Lipstick Traces: Taylor Mac's Satire Takes the Hand of Philanthropy in Its Teeth
Megumi Iwama as Muse #2, Ian Joseph Paget as Prometheus Dancer, Taylor Mac as Artist, Em Stockwell as Muse #1, Cara Seymour as Muse #3. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
It is never an easy time to be a nonprofit arts organization, but our particular moment is exceedingly fraught. Numerous NEA grants have been cancelled, leaving organizations scrambling to finance productions that are already underway. Into this cultural maelstrom comes the world premiere of Taylor Mac's play, Prosperous Fools, a gloss on Molière’s social-climbing satire Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.
Set presently, at a gala for a not-for-profit dance company, the play, billed as "a comedy of manners for an age with no manners," centers on the preparation for an awards ceremony and the event itself, honoring two unnamed persons who share very recognizable traits with real-world analogs. The first, $#@%$ (Jason O’Connell), pronounced "as if a censor buzzer has just gone off" according to the script, is a brash oligarch, while the second, ####-### (Sierra Boggess), said “as if a choir is heralding the appearance of an angel" is a revered actress and humanitarian.
Mac leads the company as Artist, the composer/choreographer of the three-hour ballet which precedes the ceremony. Artist is joined by a pill-popping artistic director (Jennifer Regan), called the Philanthropoid in the script, and an idealistic and slyly ambitious Intern (Kaliswa Brewster). The dancer playing Prometheus (Ian Joseph Paget), a trio playing the Muses (Cara Seymour, Megumi Iwama, Em Stockwell), and Stage Manager (Jennifer Smith) round out the ensemble, directed with aplomb by Darko Tresnjak.
Jennifer Smith as Stage Manager, Jennifer Regan as Philanthropoid, Jason O’Connell as $#@%$. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
In a recent interview, Mac said, cheekily, “I don’t like to bite the hand that feeds me, but I do like to get a little lipstick on it.” Written from an insider POV, Mac is concerned with skewering philanthropy as much as artistic pretension, which leaves no one on stage safe, from the well-meaning Intern to the thin-skinned oligarch. The self-seriousness and inflated stakes of the event are reflected in the Philanthropoid, who debases herself to the point of literally making piggie sounds while on all fours to amuse $#@%$. When the Philanthropoid says, “My job is to give the money away, but my ‘job’ is to make sure we have the money to give away.” The Intern replies, “So you’re like a philanthropic collection agent?”
The performative generosity of the humanitarian actress is likewise interrogated, though not as maliciously.
Wally Shawn (yes, that one, embodied in the play in a way this review won’t spoil) becomes a running gag throughout, and a lodestar—the artist with integrity.
Sierra Boggess as ####-###, Aerina Park DeBoer as Pot-Bellied Child. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
Anyone who’s written a grant proposal or crafted an artist statement will sympathize with the Artist's conflicted rant about funding, as he wrestles with taking money from the dubious $#@%$. “Imagine, in this day and age, an actual patron. No more public humiliation through crowdfunding. No more talk of how my work is about ‘community.’”
The cast is uniformly excellent, with Sierra Boggess giving an expert comedic performance, conveying the sort of unhurried, slightly narcotized mannerisms and gentle lilt of the exceedingly rich and famous. Jason O’Connell’s $#@%$ pushes the character from the laughable to the grotesque.
Jason O’Connell as $#@%$. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
Ultimately, what’s left to the playwright, the humorist, in an era that has surpassed absurdity? What tools are available to match the tenor of the moment? Working in the traditions of playwrights like Charles Ludlam and Christopher Durang, Mac is a scholar of comedy, and he inserts a small lesson into the play, illustrating the six classifications of humorists as a runway show, moving from the top (the satirist) to the bottom (the mime). He’s fond of language games and physical shtick (a lot of characters end up falling into the orchestra pit) and is unafraid to shock or disgust. But as Artist dons a fool’s cap to deliver the play’s epilogue in rhyming couplets (a nod to Puck’s speech at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), in lieu of a curtain call, it’s a final plea for the audience to contemplate the larger implications of the evening’s entertainment:
Could theater be emblematic
Of all the ways we're autocratic?
Could be our meta play is not
So self-involved, but food for thought?
So rather than applaud us please,
Do talk amongst yourselves, and seize
This opportunity of sharing.
And use your exit, now, for airing
Out all your thoughts, and your suggestions,
Your hopes, and mostly all your questions
Regarding our disparity,
Our rich slash poor polarity.
Taylor Mac as Artist. Photo by Hollis King.
With arts funding in the US basically a feudal system, as Mac observes, what's the alternative? Prosperous Fools provides plenty of laughs but offers no easy answers. So the audience is sent off, as Artist mops the stage, sweeping up the accumulated detritus from the previous two hours of chaos. Exiting into the Brooklyn night, I overheard fellow audience members pondering, recapping, and offering opinions, in dialogue with questions Mac posed.
Prosperous Fools is presented by Theatre for a New Audience and runs through June 29th at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY.
