Get Your War On

Get Your War On

The Off Center, through Feb. 11

Running time: 1 hr, 5 min

Around the office water cooler, things are not at all cool. "It's been over a year, and the president still can't seem to get around to fucking firing someone for the September 11th attacks!" rails one white-collar middle manager. "I mean, was that somehow not the most colossal fucking fuck-up imaginable? I don't care if you fucking retroactively fire someone from the Roosevelt administration – just let me know that if I can get fired for – ahem – stealing coffee filters from the office kitchenette, some motherfuckers in the government can get fired when 3,000 Americans get murdered in one morning!"

The tone is blistering, an eruption of deeply rooted anger, indignation, and frustration so white-hot that it could send all the liquid in that cooler into a rolling boil in a heartbeat. It's a spewing forth of tough, trying feelings that have taken hold of our collective gut, churning down there, for the past four years, as our nation has grappled with a horrific attack on our soil and with an administration that's responded to that tragedy by launching its own jihad, sanctioned by the Almighty and justifying just about any act from detaining prisoners indefinitely to spying on this country's citizens to torture to, well, mocking the French, a war staggering in its arrogance and inept execution. In the stage version of Get Your War On, as in the comic strip it's based on, these pent-up feelings are let fly in all their black rage and with a black humor that brings laughter up from the gut with them.

The Rude Mechs' adaptation of David Rees' Internet sensation doesn't really have the flat, bland look of its clip-art-illustrated source (well, except in some overhead projections), but it has everything else that made the satiric strip an online phenomenon: the archness, the outrage, the dialogue profane enough to make David Mamet blush, the scorched-earth approach to political commentary. Drawing from the whole of Rees' four-year output (as culled by playwright Kirk Lynn), the show rewinds the calendar to October 2001, then fast-forwards through 53 months in 65 minutes, revisiting most of the moments of political import since 9/11 – the botched decisions, the inflated jingoistic claims, the infringements of liberty in the name of security – as commented on by the staff of an unnamed office jabbering on the phone and at their computers, while grabbing a doughnut or gabbing around the water cooler. In crisp, simple, and occasionally goofy staging by Shawn Sides, they cover the grimmest hits of Dubya and the gang: the bombing of Afghanistan, the PATRIOT Act, "freedom" fries, Kissinger and the 9/11 Commission, the invasion of Iraq, the Mars initiative, and more, and as embodied here by five actors unafraid to express extreme opinions in the bluntest of terms, they're fiercely funny in their foulness, serving sarcasm with a twist like a blade in the back.

For someone whose opposition to the war may have been muted by equivocation or a misplaced desire for civility in public discourse, hearing these uncensored and unrepentant declarations of what we've felt all along but held in can be a striking release, a liberation of one's political soul in a cleansing explosion of laughter. For someone who supports the president and his administration's actions, these comments are unlikely to inspire anything more than a burning desire to leave the theatre. And it's true that the show's recap of the long record of Bush bungles doesn't do anything about them or any other problems we face. But that's not satire's job. Satire is there to call our attention to something that deserves it, to prick our dulled minds into wakefulness. And after four years and five months of numbing, wearying crimes and misdemeanors, many of them lost in the sheer volume of deaths and disasters and lies, even those of us who have been paying attention and been appalled by what we've seen can use a wake-up call. Get Your War On gives us a fresh reminder of the outrages of the past four years and a fresh injection of the outrage we may have lost.