Taylor Mac (center) plays a choreographer in Prosperous Fools who is surrounded by the principals of his new ballet (clockwise from left): Megumi Iwama, Em Stockwell, Cara Seymour, and Ian Joseph Paget (bottom). This photograph and banner photo by Travis Emery Hackett.
Taylor Mac is chronicling slapstick goings-on backstage at a not-for-profit’s fundraising gala in his new comedy Prosperous Fools. Murphy’s Law is in high gear, and things are haywire. Since the not-for-profit is called National Ballet Theater, it’s clear this is Mac’s assessment of the state of the arts under the new federal administration that has made its leader chair of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Sierra Boggess plays the humanitarian known as ####-### and Aerina Park DeBoer is the Pot-Bellied Child, one of the beneficiaries of ####-###’s conspicuous largesse, in Prosperous Fools. Photograph by Hollis King.
Playwright, actor, avant-gardist, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Mac has written himself the plum role of Artist (yes, just Artist), a choreographer beset by the politics of arts funding. After years of self-denial, Artist hopes the gala’s premiere of his new ballet will cinch his professional future. Philanthropoid (Jennifer Regan), the company’s artistic director, is terrorizing her minions: “We are raising not just money but our salvation.” Artist and Stage Manager (Jennifer Smith) are competing for control of the stage: he’s trying to summon a miracle through a last-minute rehearsal of the under-rehearsed dancers; she’s conducting a sound and light check.
All progress ceases on the arrival of $#@%$ (the name is supposed to sound like “a censor buzzer has just gone off”). He (Jason O’Connell) is a grandiose billionaire aptly dubbed a “philanthrocapitalist” by a detractor. Having built the company a grand new lobby and donated cash to commission Artist’s ballet, this philanthrocapitalist expects a kowtowing welcome. He’s a “real estate petroleum mogul who makes pharmaceutical heroin out of endangered species” but, to people on the street, he’s the judge of a television reality-show in which “poor people compete” for the title of “best beggar.” He has also been the cause of genocide in a country called @!@!@ (pronounced like super-rapid reports of a machine gun).
Philanthropoid (Jennifer Regan) welcomes the arrival of $#@%$ (O’Connell), whom she hopes will be the financial savior of her ballet company. Photograph by Travis Emery Hackett.
O’Connell makes a meal of the long speeches Mac gives him. His endurance and vocal aptitude in handling the script’s tangled syntax are impressive; but this aspect of Mac’s writing calls for endurance on the part of the audience, as well as the performer. Nattering about his family (but really about his own supposed accomplishments), the philanthrocapitalist (costumed as a hybrid of Trump and Elon Musk) evokes the ghost of his father, who, he says:
was a self-made man, one of those great American men, like me, who, well, years before, when his father graduated from Yale, he said to my dad at his graduation from Yale, all he wanted was for his son to do better than him, and that’s what my father did, all on his own, like me, without any kind of leg up, and being part of the world, making it the place you want it to be, because if the world isn’t what you want it to be, then you have to make it the place you want it to be, you must cram it into your ideal.
The production, efficiently directed by Darko Tresnjak, features actors tumbling into the orchestra pit, a running joke about Wallace Shawn (with Mac leaping in and out of Shawn disguise), and Sierra Boggess as a very funny phony humanitarian. There’s a commedia dell’arte spirit to it all, which is diverting in a Molière-ish way, until it crosses the border of tedium.
Boggess and O’Connell play grandiose celebrities, famous for being famous. Photograph by Travis Emery Hackett.
Mac credits Molière’s 1670 comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme as inspiration. Molière may have been the spark, but Prosperous Fools is fueled by a fiercer spirit. Mac’s affinity for nonsense names--$#@%$ and Philanthropoid, for instance—suggests that Jonathan Swift, the poet-churchman who set Gulliver adrift among the ridiculously-named Lilliputians, Houyhnhnms, and Brobdingnagians, has been an influence. The French and Anglo-Irish satirists were near contemporaries, arguably representing similar moral perspectives. And it’s hard to ignore the Swiftian vituperation that overshadows the Molièrian mirth in Mac’s comedy.
Vituperation isn’t an inappropriate tone for what Mac is doing here. But high-octane satire is a near-relation of invective, and a little goes a long way. Proverbs 1:32 (a likely source of Mac’s title) warns that “the complacence of fools destroys them.” Like many citizens at the moment, Mac’s Artist is despairing. He tells himself he must “embrace the fact that you are living in a feudal society, and the only way to get funding is through an oligarch.” He laments: “Why couldn’t I have a good oligarch?”
Whether derisive satire, such as Mac’s, will pave the way to constructive discourse is an open question, but it’s a viable tonic against despair. What’s certain is that, for playgoers, Prosperous Fools is destined to be polarizing—but what’s not polarizing nowadays?
Prosperous Fools runs through June 29 at Theatre for a New Audience/Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn). Evening performances are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit tfana.org.
Playwright: Taylor Mac
Direction: Darko Tresnjak
Scenic Design: Alexander Dodge
Costume Design: Anita Yavich
Lighting Design: Matthew Richards
Sound Design: Jane Shaw
