Prosperous fools
Written by Taylor Mac; Directed by Darko Tresnjak
Theatre For A New Audience | The Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage | The Polonsky Shakespeare Center at 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY
June 1- June 29
In Prosperous Fools, Taylor Mac—always a maximalist, seldom a minimalist—offers not so much a play as a flamboyant grenade lobbed at the sanctified altar of arts patronage. The result is a dizzy, glitter-encrusted spiral into chaos, vulgarity, and uncomfortable truths. This is farce, yes, but the kind soaked in irony and unholy glee, tipping champagne flutes full of bile in every direction. And if that sounds like too rich a cocktail, well, that's rather the point.
The conceit is gleefully meta: a national ballet company scrambling to stage a fundraising gala at a major arts venue—one complete with haute couture, ego wars, and a ballet about Prometheus, no less—only to find themselves buffeted by the gales of late-stage capitalism and fame-drunk celebrity activism. The benefactor? A coarse, swaggering billionaire with the unprintable name of $#@!$ (could have been pronounced Elon Musk, or the sound of a Tesla being decommissioned like you would a leaking yacht) whose entrance on a chariot festooned with eagle wings is as majestic as it is ludicrous. “Get me off this fucking thing,” he growls—an opening salvo for what is essentially two hours of theatrical siege warfare. Dressed for the actual gala and receipt of an award in an electric blue suit accessorized by a hemoglobin-hued tie, he resembles another unbeloved oligarch that ironically has never contributed to a not-for-profit (stolen from, yes, given to, nuh-uh).
Mac cheekily inverts the dynamics of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: rather than a bourgeois climbing the ladder of taste, we are given Artist—a name both literal and parodic—an avant-garde choreographer whose Promethean ballet (site-specific, naturally) anchors the evening’s festivities. Artist, portrayed by Mac himself, is a tormented purist forced to slather his integrity in sycophancy just to keep the show afloat. “Buckle up,” he snaps at an idealistic intern. “You want a life in the arts, this is what it looks like.” Rarely has bitter truth been so blazingly theatrical.
The gala’s storm of absurdity is fanned further by ###-###, a movie starlet seemingly reverse-engineered from every “empathy-in-heels” red carpet cliché. Played with dazzling insincerity by Sierra Boggess, ###-### glides through the event in a sheer gold skirt festooned with cherubic faces (one of designer Anita Yavich’s hysterically cheeky creations), clutching a stuffed platypus like it’s a UNICEF ambassador. She is the absurd apotheosis of celebrity compassion—telegenic, transactional, and terminally un-self-aware.
If Boggess’s performance sparkles with venomous charm, it’s Jason O’Connell who steals the show as $#@!$, a tech-bro tycoon whose vanity outpaces his self-awareness at every turn. Dressed like a man who’s just stumbled out of a crypto convention at Burning Man, he frets about hecklers, reputation laundering, and whether Wallace Shawn’s presence will legitimize his largesse. His rambling soliloquies—half TED Talk, half existential collapse—are vintage Mac: grotesquely funny and uncomfortably incisive. O’Connell gives them real heft, fashioning a character who is part Falstaff, part that Musk-oid, and entirely human in his monstrousness.
The satire here is not delicate. Mac wields his pen like a sledgehammer dipped in glitter. We are treated to operatic arias about donor dependency, surreally extended riffs on the ethics of benefaction, and a show-within-a-show ballet that evokes Balanchine by way of Dada. Austin McCormick’s choreography makes brilliant mockery of artistic solemnity, all set against Alexander Dodge’s carnivalesque stage design—clouds, blood pools (which more than half the cast will fall into), and a Promethean cube—and brought to life with Matthew Richards’ intentionally incomplete lighting plot. It’s a fever dream of high art meeting low impulse.
Director Darko Tresnjak, no stranger to organized mayhem, occasionally struggles to tame this hydra-headed beast. The evening wobbles under the weight of its own excess: the Wally Shawn joke is trundled onstage once too often, and the central love/money-for-charity point-well-taken fizzles without resolution. The intern (played with poignant edge by Kaliswa Brewster) poses difficult questions, but she’s left to orbit the action rather than influence it.
Still, what Prosperous Fools lacks in narrative tightness, it more than compensates for in its brazen theatricality and thematic resonance. Jennifer Regan’s Philanthropoid, the arts director clad as Marie Antoinette, delivers barbed truths in couture: “So many kinds of white people,” she coos at the audience, before getting fitted for a straitjacket. It's this kind of bonkers brilliance that keeps the evening alive, even when the dramaturgy falters.
The play closes, fittingly, with rhymed couplets—a full-throttle homage to Molière that manages to be both glorious and damning. Mac leaves us with the queasy recognition that art’s survival in a capitalist regime often demands complicity. We watch as Mac, alone, sweeps the stage in silence - a wink to any of us who, while part of repertory companies that celebrated too much on opening night, couldn’t leave the theatre before we first cleaned the toilets and took out the trash. Mac’s solitude, a compromised aloneness, jabs at the ribs long after the curtain falls.
Yes, Prosperous Fools is a glorious mess: bloated, brilliant, self-indulgent, and searingly funny. It’s also vital. In an era when many artists tiptoe around the politics of patronage, Mac storms the gates with a jester’s crown and a molotov cocktail. You may leave exhausted, even irritated—but you won’t leave indifferent.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on June 16th, 2025. All rights reserved.