***Prosperous Fools

Like many a morality play, not exactly subtle

Sierra Boggess and Jason O’Connell in Prosperous Fools. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett

Even a certified genius like creator/performer Taylor Mac (MacDowell-anointed in 2017) could benefit from guardrails from time to time. For this fanciful, shambolic parody of an avant-garde production of Prometheus gone awry, Mac plays a visionary director thwarted at every turn by the donor-class kakistocracy that actually keeps the wheels of high culture grinding.

Initially envisioning a fulsome corps de ballet, the “Artist” – Mac’s character name – gets a mere quartet of dancers (dazzlers all, as choreographed by Company XIV founder Austin McCormack). The benefit performance planned is to be staged under the aegis of the “Philanthrapoid” (Jennifer Regan, overplaying hoity-toity: a bit more of Margaret Dumont’s self-deluding reserve wouldn’t hurt).

Two celebrity guests are on board for the extravaganza. The major underwriter – played by the reliably comedic Jason O’Connell – is $*#%$ (pronounced like a stereo needle being ripped across a record), a character very clearly modeled on a certain South African megalomaniac.

Like Musk, $*#%$ is sometimes permitted to riff excessively here. It’s hard to tell whether director Darko Tresnjak (who kept a very tight rein on 2013’s multiple-award-winning A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) has opted to give O’Connell free rein or if the latitude is written in. O’Connell does make a great stealth sadist (remember his 2018 off-Broadway turn in Kurt Vonnegut’s Happy Birthday, Wanda June?), but he’s given way too much time to fill, such that he occasionally appears genuinely lost, as in: How am I supposed to amuse this crowd next? A similar concern, of course, also plagues the protagonist. Either way, you’re in for some puzzling dry spells.

Broadway’s Sierra Boggess is pure delight as $*#%$’s co-presenter, ####-### (imagine a pure soprano tone that, to quote Fitzgerald, “sounds like money”). ####-###’s got up in a mocha-colored organza gown hemmed with appliquéd portraits of the starving children of the world, her pet charity (brilliant costume design by Anita Yavich). An actual, picturesque beggar child, whom ####-### keeps in tow, seems a bit de trop (it’s a trope now: cf. The Cherry Orchard at St. Ann’s), but to each his or her own signature accessory. The speech that Mac has fashioned for ####-### – a golden stream of nonsensical if vaguely benevolent fatuity – is indeed genius, the high point of the show.

If you find Mac’s parodic, half-size puppet-embodiment of Wallace Shawn (####-###’s cerebral crush) problematic, you may need to delve into the show’s extensive QR-coded program notes, where – in an in-depth interview with esteemed journalist Alisa Solomon – Mac clarifies that he secured Shawn’s blessing; that the author of Aunt Dan and Lemon (a prescient 1985 study of fascistic indoctrination) was all in from the get-go. The program also offers a helpful cram course on Mac’s entire CV to date. A dissertation-length excerpt from The Taylor Mac Book by Sean Edgecomb and David Román (2013) outlines Mac’s extrapolation of – and ongoing loyalty to – Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous.

It's a proud and ever more relevant tradition. Dictators have been known to crumble under a barrage of ridicule. Messy and occasionally tiresome as this production is (or was, as of opening night), it can serve a vital, purgative purpose. Bored, disgusted even? Let your discomfort spill over; then take that energy to the streets – again. And again.

Theatre for a New Audience, to June 29