The Emperor Has New Clothes: Jon Robin Baitz’s Vicuña

Vicuña is populated with characters even more thinly veiled than Gore Vidal’s were 60 years ago in The Best Man.

The Emperor Has New Clothes: Jon Robin Baitz’s VicuñaIn 1960, Gore Vidal wrote The Best Man, a play about two politicians vying for their party’s nomination for president, in addition to the sitting president’s endorsement. Both men can be seen as stand-ins not only for the political figures of Vidal’s day (John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson in this case), but also for the political archetypes that American voters have come to expect. Watching (or reading) The Best Man today reveals the timelessness of Vidal’s perspective on American politics and the familiarity of the style of politics he portrayed.

Jon Robin Baitz’s Vicuña is populated with characters even more thinly veiled than Vidal’s were 60 years ago. Although Baitz wrote the play during the 2016 election—and later appended it with a new prologue and epilogue after the results—if he’d written it even five years ago, it might have seemed too outrageous and farcical in certain parts to be believable. The line between the familiarly louche brand of politics Vidal portrayed in Best Man and the brow-furrowing shock of Vicuña is only navigable by the map 2016 laid out.

Vicuña centers on a moderately more articulate version of our current president, amid the bewildering rancor of a very specific presidential campaign in its last stage. Kurt Seaman, “vulgar real estate mogul” turned candidate, has hired a bespoke tailor, Anselm, to make him a suit in order to seal the deal with the American people at the last debate of the election. Seaman’s female rival is never seen, but her own penchant for pantsuits firmly situates her in the play’s underlying acknowledgement of our cultural willingness to project political messages onto clothing choice—for good or ill.

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Baitz successfully portrays Donald Trump’s distinctive stream-of-consciousness style of speaking, while also sanding away the man’s worst vernacular tics that would only make the play incomprehensible once Trump has come and gone. Seaman is an obvious caricature, but Baitz wisely skewers the traits some Americans were drawn to in 2016 even more than he is who they sought those traits in. In fact, the “American Epilogue” that Baitz attached to the play after the 2016 election doesn’t even feature Seaman.

Baitz’s characters take outrageous actions and say deplorable things. In any other world, it might have been humorous, and perhaps that was the writer’s original intent. When Seaman shares his new campaign slogan with the tailor Anselm (“Seaman loves women, and women love Seaman”), the joke stems not from the sophomoric crassness of it, but from the pitiably thin line between fiction and reality. Despite the seriousness the prologue and epilogue introduce, Vicuña has fun playing with the perceptual fuzziness that surrounds Trump (both during the election and now) and those close to him. How much of Seaman is character and how much of him is sincere? Or as Seaman acknowledges, “I learned something over the past year, I learned that what starts off as sort of an experiment, a ‘what-if,’ can turn real.”

As for the other characters, Baitz populates his story with all the elements worth reconsidering from 2016. Sri-Lanka Seaman, the alternately doting and stern handler of her father, ultimately rejects her father’s politics and thereby embodies the liberal dream that Ivanka will also one day recognize her complicity and walk away. Anselm and Amir, his assistant tailor, serve to interpret what we’re seeing (or reading) in Baitz’s text and to step back and reevaluate how one negotiates with political and moral corruption. After all, it’s literally their job to dress Seaman up in finer clothes and make him more palatable and appealing to Americans. When Amir questions this, Anselm’s initial answer interrogates us all: “I was civilizing him so that when he looked in the mirror he had the opportunity to see the better angels of his nature.”

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Kitty Finch-Gibbon, the head of the Republican National Committee, serves as little else than to embody the soul-searching conservative distress that every liberal in 2016 imagined surely had to be going on behind the scenes. “What you have done to our party will take generations to undo. And when I’m done with you, I’m gonna go after the cowards who made you possible. I’m brokenhearted,” Kitty laments in a confident philippic that certainly seemed more meaningful pre-election. Seaman’s response? To bellow “BELTWAY! BELTWAY!” with all the unhinged furor of a tweet.

Across the shrinking boundary between entertainment and politics, perhaps it takes a work like this to remind us that none of that matters. “That’s the story of America. That’s the story so many foreigners don’t get, that the line between lies and fact—actually there is no line, just a pulse beat,” Seaman tells Amir. Does it matter if Seaman is playing a character or if he’s sincerely Islamophobic and sexist? If the zeitgeist of Trumpism will outlast the current president (as it surely will), so will the importance of Vicuña. After all, for all of the play’s moments of sincere gallows humor, nothing can out-satire 2016.

Vicuña is now available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Matthew Snider

Matthew Snider reviews books for PopMatters, and writes on culture, literature, and politics from Maryland.

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