Performance Review: Taylor Mac's "The Lily's Revenge" more

The Lily's Revenge Jason Fitzgerald Theatre Journal, Volume 62, Number 3, October 2010, pp. 457-458 (Review) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v062/62.3.fitzgerald.html Access Provided by Columbia University at 12/28/10 11:23PM GMT PERFORMANCE REVIEW In his remounting of The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens and his company reveled in the world of innuendo, ambiguity, and parody allowed within the walls of the playhouse. Such unbridled joy and humor matched the spirit of Conky’s choice for the “secret word of day”: “fun.” Still, I cannot help but think that an equally fitting choice might have been “subversive.” / 457 scope of the earlier play by requiring five acts, five directors, over forty cast members, and every available corner of the HERE space. In the tradition of lowbrow camp, the production was self-consciously clunky, the costumes and tickets intentionally cheap. This aesthetic perfectly complemented the script’s playfully self-deprecating dialogue (“This play is looooooong!” shouts a character in the opening scene) and exaggerated allegorical plot. The antagonist, The Great Longing, takes the form of The Curtain, a melodramatic, mustachioed villain who controls whatever traffics his stage and has a fondness for formulaic comedies, idealism, and weddings. Opposing him is his mother, Time, a regal woman in a clock costume who is furious that her son’s nostalgic tastes have dragged audiences away from “the here and now.” Trapped in the middle is Lily, a five-petal flower (covered, in this production, in Mac’s signature glitter and colorful makeup). After he leaps onstage, Lily falls in love with The Bride, the character destined to star in Curtain’s finale. Brides don’t marry flowers in the narrative idealism of Curtain’s storytelling, so Lily resolves to become a man, and his hero’s journey frames the rest of the evening. Time recruits Lily in her battle to defeat Longing, and when Lily finally comes to her side, he subverts the ugly duckling story by turning difference into a new standard of beauty. In the ultimate battle that ensues, the world’s flowers, tired of being plucked for knick-knacks in human weddings, join Lily in taking back the stage from its oppressors. The event’s expansiveness—each act required different seating arrangements and employed a different pastiche of theatrical traditions—called attention to the processes of production and reception. Audience members, ejected from the theatre for each of three intermissions, were invited to interact with one another and with members of the company in the “Discussion Disco,” HERE’s downstairs theatre space that was transformed into an oversized dressing room. The evening’s “host,” a heavily glittered, bosomy woman in a butterfly costume, instructed spectators to turn off their cell phones and regularly checked on their comfort level. This tension between the fictional story and the live performance permitted The Lily’s Revenge to perform its own politics. The former is aligned with predictable plotlines and conservative values—particularly the opposition to gay marriage. All nostalgic theatre audiences want, after all, is a play that ends in a wedding, so Lily’s nonheteronormative love-match is a slap in the face of dramaturgical and social orthodoxy. Mac borrowed the outline of JONATHAN CHAMBERS Bowling Green State University THE LILY’S REVENGE. By Taylor Mac. Directed by Rachel Chavkin, David Drake, Faye Driscoll, Kristin Marting, Aaron Rhyne, and Paul Zimet. HERE Arts Center, New York City. 14 November 2009. Much is at stake in The Lily’s Revenge—the fate of a hapless young flower, the marriage of a young bride, the rescue of an anthropomorphic vial of dirt—but nothing is more implicated than the soul of the theatre itself. Shall the theatre be a place of dreams, a seductive reification of our fantasies and desires? Or shall it be a place of awakenings, where we find beauty in the chaotic contradictions of the here and now? For the chorus of women—old, ugly, worn out, draped in torn dresses and broken crowns—sitting on a makeshift stage in the play’s opening scene, only fidelity to a theatrical dream world maintains the illusion that they are beautiful Follies girls. But Lily, the talking flower who sits in the audience, sees only what is in front of him, and his innocent observations (“Mary. You have a pimple”) set off a firestorm of trouble. Before long, he has barged onto the stage, pulled himself out of his pot, and set off to defeat the forces of nostalgia in theatre and in life via a camp aesthetic, allegory, and a foregrounding of the processes of production and reception. In the premiere production of The Lily’s Revenge at HERE Arts Center, Lily, of course, was played by Taylor Mac, the play’s author. For much of his career as playwright and performance artist, Mac has been fighting the forces of conformity, struggling to liberate the individual from the homogenizing snare of bourgeois cultural fashion. He staged that battle in Red Tide Blooming, which premiered in 2006 at P.S. 122; in that play, a giant cashmere sweater that called itself the “Collective Conscious” represented the spirit of convention, while a meek intersex sea creature named Olokun stood up for weirdness and difference. The Lily’s Revenge is not so much sequel as companion to Red Tide Blooming, increasing the 458 / Theatre Journal James Tigger! Ferguson and Taylor Mac in The Lily’s Revenge. (Photo: Ves Pitts.) his argument from aesthetic theorist Susan Stewart, who, in her book On Longing, defines nostalgia as sadness without an object, making it both a creative force (it constructs its own objects) and a conservative one (it erases all alternatives). Mac is so enamored with Stewart’s theories that he quotes her book throughout the play, and she herself becomes a character. The combination of epic plot and down-market production earns its biggest payoff in one of the play’s final images. At the moment of his final defeat, his wedding irreversibly wrecked by Lily and the militant flowers, the Curtain fell to the ground to reveal a Sodom and Gomorrah mêlée. Members of the conservative guard and of the revolution were not simply clashing; they were licking, humping, sucking, thrusting, and yanking one another in a wild and confusing mass. Such unapologetic grotesquery recalled Belize’s description of heaven in Angels in America: “Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian . . . full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion.” The challenge to the audience was implicit: to see the beautiful in the spectacularly dirty is to touch the heart of The Lily’s Revenge. But dirty is not always Mac’s style, and, as the play’s star, he largely determined its spirit. As in all his work, he has paired camp extravaganza with adorable, comic self-deprecation. He played Lily like a precocious and stubborn child who would be cute even when breaking his parents’ dishes. In other words, he has dressed to shock, then worked to ingratiate. The result is that The Lily’s Revenge sometimes felt like too much fun, its potentially radical blow offered with a plastic sword. Mac’s desire to be liked bleeds into his politics, which, in their embrace-the-moment, love-for-all rhetoric, can feel broad and simple. Fortunately, Mac’s intelligence is as mature as his generosity is wide. He made room for such criticisms when, in the play’s final moments, a character remarked, “You’re saying to love others, we should create community theatre?”—forcing Macas-Lily to nod sheepishly in the affirmative. Humility strengthens his message. The days when theatre needed to be aggressive to be radical are long past, and Mac has always spoken of his work in terms of inspiration, rather than action. In addition to being a parable of a utopian revolution, The Lily’s Revenge may add to its achievements a representation of how difficult it is to coax that utopia out of the flowerpot of lived experience. JASON FITZGERALD Columbia University