Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus

[Cooper]

Took in a Wednesday matinee of this most bizarre play that has great acting & script.

 

FYI. Unless you want to get squirted with blood, don’t sit in the front row. I guess they failed to mention this to some very surprised people. And, when the curtain opens be prepared to see a mountain of dead, anatomical correct, nude Roman Soldiers. Some will come to life. What this mountain of dead bodies is doing on stage is a large part of the plot.

 

It’s a 90 min play with no intermission. So, if you’re planing on walking out, do it very quietly.

 

Three-time Tony Award winner Nathan Lane, Tony Award nominee Kristine Nielsen, and Tony Award winner Julie White star on Broadway in the world premiere of Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, the new comedy by Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur Fellow, Taylor Mac. Directed by five-time Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe, Gary is set just after the blood-soaked conclusion of William Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus.

 

SYNOPSIS: It's the fall of the Roman Empire, and the years of bloody battles are over. The civil war has ended. The country has been stolen by madmen, and there are casualties everywhere. Two very lowly servants are charged with cleaning up the bodies. It’s only 400 B.C.—but it feels like the end of the world.

Edited March 29, 2019 by Cooper

[foxy]

I’ll be curious to see how the critics react to this show and especially to those buying tickets. Probably not a family friendly show lol. I have to admit I liked the dancing soldiers with the big erections going up and down.

[edjames]

Openned last night....NYTimes review "mixed."

ANYONE CARE TO WEIGH IN ON THE "DEAD PENIS DANCE"?

 

Review: Taylor Mac’s ‘Gary’ Finds Hope and Humor on a Pile of Corpses

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.

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.

 

Other reviews are also "fixed."

http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-gary-a-sequel-to-titus-andronicus-on-broadway

[foxy]

Funnily enough, after reading this review I’m tempted to see the show again. It’s so peculiar. I don’t think it will last long but I don’t think we’ve seen the last of it. I think it could get cult status.

[+ beethoven]

I saw "Gary" last night, and disliked it intensely. Much of the humor revolved around penises, excrement, and flatulence, and half the audience loved it, just like the third-grade level potty humor in The Book of Mormon.. The NY Times review used the word "mess" more than once, and that's an understatement. Yes, people near me were laughing their heads off, and just as many sat in silence. I agree with Cooper that "Gary" is bizarre, but that's about all I agree with.

Nathan Lane is who I went to see, and he's the inimitable Nathan Lane, but I wonder about the crummy scripts that he and his agent must have rejected if this crap is the best he could find.

[edjames]

The first casualty of the Tony Awards announced that it is closing on Sunday.

 

Taylor Mac’s ‘Gary’ Will Close Early on Broadway

The profane and bloody comic “sequel” to “Titus Andronicus” has been dying at the box office.

 

Taylor Mac’s first Broadway play, “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” will close on Sunday, seven weeks earlier than scheduled.

 

The play is an experimental comedy that imagines a conversation between a maid and a clown left to clean up the dead bodies after the bloodshed that roils the ruling class in Shakespeare’s gory tragedy.

 

An unusual project for Broadway, it marked the arrival of Mr. Mac to the commercial stage. His previous works, in which he often starred, were produced in nonprofit spaces. His best-known project, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” has been presented to acclaim around the world.

 

“Mess is both the aesthetic and the subject of ‘Gary,’ ” The New York Times theater critic Jesse Green wrote in praising the show. And “Gary” was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best play.

 

But it was shut out at the Sunday ceremony, and is the first show to announce a closing afterward.

 

Directed by George C. Wolfe, “Gary” had a cast of Broadway favorites: the Tony winners Nathan Lane and Julie White, along with multiple nominee Kristine Nielsen.

[leeper]

Despite the strong negative reactions this play got from some people, I am totally bummed I won't be able to see it. I actually had a ticket to see it on the 22nd, but won't be able to see it before it closes. I have a feeling that I would have enjoyed it.

[+ beethoven]

Leeper, you don't know how lucky you are! I bought a ticket in advance, and was thoroughly disgusted with this fraud perpetrated on the theatergoing public. I don't think I ever expressed satisfaction when I read of a play's closing. It's not nice to say, but I hope the producers lost their shirts.

Use your refund to see something good!! Support the real theater! Not crap like "Gary."

[RyanDean]

I saw the show (my second time) last night. I can see how it's not for everyone (hi @beethoven!) but I've become quite fond of this play. I'm sorry you won't be able to decide for yourself, @leeper, and hope you find an alternate option as ambitious and as adventurous as GARY.

[+ beethoven]

RyanDean, I'm glad you enjoyed Gary -- seriously. That's what makes horse racing! I know there are plays, especially musicals, that are not for me, and I usually manage to avoid them -- and friends of mine have loved them. I'm a Nathan Lane fan, and that's why I got tickets for this immediately. Oh, well......