Atrocities happen. Shakespearean-level atrocities, dismembered-and-baked-in-a-pie atrocities. Humanitys responses – tears, mockery, more atrocity – are ludicrously inadequate, but really, arent you just glad we have Nathan Lane on our side?
And while were on the subject of inadequacy, put me down for singling out Lane, who is only the most obvious of the pleasures in Taylor Macs Gary: A Sequel To Titus Andronicus, the outrageous, hysterically funny and connivingly moving new play opening on Broadway tonight at the Booth Theatre.
With co-stars Kristine Nielsen and Julie White – both splendid – and director George C. Wolfe, Gary could seem almost greedy bringing in original music by Danny Elfman, Ann Roths costumes – perfect to the last, bloody thread – and a set design by Santo Loquasto that makes a wondrously macabre mountain out of a massacre. So if Gary wants to gild the lilies and spread em around the morgue, go Gary.
Mac, the Pulitzer Prize finalist for the 24-hour outsider masterpiece A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music, winnows the running time, avant-garde experimentalism and a bit of creative reach for the 90-plus minute Gary, but the iconoclastic vision, the captivating balance of highbrow and low, the undercurrent of compassion for a rarely deserving species – all stay true and really rather glorious.
Nipping, snipping and tangling any number of theatrical conventions and pioneers – Shakespearean tragedy, Shakespearean comedy, the Greeks, Punch and Judy, Monty Python and Saturday Night Live, Beckett and Mel Brooks, Grand Guignol, British music hall, American burlesque, Charles Ludlam, and finally the genre we might just as well call “Nathan Lane” and be done with it – Gary begins with a panic. A woman well come to know as the midwife Carol, dressed in Elizabethan rose and sensible shoes, slips through the stage curtain to bring some very bad news. Theres been a massacre, and Carol just might be more than a witness – our first clue is the blood that begins spurting from her neck, Python-style.
She has survived, in other words, the carnage depicted in the goriest of Shakespeare plays, the one that gives Gary its full title. Titus Andronicus includes nine on-stage killings (many more offstage), dismemberment, rape and cannibalism, cruelty, sadism, and a deep, ugly calling-out of misogyny that exploits while it condemns.
Gary does some clever, comic exposition, but if you want a jumpstart, heres what to know: Roman general Titus Andronicus returned from war, most of his many sons slaughtered. He has taken Tamora, Queen of the Goths, as a bounty of war, along with her three sons and a Moor named Aaron. The circle of revenge had Titus and Tamora beheading sons right and left, until finally Tamora orchestrates the rape and dismemberment of Titus daughter Lavinia. Theres even a baby – the son of Aaron the Moor – that guilt-wracked Carol does nothing to save from slaughter, or so she thinks.
Julie White
Once Carol finishes her fast and funny intro, the curtain rises to reveal Loquastos most breathtaking contribution: A palace room filled to the brim and beyond with corpses. Think sandbags sculpted into rigor mortis, rictus faces, genitals exposed. Theyre not realistic, exactly – more like dummies that might fall from a building in a Three Stooges short, anatomically corrected – but disturbing all the same.
And there to clean up the mess is Lanes Gary and Nielsens Janice, he a clown (barely mentioned in Titus) spared the noose by a promotion to maid (help being hard to find), she a real maid who resents having this inexperienced, inept idiot suddenly bossing her around.
“You think this is me first massacre?” she demands. “You think I sat idle on the Ides of March?”
Nathan Lane
To make matters worse, Gary quickly looses whatever enthusiasm he brought to his newfound gig once Janice walks him – and us – through the gruesome details. Gas must be expelled – here, the nod to Brooks Blazing Saddles – and all manner of entrails removed and bodily fluids drained (think siphoning gasoline from a car). One look – one long, beautifully performed deadpan look – at the pile of work ahead and Gary realizes hes not exactly living his best life. Scheming commences.
His plan: He, and the reluctant, just-get-the-work-done Janice – will transform this carnage into some sort of truth-telling, order-disrupting performance piece for the leaders and dignitaries gathering soon. Hell call it “a Fooling” (“Ive invented a new genre!”) that, he brainstorms, will make creative use of these cadavers. Maybe that hunky soldiers corpse, with its Read More – Source
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