much better parking space. At one point he utters, “I assure you I have no idea what is happening”. Also present is the wealthy white woman of privilege (Blair Brown; Copenhagen) who has been on the council more than thirty years. She’s so baked in her conservative past that I suspect the term white privilege is unbeknownst to her.
Other assorted members include a potentially corrupt Sheriff (Jeff Still; To Kill a Mockingbird), a sycophantic imbecile (Cliff Chamberlain, Superior Donuts), a spastically ditzy keeper of the rules (Sally Murphy, a tad overwrought). Two councilmen (K. Todd Freeman, Danny McCarthy) have self-dealing business before the committee. All of this foolery is comedy meant to mercilessly mock our government (at every level).
This being America, however, the objects of Mr. Letts’ jibes are as big as the founding of our nation. Lies perpetrated to tell a preferred story rather than the truth. In this play – and sadly – in our society truth is a inconvenience which must be aggressively thwarted.
The dialogue contains chestnuts like “righteous indignation is a cheap perfume”. The play cloaks itself in realism, adds in delicious dollops of farce and does not hesitate to luxuriate in mystical symbolism. I could tell after it ended not everyone digested those missing minutes as powerfully intense as I did.
Here are things The Minutes stirred in my mind. Book banning. The denial of critical race theory. Christian embracement of machine guns. Preferred religions. The big election lie. Political bribery masking as campaign funds. The dead wood of no term limits. The founding of America. Violence as the soul of a nation. Violence as a soul of a species. Just to name a few.
The ending of this play left me to consider that Mr. Letts has a darker worldview that I do. He posits that our generational lifecycles – now firmly baked into our psyches for hundreds if not thousands of years – are inevitably marbleized or even metastasized. I, potentially idiotically, hold out hope. The thinker in me, however, supposes this playwright is probably right.
One more thing. Fittingly Mr. Letts portrays the truth-hiding Mayor in this well directed (Anna D. Shapiro) production filled to the brim with accomplished actors.
The Minutes from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre is playing on Broadway at Studio 54 through July 24, 2022.