Taylor Mac (Photo: Hollis King)

Prosperous Fools

By Deirdre Donovan

In Prosperous Fools, playwright-provocateur Taylor Mac lobs a glitter bomb straight at the glitterati, skewering the pomp, pretension, and performative philanthropy of the nonprofit gala circuit. Loosely riffing on Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and staged with gleeful excess by director Darko Tresnjak, this biting new satire trades powdered wigs for power donors and 17^th century social climbing for modern theatrical narcissism. The result is a hilariously damning portrait of cultural vanity, where the currency is clout, and the cause-whatever it may be-comes second to the spectacle.

Molière's 1670 play was a comédie-ballet and Prosperous Fools nods to this form by showing the dizzying preparations to a gala for an American not-for-profit dance company rehearsing excerpts from a ballet about Prometheus. The show follows Artist (Mac), a genius choreographer, who sees the ethical dilemma of creating art that depends on oligarchs for its funding. Artist soberly points out that only artists living in obscurity ("which equals buying vegetables on a plate of Styrofoam, wrapped in Saran Wrap") can keep their integrity intact in the feudal-like environment of non-profit theater today. But for those artists who aspire to speak their truths in grander spaces, it follows that they must seek the "snobs endorsement" and accept their largesse-and their rules.

Jason O'Connell (Photo: Travis Emery Hackett)

According to an interview in the program, Mac had an uphill battle in finding someone to produce this current work. Judy (Mac's pronoun) approached countless institutions, all of whom shied away from staging a work that took aim at donors. Only Theatre for a New Audience said yes to Prosperous Fools. Even though it meant spitting in their benefactors' faces, they put it on their 2024-2025 season line-up.

Although Prosperous Fools abounds with wit and humor, it brings serious questions to the fore: Should billionaires decide what's seen on stage? Who is excluded from seeing a show owing to high ticket prices? Does charity absolve a philanthropist's greed? Mac's Artist, in fact, tries to give an education on social responsibility to Intern (Kaliswa Brewster) who's still a babe in the woods when it comes to "the rich slash poor polarity:" 

"You want a life in the arts, this is what it looks like. You work for free, you beg for permission to ask for permission to do what you've worked for free to do, and after years of this humiliation, you finally break through, get yourself a patron, and he represents everything you've been fighting against your entire life."

There are ten characters in all in this romp through immoral philanthropy. There's the aforementioned Artist and Intern. Then there's Philanthropoid (Jennifer Regan), the theater's artistic director who tends to talk in doublespeak ("My "job is to give the money away, but my 'job' is to make sure we have the money to give away.") We meet her on perhaps the worst day of her theatrical work life. In comic counterpoint, Jennifer Smith's Stage Manager comes across as cool as a cucumber. The rest of the characters provide texture and depth to this play-within-a-play.

The dramatis personae has some puzzling entries in it. One gets introduced to the likes of $#@%$ (Jason O'Connell), a real-estate petroleum mogul who makes pharmaceutical heroin out of endangered species and ####-### (Sierra Boggess), a superstar humanitarian who wears a gown imprinted with needy children along its hemline. Both are honorees of the gala and, of course, should be interpreted as symbols, even though one sees them as three-dimensional characters. And when it comes to pronouncing $#2%$, according to my press script, it sounds "as if a censor buzzer has just gone off;" and for ####-###, it's "as if a choir is heralding the appearance of an angel."

When it comes to virtue in the play, it's Wallace "Wally" Shawn--or rather his puppetized version--who holds the moral compass. Mac's Artist, in fact, puts on a Wally Shawn costume, transforming Mac into a Lilliputian plucked out of Gulliver's Travels. And, in the next beat, when $#2%$ gruffly says "Read to me, Wally," and then hands Wally a copy of Atlas Shrugged, the play takes on an unexpected philosophical bent. But this diminutive Wally Shawn is nobody's fool as the action unfolds and serves as a beacon of hope for the life-sized characters.

Sierra Boggess and Jason O'Connell (Photo: Travis Emery Hackett)

The play wraps up with an epilogue. Mac, in the persona of Fool, dons a motley cap and recites rhymed couplets that invite the audience to reflect on the play's carnivalesque goings-on. But Mac is no preacher, and can be trusted not to leave things as if this were the last word on the matter of philanthropy and the arts.

In Prosperous Fools, Mac raises pertinent questions on the current feudal-like practice of donors giving their billions to art institutions. Those who want to delve deeper into these questions can hop a train to Brooklyn where Prosperous Fools runs through June 29.

Prosperous Fools

At the Polonsky Shakespeare Center

262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn

For more information, visit tfana.org

Running time:  2 hours; 15 minutes with intermission

Through June 29