After two hours satirizing an arts fundraising gala with barbed caricatures, loopy shtick and shameless slapstick, Taylor Mac takes the stage alone in a fool’s cap to deliver a coda in rhymed couplets summarizing the point of the play — the corruption of theater art and artists by self-serving billionaire philanthropists. Mac asks:
“Could be our meta play is not
So self-involved, but food for thought?”
Couldn’t it be both? “Prosperous Fools,” based loosely – very loosely — on Molière’s “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme,” is overlong, self-indulgent, and chaotic, but also colorful, often clever, sometimes funny and impressively spot-on. The well-portrayed caricatures call to mind not just familiar types, but precise figures in the news.
Food fight for thought?
Mac portrays the Artist, who is charged with putting on a performance for the gala of a ballet based on the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, for which he was punished by being bound to a rock, set upon by an eagle perpetually eating his liver. We’re given snippets of the performance by four dancers during rehearsal, comic but credible. There is no liver-eating eagle, but it is no coincidence that the philanthropist being honored at the gala rides in on a chariot decorated with a larger-than-life-size fire-breathing eagle.
Jason O’Connell portrays the coarse, billionaire, whom one character identifies as “a real estate petroleum mogul who makes pharmaceutical heroin out of endangered species.” He is listed in the program as $#@%$, like a curse word too foul to express (and pronounced, as the script instructs, “as if a censor buzzer has just gone off.“) O’Connell gives a triumphantly off-putting performance, the highlight of which is a rambling convoluted speech that’s positively triggering — unmistakably dressed in Act 1 like Elon Musk and in Act II like Donald Trump, just one of the inspired touches by costume designer Anita Yavich
Similarly, Sierra Boggess portrays the other gala honoree, ###-###, a film star who wears a dress decorated with the faces of the urchins who are the ostentatious targets of her well-publicized charity, and Jennifer Regan performs as Philanthropoid, the theater’s artistic director, dressed as Marie Antoinette, who winds up caught and wrapped up in a straitjacket by a man in a white coat (yes, the show goes that low.)
Even lower, literally: At one point, the characters one by one fall into a pile in the orchestra pit, a hoary routine should have been be too obvious and too extended to be funny, but made me laugh anyway. Less amusing is some odd and endless business with Mac dressed up on orders from the philanthropist in a miniature puppet suit meant to impersonate Wallace Shawn, a a stage design that inexplicably includes corralled faked geese and sheep and a blood-stained kiddie pool. If this was in Moliere, I missed it.
Prosperous Fools
TFANA at Polonsky Shakespeare Center through June 29
Running time: About two hours, including a 15-minute intermission
Tickets: $75 to $130
Written by Taylor Mac
Directed by Darko Tresnjak
Oran Eldor (Composer), Austin McCormick (Choreographer), Alexander Dodge (Scenic Designer), Anita Yavich (Costume Designer), Matthew Richards (Lighting Designer), Jane Shaw (Sound Designer), Aaron Rhyne (Video Designer), Andrew Wade (Voice Director), Jonno Knust (Properties Supervisor), Rocio Mendez (Fight Choreographer), Tom Watson (Hair & Wig Designer), and Jonathan Kalb (Production Dramaturg).
Cast: Taylor Mac, Sierra Boggess, Kaliswa Brewster, Aerina Park DeBoer, Megumi Iwama, Jason O’Connell, Ian Paget, Jennifer Regan, Cara Seymour, Jennifer Smith, and Em Stockwell.
