At just over 90 minutes, Taylor Mac’s first Broadway play, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, is roughly one-fifteenth the length of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, the brilliant, epic performance piece that made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist a couple of years ago. But Gary is just as difficult, in the best sense, to sum up neatly: a raucous comedy whose subject is tragedy—not the titular Shakespeare play, which is merely its starting point, but our enduring capacity for destruction, which Mac engages with gloriously raunchy humor and blazing intuition, and an aching tenderness that sneaks up on you and wraps itself around your heart.
The terrain demands a deft guide and expert players, and Mac has both in director George C. Wolfe and his cast, composed of Nathan Lane, Kristine Nielsen (replacing Andrea Martin, who sustained an injury during rehearsals) and Julie White, all in top form as minor figures from the original Titus who come into their own, and then some, after surviving that play’s notorious wreckage.
The wreckage itself has a prominent role in Gary; the curtain opens to reveal as resplendently and hilariously gory a set as you’re likely to have seen on a Broadway stage, with what appear to be hundreds of stuffed, rouge-stained corpses scattered about. Scenic designer Santo Loquasto (another invaluable veteran, along with costumer Ann Roth) has a bunch heaped around a tall wooden centerpiece surrounded by the gold-plated ruins of a Roman palace’s, the emperor Titus’s, banquet hall. A staircase snakes through this pile of bodies—still clothed, in contrast to others stacked around them—which the actors will sift and climb through, at points popping up like daisies sprouting from dry soil.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★ review here.]
The corpses also become objects of play, particularly for Lane’s Gary, a lowly clown who has been promoted, after the death of too many servants, to the role of maid. His new boss is Nielsen’s Janice, a battle-hardened vet—”Ya think this is me first massacre?” she shouts—who sets about showing him how to rid the dead of any remaining flatulence, as well as blood and feces. Scatological humor plays a key role from early on, with Lane and Nielsen, both speaking in broad cockney accents, pressing fake tummies and other body parts to produce a symphony of fart noises. Lane wears a horn strapped to his midsection, providing more sonic punctuation as Gary’s initial unease fades a bit and he begins to have fun with his insentient subjects, even developing a crush on one of them.
But Gary has higher aspirations, and not just because the task of draining bodily fluids through tubes doesn’t strike him as a dream job. The clown’s goal is nothing less than to save the world, by being further promoted to the role of fool—a voice of wit and wisdom, rather than an object of derision—and thus allowed to enlighten what’s left of the court. Gary speaks loftily of the “beauty of a coup” that would deliver them from chaos and despair and social injustice, rather than requiring them to clean up, in every sense, after the privileged. “All you’ve done is make it seem pleasant for the people making the mess,” he chides Janice, who retorts, “I understand. Ya had some near deaths. It changed your lives. And now ya think ya can change other people’s as well. But it don’t work that way.”
Gary’s aspirational idealism and Janice’s pragmatic cynicism complement each other in the absurd but somehow not unfamiliar world Mac has crafted here, with language that’s both masterful in expressing character and exquisite in its wit and beauty. The first lines are spoken in rhymed verse by Carol, the midwife drolly played by White, a woman rather higher in social station than Gary or Janice, though still saddled with serving the more fortunate. Gary is later mocked by Janice when he does the same, as the play juggles ribald satire—there’s even a bawdy musical number, in which various male corpses suddenly spring to life, along with distinguishing body parts—with profoundly moving reflection.
Gary and Janice are given stirring monologues, enabling Lane and Nielsen showcases for the astonishing range that has sometimes been overshadowed (though less so in Lane’s case, recently) by their comedic prowess. The actress, who assumes a deeper voice and more muscular presence than she has in some previous roles as Janice asserts her authority and frustration, settles into a beautiful, and rhyming, tribute to Titus’s daughter Lavinia, an especially undeserving victim of the slaughter and a symbol of the unfair burden heaped on one gender in particular. “I would like to see a line of living women kicking all in one direction, symbolizing a revolt, and taking over the world,” Janice declares later, nodding back to the all-male production number. (Notably, she keeps the bodies of women and children covered, out of respect and because she can’t bear to look at them.)
The superficially daffy Carol, whom Janice characterizes as “smart enough to accept the world but clean her plate,” though also “damaged,” agonizes over the fate of another small character in the original Titus: a black baby, the product of an affair between the Goth queen Tamora and Aaron, a Moor. Though marked for murder in Shakespeare’s play, the infant comes to personify hope in Mac’s, informing a benediction that cuts through the squalor, as sharp and pure as a ray of sunlight.
Gary, too, is a welcome sign of new life, the work of a truly sui generis talent who, if we’re lucky, will be blessing Broadway—as a performer, too, hopefully—for years to come.
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus opened April 21, 2019, at the Booth Theatre and runs through June 16. Tickets and information: garyonbroadway.com
