ON THE FAST LANE TO HIS AMBITION
He’s spectacular in ‘Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus’
What’s the difference between a clown and a fool?
You might think the question moot, given the ample prevalence of both types in and around the White House. But it’s the central issue in “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” the weird new Broadway play from Taylor Mac that, depending on your tolerance for the comedically scatological, circuitous and nihilistic, will either transfix you or drive you screaming from the theater hoping never again to encounter so many corpses with flatulence.
There’s no middle aisle at this one, folks. Consider yourself warned.
The title character in this whacked-out play, a self-declared sequel to William Shakespeare’s whacked-out “Titus Andronicus” and as subversive a comedy as Broadway has ever seen, is what you might call a clown with ambition — which is a
pretty good description of the real-life actor who happens to be playing that role with formidable ferocity, Nathan Lane.
Gary is a clown who has cheated death and, in return for being allowed by his masters to stay among the living, has been tasked with cleaning up all the corpses at the end of “Titus Andronicus.” And on Santo Loquasto’s set, an eye-bulging Mount Trashmore of bodies, that’s a pretty big job.
Even by the standards of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, “Titus Andronicus” really piles up the dead, many of whom were decapitated, mutilated or otherwise abused in the course of the tragedy, a monument to how the powerful and the piqued can spurt rivers of blood.
In this 90-minute show, directed by George C. Wolfe, the corpses are rendered as giant rag dolls, flexible dummies that the three characters in the show can poke, prod and pick up on their backs.
Aside from Gary, you’ve got two other caustic, Thenardier-like trolls, Carol (Julie White) and a maid named Janice (Kristine Nielsen).
They all have the crap jobs in life — cleaning up other people’s mess.
Much of that cleanup — and thus much of the action of the play — involves the removal of the internal fluids inside the cavities of these bodies through aspiration or good old-fashioned sucking.
I kid not; this may be too much for you. But it’s rendered humorously.
Lane’s Gary has one of those wa-wa horns attached to his body to punctuate the unpredictable trajectories of all these bodily fluids. Death never has been so mocked on the Great White Way.
Lane is quite spectacularly good here — he’s in deeper than I’ve ever seen him, and I’ve been watching him for years. He’s more vulnerable, too.
His ambition — to be the fool, the kind of Stephen Colbert-like figure who speaks truth to power, rather than the clown guy who only offers nonideological escape — is what drives this performance, remarkable in all kinds of ways.
He’s often very funny — as, to cite just one moment, when he comes to realize the magnitude of the task in hand, a little comic clown having to mop up what the patriarchy has piled up right in front of his face.
It’s all a metaphor for the pain, and the necessity, of resistance.
Lane is always at his best when he shows you the world-weariness of his allotted role in life, a realization that only grows as we age.
Never has that been clearer than in “Gary,” as important and risky a role that he ever has assumed.
“Gary” sometimes gets lost in digressions and Mac sometimes lets repetitive, undisciplined detail overshadow his thrilling verbosity and reach for ideas.
There is no escape from the cockney comics into quiet, even though that would have been helpful for a beat or two. And on the great track of self-awareness, Lane is further along with Mac, whose best work will require a reckoning with complacency and self that still lies ahead. I can’t wait for that pending humility.
But Gary” is unlike anything you’ve ever seen and, through its very presence on Broadway, an act of clear desperation and an important meditation on the role of the comic in a geopolitical hellhole.
“We’re going to put an end to all this tragedy,” someone says, well knowing that is entirely impossible.
The world ain’t capable.