Taylor Mac’s Gary is an irreverent satiric sequel to one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known but bloodiest gore tests, Titus Andronicus. Mac has made a name in the avant-garde world of Off and Off-Off-Broadway as a performer and playwright, bending gender and theatrical rules in such works as Hir, The Lily’s Revenge, and his performance piece A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Gary is his Broadway debut and makes a bold departure from the the usual Main Stem fare.
The slight work stars a trio of major comic actors (Nathan Lane, Kristine Nielsen, and Julie White) as minor characters in Titus cleaning up after the massacre depicted in the Bard’s tragedy and ruminating on the role of the average person coping with the elite’s grand messes.
It’s an interesting concept and director George C. Wolfe and the brilliant cast do much with Mac’s scatalogical humor (there are plenty of fart, blood, and anatomical gags as corpse-dummies are tossed about) and social observations. White is particularly funny as a palace midwife killed for knowing too much and astonished at being brought back to life. But the play runs out of steam long before its 90-minute running time is done.
Santo Loquasto’s gore-drenched set and Ann Roth’s Roman-Empire costumes help, but the combination of low jokes and high intellectualism just doesn’t gel.
