Dateline: CHICAGO – THIS IS A HEARTLAND CITY WHERE MEDIA people have long come to familiarize – or reacquaint – themselves with home truths about American politics. Novelist Norman Mailer traveled here to bring us his searing non-fiction account of a divided America when the 1968 Democratic National Convention disintegrated into chaos and violence.   And in the 1970s I first came here, from my then-homebase in London’s network television industry, to profile Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver (after jail-time in Oakland and fugitive exile in Algeria had given way to his settling in Chicago), and I was given a baptism in some brutal American realities.

Now Chicago is offering a timely and trenchant dramatic experience – in a limited run, at the city’s Victory Gardens Theatre, and likely to travel soon to Washington DC and New York. It’s a remarkable one-woman-show profiling US House of Representatives’ Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The piece is titled, perhaps inevitably, but oh-so-appropriately: The Adult in the Room.

Veteran Broadway habituée Orlagh Cassidy incarnates Madam Speaker completely, devoid of any simplistic effort at mimicry. It’s a masterful and at times sly characterization, with the deliberate techniques of Pelsoi’s own self-presentation – so consciously cultivated, she tells us, from before she first ran for elected office in 1987 – being sharply underlined in Cassidy’s performance and even cunningly anatomized for us in the player’s arch tones and and knowing, almost-winking, looks at the audience.

A narrative is built by playwright Bill McMahon upon Pelosi’s own broad-ranging autobiographical writing, but for compact theatrical effect he specifically focuses on Pelosi’s recent progress through considering … and at first rejecting … but then firmly deciding on, and determinedly pursuing, the impeachment of our 45^th US President.

Topmost among those Pelosi self-presentation techniques – along with the brisk authority that so clearly comes naturally to Cassidy – is that well-known Pelosi SMILE. I feel I must capitalize the phenomenon, since it is so strongly emphasized here by Pelosi-Cassidy … virtually held up to the sharp accent lighting for us all to examine in detail.

That smile forms a crucial part of the Speaker’s armory – and Cassidy employs it with subtle changeability – sometimes it’s a stiff smile, sometimes warm and melting, sometimes ironic, sometimes just out-and-out gleeful.  At one point in the narrative (after a long reflective pause, suggestive of deflation and maybe despair) Cassidy suddenly flicks it on again like an electric current, with a confident abruptness that’s shocking, eerie, maybe almost superhuman.

Co-directors Heather Arnson and Conor Bagley employ a deft story-telling device to supply textural variety to the roughly 80-minute solo monologue. We watch Pelosi as she hosts an online forum with a group of female (and judging by how she addresses them, mainly young) aspiring politicians. Their questions to her are digital and silent, appearing only in visual text form, and doubled up on screens at either side of the stage.

Until it gets dramatically interrupted by a interloping political saboteur, participation in the forum keeps growing, according to the numerical counter above the screens – up to a total of some five thousand women. It’s also a chance for the Speaker to check a written note (she’s already impressed upon us the importance of confirmed facts and data) and then tell us that on Instagram she has over 865,000 followers. [She could have told us that on Twitter, Number 45’s favorite platform, she has 3.8 million followers – but maybe that would prompt dispiriting, though unavoidable, comparison with his 72 million.]

IN ADDITION TO HER WORK on the boards, Cassidy is noted for appearances in TV drama and movies, but it may be the skills that brought her an AudioFile Magazine Award (for her frequent voicing of best-selling audiobooks) that are being most profitably exploited here. She somehow, with a script that all-too-often originates in prose so undisguisedly written for the page, convincingly transforms the words into real-world, out-loud human communication.

The unobtrusive but highly purposeful lighting design is by Jamie Roderick. And nowhere does it come into play better than at the very end of the show.  The production as a whole studiedly avoids turning autobiography into hagiography … but Speaker Pelosi remains undeniably a hero, for a time when we so clearly need effective heroes – and the final lighting cues dramatically highlight her status.

After an arresting scene-change, Cassidy reappears coming downstage, as far – almost further, it seems – than is possible, and she is so highlighted as to virtually project her even further out, to be within our, the public’s, own midst. She poses a piercing question, one that we know is inherited from Pelosi’s beloved predecessor in Congress – and only we can answer it.

If you are lucky enough to get into the audience for this stirring play, and I hope you do … I also hope you have a good answer for her.

** The Adult in the Room continues at Victory Gardens Theatre, Chicago until February 15.