Amber Washington Photo by Joe Mazza/brave lux

The opening scene sets up everything that follows. On election night 2044, the First Lady of the United States (Jodi Gage, who deserves a Jeff Award for the multiple roles she takes on here) is watching the returns, rooting for the highly qualified woman she has endorsed (Amber Washington). The candidate would be the first female U.S. President–I sat there praying that Winters did not have some Cassandra-like insight into the current election–it's about time, and her candidate has some remarkable ideas for the future.

Unfortunately, that time has not yet arrived: a total do-nothing of a (male) candidate wins the three-way race, proving once more that women face a massive double standard. (If you doubt this, try a thought experiment: if Kamala Harris had all of the baggage that Donald Trump has, would she even have been nominated? Of course not, yet he actually could win.)

The candidate, the First Lady, and the First Daughter (Mary Tilden) commiserate over drinks, getting more and more soused, until they come up with the novel notion of fixing things by introducing a fourth branch of government–a queen–and they write their "rules" down as they brainstorm them. It is this idea, overheard by Kiki, a ubiquitous AI bot, that sets up the rest of the play: politicians further in the future have discovered their documents and, treating these women as "Founding Mothers," incorporated them into the Constitution.

At this point we hurtle into the future, to a 22nd century in which the whole population has been forced underground by cataclysmic natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. The President (Dylan J. Fleming), seeking nullification of the potentially emasculating rule by the Queen (even though the three women who dreamed it up only allowed the Queen to proffer a single bill each year), seizes upon an indistinct punctuation mark in the documents that, in his reading, seems to state that the Queen can only be educated in royal ritual. (Think back to Queen Elizabeth's education in the first season of "The Crown," and then eliminate all substance.) So much for female leadership. The role of the Queen becomes more and more merely ceremonial as time continues to pass until it is just something akin to an influencer by 2304. (So good to see that influencer culture hasn't vanished in 200 more years though–I guess?)

By this point, the virtual Kiki has long been supplanted by robots, whose evolution is seen in Gage's various performances, which become gradually more realistic over time. Gage is utterly amazing here, as her Kiki adopts more and more human mannerisms and the AI behind them, programmed with that original founding document that she overheard so long before, becomes more and more disenchanted with male rule–but also with the Queens who meekly go along with it.

This is certainly some thought-provoking stuff, but Winters unfortunately chooses to hit us over the head with it. The opening scene takes entirely too long to set things up, and afterward things grow more and more absurd. By the time we reach the play's final moments, which many of us surely see coming, we have left reality far behind. This does not necessarily doom the play, as most satires do take things to extremes; it is their raison d'etre to show us the outrageous consequences our current patterns can lead us to. But this play, despite its imaginative treatment of its theme, covers no ground that has not been covered before. And truthfully, Winters could probably have done without the climate disaster, which anyway is shrugged off by the end. (Still, it does lead us to one of the play's funniest bits of satire: a fashion show of gas masks.)

Director Tova Wolff takes on a lot with this production, and despite some pitfalls within the script, she pulls it off extremely well. The performances are uniformly wonderful, the blocking is careful and realistic, and all of the various pieces fit beautifully, especially Garrett Bell's occasionally stunning lighting and Ethan Korvne's sound and original music. Wolff does not do enough with Becca Venable's runway-like set to justify the sometimes awkward sightlines it imposes, but that's really my only production complaint. This one might have worked better on a normal thrust stage. It does, though, make excellent use of projections on a background of glass blocks.

Coronation may not be the best political satire but, considering everything it tries to accomplish, it is pretty impressive. The present we inhabit, though, is every bit as frightening as the future it envisions, and that is the scariest thing of all.

Coronation, a production of Refracted Theatre Company, runs through November 16, 2024, at the Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit www.refractedco.com