Nothing says Broadway like a luscious red show curtain.
But look closer: This one, designed by Santo Loquasto, isn’t merely red. It’s blood red speckled with filth and bedazzled with sparkly rosettes.
Welcome to the world of “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” where carnage and camp coexist — if not exactly in peace, then in a constructive dialectic.
Taylor Mac’s new play, which opened on Sunday at the Booth Theater in a production starring Nathan Lane, is the unlikeliest bird to land on Broadway in many a year. Much like Mr. Mac himself at the end of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” his epic revision of American culture, it is fabulous and bedraggled: a defiant and beautiful mess.
Mess is both the aesthetic and the subject of “Gary,” which picks up the story of “Titus” shortly after its finale, among the grisliest in dramatic literature. You don’t need to know Shakespeare’s play to understand “Gary”; when the show curtain rises on George C. Wolfe’s production, you see its result. Mounds of corpses mount toward heaven from the blood-slicked floor of Titus’ opulent banquet room.
In this makeshift morgue, two maids have the task of preparing the bodies for disposal. One, an old hand at cleaning up after powerful people, is Janice (Kristine Nielsen). With the practical amorality of Mrs. Lovett baking human meat pies — which, relevantly, is a plot point in “Titus” — she sets about removing the corpses’ clothing and accouterments, then draining them of fluids and gases with a ludicrous contraption involving hoses and hand pumps.
Gary (Mr. Lane) is her new trainee. Although the character appears briefly in “Titus” as a clown quickly sentenced to hang in Act IV, Mr. Mac has imagined him escaping that fate by volunteering for the post-coup janitorial crew. Changed by his brush with death, and swaggering over his promotion to maid, Gary begins to sense even bigger possibilities for advancement in the midst of calamity.
Could he not now rise to the level of fool? A clown, he tells us, merely “encourages the idiotic” with low antics — much as “Gary” does, with its bug-eyed bits and endless flatulence arias. But fools, who “tease out our stupidity with brain,” aim to save the world by speaking truth to power.
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Mr. Mac, a maximalist who says “subtlety is a privilege,” wouldn’t accept Gary’s oppositional cosmology. His is a “both/and” stance, not “either/or.” Fool and clown at once, he throws all kinds of seemingly incompatible ideas into the mix, confident that if they are all true they will make something even truer together.
And so, in what amounts to a philosophical vaudeville performed by Gary and Janice, we get sketches depicting the savagery of elites, the pettiness of proles, the foolishness of dreamers. Then the traits get reassigned. Soon, the battle lines are drawn between those, of whatever class, who would try to save the world but fail — the comedians, that is — and those who won’t try at all: the tragedians.
A third character complicates the class considerations. Higher born than the others — under the name Cornelia she is mentioned as a midwife but not seen in “Titus” — Carol (Julie White) speaks in the tones of a BBC announcer. (Gary and Janice are cockneys.) And though she dies spouting fountains of blood while reciting the play’s prologue, she returns in time to endorse Gary’s dream of retooling the horror around them as provocative political entertainment. Janice, fearful of retribution, resists this project, which Gary calls a “fooling.”
We do get to see it; you could describe “Gary” as a play in which we get to see everything. I’ll just give you three words to mull: Dead Penis Dance.
But getting to see everything, however wonderful that may be as a moral proposition, is a difficult thing to stage. And characters at constant contradictory extremes are almost impossible to act.
Here is where “Gary” is messy in a way I don’t think it wants to be. I don’t mean in its design, which aptly puts the gore in gorgeous. How wonderful — after his somewhat different work on “Hello, Dolly!” — to see Mr. Loquasto turning massed corpses into baroque sculpture. How smart, of all the periods Ann Roth might have chosen for her evocative costumes, that she ended up going late Elizabethan, as if “Gary” were the midnight show after “Titus” at the Rose. The high, frizzled wigs (by Campbell Young Associates) are punch lines in themselves.
But though Mr. Wolfe does everything in his considerable power — he, too, is a maximalist — to pull the look and the argument together, the argument keeps wandering off.
Or perhaps it is being chased away by the actors’ need to connect with the audience. Mr. Lane and Ms. Nielsen, natural clowns, at times push the clown side of the equation too hard, at the expense of the fool. (Ms. White beautifully escapes this trap.) And yet the play isn’t as funny as you hope. Even if the blood is obviously fake and the corpses cartoons, it is hard to keep both your sense of humor and horror engaged at once.
So for me, at least, the most convincing and powerful moments came when the performances aligned with the gravity of the premise. Gary’s speech about the power of art to create new realities was one such moment for Mr. Lane: You could feel the hope in the hyperbole he spoke of.
Another was Janice’s soliloquy about the stupefying human habit of survival: “Ya pick things up to not see what you’ve dropped/To start again before you’ve even stopped.” Spoken (like much of the rest of the play) in rhymed couplets, these lines draw from Ms. Nielsen a pathos that honors their Shakespearean model.
I don’t know whether “Gary” will last as long as “Titus Andronicus” — a play I don’t like but that has hung around for more than 400 years. I don’t even know whether “Gary” will last a month in the hostile ecosystem of Broadway. But, strange bird or not, I’m glad it’s here. Not everything perfect is true, and not everything messy isn’t.
