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Nothing says Broadway like a succulent red curtain.
But look closer: this one, designed by Santo Loquasto, is not just red. It is blood red speckled with filth and dazzled with sparkling rosettes.
Welcome to the world of "Gary: a sequel to Titus Andronicus", where carnage and camps coexist – if not exactly at peace, but in a constructive dialectic.
Taylor Mac's new play, which opened Sunday at the Booth Theater in a production starring Nathan Lane, is the least resembling bird that has ever landed on Broadway for many years. Just like Mr. Mac himself at the end of "A History of Popular Music of 24 Decades," his epic revision of American culture, he is fabulous and upset: a provocative and magnificent clutter.
Mess is both the aesthetic and the subject of "Gary", which takes up the story of "Titus" shortly after its finale, among the most dramatic in dramatic literature. You do not need to know Shakespeare's play to understand "Gary"; when the curtain rises on George C. Wolfe's production, you see his result. Mounds of corpses rise to the sky from the frozen floor of Titus' banquet hall.
In this improvised morgue, two maids are assigned to prepare the bodies. Janice, Janice (Kristine Nielsen). With the practical amorality of Mrs. Lovett, who prepares human meat pies – which is an important point in "Titus" – she undertakes to remove the clothing and accessories from the corpses, and then to empty them of their fluids and their gases with the help of a ridiculous craft including pipes and hand pumps.
Gary (Mr. Lane) is his new intern. Although the character briefly appears in "Titus" as a clown sentenced to the hanging of Act IV, Mr. Mac has imagined escaping this fate by volunteering for the team to cleaning after the coup d'etat. Transformed by her death and collapsed by her maid promotion, Gary begins to see even greater opportunities for advancement in the midst of a calamity.
Could not he now reach the level of fool? A clown, he tells us, simply encourages "the idiot" with antics, like "Gary", with his snail-eyed snatches and endless flatulence. But fools, who "unravel our stupidity with the brain," aim to save the world by telling the truth to power.
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Mr. Mac, a maximalist who says that "subtlety is a privilege" would not accept Gary's oppositional cosmology. His attitude is "both / and" and not "ni / ni". Crazy and clowns at once, he throws all sorts of seemingly incompatible ideas into the mix, confident that if they are all true, they will do something even truer.
Thus, in what appears to be a philosophical vaudeville interpreted by Gary and Janice, we obtain sketches illustrating the savagery of the elites, the smallness of the proletarians, the madness of the dreamers. Then, the traits are reassigned. Soon, lines of battle are drawn between those of any class who would try to save the world but would fail – the comedians, that is – and those who would not try at all: the tragedians.
A third character complicates class considerations. Born higher than the others – under the name of Cornelia, she is mentioned as a midwife but is not seen in "Titus" – Carol (Julie White) speaks on the tone of a BBC advertiser. (Gary and Janice are cockneys.) And though she dies while spitting out fountains of blood as she recites the prologue of the play, she returns in time to endorse Gary's dream of rearranging the horror around them as entertainment. provocative politics. Janice, fearing retaliation, resists the project, which Gary calls a "duper."
We can see it; you can describe "Gary" as a room where you can see everything. I'm just going to give you three words for mull: Dead Penis Dance.
But getting to see everything, as wonderful as it may be as a moral proposition, is hard to put on the stage. And characters with constant contradictory extremes are almost impossible to act.
This is where "Gary" is in a mess in a way that I do not think he wants. I'm not talking about its design, which beautifully puts the gore in beauty. What a wonder – after his somewhat different work on "Hello, Dolly!" – to see Mr. Loquasto transform massive corpses into baroque sculpture. As he was intelligent, Ann Roth could have chosen his evocative costumes during all eras at the end of his Elizabethan period, as if "Gary" was the midnight show after "Titus" at the Rose. The high and frizzy wigs (by Campbell Young Associates) are striking lines in themselves.
But while Mr. Wolfe is doing everything in his power – he is also a maximalist – to gather the look and the argument, this argument continues to stray.
Or perhaps it is driven by the need of actors to connect with the public. Mr. Lane and Mrs. Nielsen, natural clowns, sometimes weigh too much on the clown side, to the detriment of the madman. (Mrs. White escapes this trap beautifully.) And yet, the room is not as funny as you'd expect. Even if the blood is obviously wrong and the corpses are cartoons, it's hard to keep both your sense of humor and your horror engaged.
So for me, at least, the most convincing and powerful moments are those where the performances are aligned with the gravity of the place. Gary's speech on the power of the art of creating new realities was one of those moments for Mr. Lane: you could feel hope in the hyperbole he was talking about.
Another was Janice's monologue about the amazing habit of man's survival: "You take things not to see what you've dropped / To start again even before you're arrested." Spoken (like many of the rest of the play) in rhymes Couples, these lines draw to Mrs. Nielsen a pathos who honors their Shakespearian model.
I do not know if "Gary" will last as long as "Titus Andronicus" – a piece that I do not like, but that has been going on for more than 400 years. I do not even know if "Gary" will last a month in the hostile ecosystem of Broadway. But, strange bird or not, I'm glad it's here. Everything is not perfect, it's true, and everything is not bad.
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