Review: Taylor Mac Bites the Hand That Pays the Bills in Prosperous Fools

Taylor Mac has a signature trait as an artist: not holding back. Putting aside the 24-hour 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Mac’s maximalist style is evident even within “conventional” forms: the rampant bodily humor and shifting philosophical perspectives of Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; the mix of jazz, opera, and flamboyant fashion in retelling the last hours of Socrates’s life in The Hang. Aesthetically, Mac’s latest play, Prosperous Fools, making its world premiere at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center for Theatre for a New Audience, is of a piece with such previous works. What Mac does with it this time around, however, is both compulsively brilliant and overly insular.

Unlike previous works, Prosperous Fools takes place in the present (though past and present are made porous, especially in aspects of director Darko Tresnjak’s production). Mac plays an Artist scrambling to finish rehearsing a new work, set to premiere at a fundraising gala for a not-for-profit dance company in which a movie star (Sierra Boggess) will also be honored for her humanitarian work. The dance company’s artistic director (Jennifer Regan) is particularly interested in appealing to the purse strings of one wealthy—not to mention narcissistic and entitled—businessman (Jason O’Connell).

That businessman is referred to as $#@%$ in the program and by the actors with a sound Mac describes in the script “as if a censor buzzer has just gone off,” while the movie star is ####-### and a sound “as if a choir is heralding the appearance of an angel.” Those are two of many whimsical touches in Prosperous Fools, which also features Mac transforming into a puppet version of Wallace Shawn, ballet sequences (choreographed by Company XIV‘s Austin McCormick, with music by Oran Eldor) conveying the legend of Prometheus (with Ian Joseph Paget playing the Greek god, accompanied by Em Stockwell, Megumi Iwama, and Cara Seymour), and a set (designed by Alexander Dodge) featuring a scaled-down reproduction of the Astor Place Cube.

Mac is not being precious just for the sake of it, however. Loosely inspired by Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Prosperous Fools updates the French playwright’s satire of social climbing and privilege to the world of the arts in America today. It’s a bubble in which artists, artistic directors, and everyone else in their orbit—including, in this case, an unpaid intern (Kaliswa Brewster)—are engaged in a persistent tug-of-war between maintaining their integrity and compromising it for monetary gain.

Though some of the play evokes forms and styles of the past, Mac speaks directly to the here and now. With the businessman made up (by costume designer Anita Yavich and hair and wig designer Tom Watson) to resemble Vice President J.D. Vance in the second act, it’s difficult to avoid thinking about President Donald Trump’s recent takeover of the Kennedy Center. And the faces of children printed on the movie star’s dress leave little doubt as to Mac’s view of celebrities who treat humanitarianism as another way to flatter their egos.

The upfront quality of Mac’s references to the contemporary theater world imbues the play with an inside-baseball feel that may alienate those who aren’t part of the crowd. Yet, even from a distance, one can surely appreciate the savagery of Mac’s satirical attack, the unbridled gusto with which Mac goes after targets. Anger never shuts out nuance, especially when the Artist wonders whether being able to survive is worth the risk of selling out.

Committed performances from Mac and the cast help put across a no-holds-barred circus atmosphere. Regan conveys a harried quality throughout the first act as the artistic director, building up to an explosion of grim truth-telling at the beginning of the second. As a beleaguered stage manager, Jennifer Smith plays the perfect foil to the mounting insanity around her. Boggess, known as a Broadway belter, milks comic mileage out of the contrast between her imperial manner and the forbidden inner thoughts she eventually brings out into the open. Most memorable of all is O’Connell’s hilariously brutish caricature of an egotistical man with an inner disdain for culture.

For all the chaotic onstage antics, Mac’s most pointed coup de théâtre is his quietest. It comes at the very end, and in a desire not to completely spoil the moment, I will say only that Mac comes up with an ingenious way for us to leave the theater in a state of reflection as we mull the issues of art vs. commerce. Even silence can be rich with meaning in Mac’s world.