A&E

Part sketch comedy, part performance art, Britney Spears for President is billed as a "pop-culture disaster." Which is as good a description as any.

A demented fantasia on celebrity worship, plastic surgery and post-9/11 politics, it's the brainchild of John Caswell Jr. and his Progressive Theatre Workshop. His debut piece was last year's Shots: A Love Story, which used ritualized gestures and relentlessly repeated dialogue to re-create the experience of alcohol addiction as a suffocating downward spiral.

That Caswell uses similar techniques in BS4P (as it is abbreviated with ironic hipness) is suggestive - that America's obsession with celebrity is itself an addiction, certainly, but also that the director's "progressive theater" toolbox might need a few more tools in it. He wields his contempt like a sledgehammer, pounding home the message that the cult of "fame, fortune and beauty" borders on a national psychosis.

The nominal plot involves a vapidly gorgeous couple, Steve and Cheryl (Dane de Bruin and Emily Pelzer), who live vicariously through tabloid television, calling each other "Brad" and "Britney" after their favorite stars. At night, Steve tosses and turns through a fever dream about Britney Spears in the White House.

The multimedia production is pretentious and occasionally ponderous, but it does have its moments, most of them involving the title character (Jannese Davidson).

Dressed in a miniskirt and go-go boots made out of the American flag, she stumbles about the stage in a drug haze, mumble-singing into a headset. The genius of her performance is that it is viciously satirical but still suggests a germ of humanity buried under a mountain of self-indulgence and desperation.

It doesn't seem that anyone else in the cast was asked to deliver more than sketch-comedy caricature. That may be by design, but the histrionic hamming gets old, especially because laughter is not a primary objective. For more than 90 minutes, the ensemble flails away at an endless lineup of pop-culture icons, from Oprah to Survivor, all of them detestable, but none so much as the hollow wannabes who worship them.

Yes, Caswell makes his point. Again and again and again. But when it's all over, he doesn't leave you with anything new to think about. Or anything to feel except relief.

Reach the reporter at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.