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Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus is as Wacky and Gory as You’d Expect

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It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, playing at Broadway’s Booth Theatre.

If you’re familiar with artist and playwright Taylor Mac, you’d know before going into one of his shows that it’ll be unique, to say the least. But you don’t even need to know Mac’s provocative past works (like his A 24-Decade History of Popular Music) to know that something billing itself as a sequel to Shakespeare’s most violent, disgustingly gory play, Titus Andronicus, will be eeeeenteresting. And gory. And weird af. And it is!

But Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, starring the great Nathan Lane, is more than just fart jokes and blood (although there’s a lot of scatological humor, which is the fancy way of saying you see a lot of actual, um, emptying of intestines. Of corpses). As you’d expect from Mac, Gary also manages to say some noble things about class, injustice, and modern society. It’s just simultaneously squirting blood out of stabbed necks and accidentally ingesting corpse feces.

As you may know, Titus Andronicus (not to be confused with the superior Titus – Andromedon) is a revenge tragedy, in which the bloodthirsty Roman general kills the Queen of the Goths’ son for killing all his sons (not to be confused with All My Sons) and then the Goth Queen has her other sons rape Titus’s daughter AND CUT OFF HER HANDS, so then Titus kills those sons and bakes them into a pie and serves it to the Goth Queen…and this isn’t even all of it. It’s beyond gory and disturbing, and there’s a huuuge body count by the end. You really only need to know this last bit going into Gary, in which Mac asks the question, at the end of this epic, insane massacre, who cleans it all up?

And his answer, for our amusement, is Gary. In Titus, there’s an unnamed clown who is sent off to be hanged. Mac has saved him from the hanging and called him Gary, played by the great Nathan Lane as no one else could play this character. By volunteering for cleanup, Gary escapes death and gets a promotion, what a big day for him, to maid. With the help of the equally-anachronistically-named maid Janice (Kristine Nielsen), the two of them attempt to sort through the massive pile of corpses, emptying their intestines of all gases and substances for reasons unconvincing for the work required, honestly. While they work, they wax philosophically – in iambic pentameter most of the time – about privilege, class, and politics. And feces.

They also meet Carol (Julie White), the former midwife bleeding out various wounds in her neck, who is dealing with the turmoil and guilt of not having done enough to save her former charge, which all sounds quite depressing but like I said, she’s bleeding out her neck and she’s Julie White, so it’s rather hilarious. One of the most remarkable details of this play is that Julie White, cast so perfectly, wasn’t supposed to be in it: absolute ledge Andrea Martin was originally playing Janice, and Kristine Nielsen was Carol. But Martin was injured days before previews began and had to leave the show, bumping Nielsen up to the lead role of Janice and bringing White in as a last minute addition. For this extreme change, everyone involved deserves kudos for making it work.

Although all three actors (mostly the women) try too hard too often to milk all the obvious humor from their characters, to the point where sometimes they go too far and it becomes unfunny, they succeed often enough to make it an amusing, enjoyable show, even though because it is so insane I have no idea whether I actually recommend it, or who exactly I would recommend it to.

Some of the philosophical statements the comic trio share are striking and powerful, especially when they are relevant to the current political crises (and especially when they are in rhyming couplets, I mean damn). The setup overall, with the help left with the responsibility of cleaning up the mess of the rich and powerful, already says a lot about power structures and who pays the greatest price. But amid Gary’s attempt to create a new genre, a ‘fooling’, to better express his political views, and amid Janice’s continued efforts to drain all the corpses, the play somewhat loses its focus. While trying to provide political commentary and outright humor, it somehow manages to deny a little too much of both.

INFORMATION

Gary is playing at the Booth Theatre until August 4.

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