'The Strangerer': An Existential Crisis in Coral Gables

Amid the various tabloid flash points in the summer of 2006 — Mel Gibson's drunken tirade, Pluto's demotion to "dwarf planet" status, Zinedine Zidane's World Cup head butt — came news that Albert Camus was the subject of discussions in Crawford, Texas. President Bush's summer reading list, it was confirmed, included the 1942 existentialist classic "The Stranger," a radical departure from the Civil War histories, Greatest Generation biographies, and Tom Clancy thrillers that have traditionally been spotted on presidential bedside tables.

The initial rush of "hey, that's a great book" commentary was quickly followed by a trickle of "hey, that's about a guy who commits murder — of an Arab, no less — without anything like sufficient cause or remorse" commentary. This head-scratching recalibration hovers on the periphery of "The Strangerer," an intellectually febrile if structurally saggy comedy from Chicago's acclaimed Theater Oobleck.

What was the president thinking? Mickle Maher, the show's author and co-star, poses this question not in the traditional sense, but rather as an attempt to spelunk into the impulses and contradictions that may have flooded his brain after reading this account of a criminal who reaches a death-row epiphany that "I had been right, I was still right, I was always right."

Lest things get too existential, Mr. Maher has relocated his protagonist's shattered notions of moral accountability to, of all places, Coral Gables, Fla. The play takes place two years earlier, during the first presidential debate between Bush (Guy Massey) and John Kerry (Mr. Maher, who looks more like Leonid Brezhnev but sounds uncannily like the junior senator from Massachusetts). And while the moderator, Jim Lehrer (a memorably droll Colm O'Reilly), does what he can to keep the focus on foreign affairs, Bush is distracted by the logistics of whether to stab, shoot, smother, bludgeon, or poison Lehrer. (All of these implements have been stashed inside his lectern, where one might also find a candlestick and perhaps Colonel Mustard.) "Because that's what makes us people," Bush explains. "The manner in which we go about killing other people."

Things then get, well, even strangerer. Kerry apparently helped Bush hatch this murder plot the night before — in between fits of narcolepsy. This happened shortly after the two caught a play together in Coral Gables, which Bush refers to as "this great theatrical city, a city of great stagecraft, now in ruins." Ah, yes, the ruins: Coral Gables has apparently become a postapocalyptic hellscape, with craters and bloated rats and floating corpses. (Does Jeb know?) But as long as one can navigate the blood-clotted streets, as long as one can ignore the drowning children and packs of dogs, one can still find an Edward Albee play. "You know that show, Mr. Lehrer?" Bush asks. "About who Miss Woolf makes afraid?"

What on earth does all this have to do with Camus? Mr. Maher has some fun with the famous opening line of "The Stranger," belatedly citing the death of Barbara Bush that day (or maybe the day before) as a precipitating factor, but very few of the other references are anywhere near as specific. Instead, Mr. Maher stomps around with a freewheeling insouciance that is first refreshing and then a bit enervating. At its best, his willingness to follow Bush's tireless probings into one philosophical cul-de-sac after another results in the stage equivalent of a top-flight Shouts & Murmurs humor piece from the New Yorker; at its worst, it sinks into the sort of underdeveloped torpor common to skits in the last 20 minutes of "Saturday Night Live." Theater Oobleck generally works without a director, and it is during these latter scenes that the absence is felt most acutely.

Kerry and Lehrer each take turns as Bush's straight man, and Messrs. Maher and O'Reilly seem at times to be competing over who can out-underplay the other. Even when Kerry enters a narcoleptic reverie about kidney stones, or Lehrer enthuses about his floor-to-ceiling collection of knives, both actors routinely — and hilariously — cede the spotlight to Mr. Massey. Sputtering, squinting, striving for moral clarity in his fashion, Mr. Massey's Bush is a thing of wonderment. He handles the text's many (perhaps too many) malapropisms swiftly and rides over them en route to the president's latest cracked epiphany.

Ultimately, both candidates can agree on little beyond the fact that Jim Lehrer should die senselessly. Once Bush realizes this, he impresses upon his opponent, his would-be victim, and the viewing public that it must stay realized. "The reason to re-memorize what occurred last night is we learn from history. ... And we want to remember history so we can repeat it. Or we're, uh, doomed to, uh, forget it." With "The Strangerer," Theater Oobleck has repeated history from a strange, vibrant, and perversely insightful new angle — and the results are nothing if not memorable.

Until August 7 (27 Barrow St. at Seventh Avenue South, 212-239-6200).