Sierra Boggess and Jason O’Connell in Prosperous Fools. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
“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.”
Wallace Shawn is perhaps the only person who comes out of Prosperous Fools with his moral code (if not entirely his dignity) intact; “money can’t buy everyone,” says the artistic director of the ballet company where this backstage play is set. Shawn himself does not appear, but he’s a touchstone for several of its characters, and is represented in effigy, or more precisely as a puppet/costume embodied, mostly by playwright and star Taylor Mac and occasionally by another actor, with enormous affection. The rest of them (the rest of us, I should say; the audience is equally implicated), including Mac as both creator and character, fall somewhere along the spectrum of ethical compromise: a sellout, a monster, a hypocrite, a toady, cowed and afraid enough to go along to get along, or at the very least willing to shrug and pay for a ticket without asking too many questions. (Or, for those of us on the critics’ side of the fence, accept our free ticket without inquiring too deeply into the funding source.) Scathing satire, backstage farce, and touch-a-nerve indictment of art in the age of late capitalism all at once, Prosperous Fools is both deeply sobering in the questions it poses and extremely funny, with Mac’s trademark acerbic bite ably matched by Darko Tresnjak’s incisive direction, which doles out the chaos in measured bites. Mac pulls no punches in diagnosing the rot at the heart of the very financial and cultural institutions and structures that support judy’s [Mac’s pronoun] own work—including of course the very theater in which we sit and watch the show; including of course ourselves as audience members.
It’s one thing to play the Fool and poke fun at your patron. It’s another—braver, harder, more uncomfortable—to sink your teeth firmly into the hand that feeds you and not let go for two hours, spinning comedy and unease in equal proportion. In a program essay, creator Taylor Mac notes that it took twelve years to get this play produced, partly because multiple theaters—including the one that originally commissioned it—passed on it, not prepared to look squarely into the maw of our collective complicity. But the age of American oligarchy has mushroomed only further in the past decade, and Taylor Mac does nothing by halves. Prosperous Fools—lightly inspired by Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, but taking tone and its arch philosophizing from Moliere more than story or characters—is often hilarious, but goes for the jugular. There’s a certain appropriate irony that Theatre for a New Audience, with its space modeled after an Elizabethan courtyard theater, is the venue for the premiere of a play that’s all about the grotesque whims of a patronage economy.
“Embrace the fact that you are living in a feudal society, and the only way to get funding is through an oligarch.”
“But why couldn’t I have a good oligarch?”
The setting is a ballet gala performance, just before and just after the performance. The characters, all nameless, span the roles in this machine: The Artist (Mac), an aging avant-garde choreographer who’s graduated to the big stage, where he has composed, choreographed, and designed a new Prometheus ballet in which he will also star. (The actual choreography is by Austin McCormick.) The company: four dancers (Megumi Iwama, Ian Joseph Paget, Cara Seymour, and Em Stockwell), a stage manager (a delightfully deadpan Jennifer Smith), and an intern (Kaliswa Brewster). The artistic director (Jennifer Regan), who goes by Philanthropoid, since the part of her job where she raises the money to do her job has subsumed her identity. The gala’s honorees: ####-### (Sierra Boggess), a movie star known for her philanthropy, and $#@%$ (Jason O’Connell), a billionaire known for embodying the evilest evils of capitalism who’s funded the Artist’s ballet.
The play was originally written twelve years ago, so the billionaire isn’t exactly either the Donald Trump or the Elon Musk of 2025, but you won’t be wrong if you see those allusions in the details and mannerisms, to which O’Connell gives just the right amount of plausible deniability. There’s a reason they–and the other patrons to whom the play alludes–are named with symbols. If you’re wondering how those conglomerations of punctuation marks can be pronounced, they can: $#@%$: as if a censor buzzer has just gone off. ####-###: as if a choir is heralding the appearance of an angel. The moralizing contained simply in how those “names” sound–and then the way the images of both implode still further as we get to know ####-### and $#@%$–is a gimmick that works far better than it should.
As the Artist debates with himself exactly how much of a sellout he is, and whether it’s so bad to be a sellout if it allows one to partake of some of the small pleasures of privilege for the very first time in one’s long life of aesthetic purity, the rest of the characters reveal the details of their own relationship to these debates. $#@%$ plots how he can “win” the competition between the honorees, a competition that perhaps exists primarily in his own mind, but with the Philanthropoid as his enabler, away he goes.
####-### can describe her privilege with a self-congratulatory air and precise enunciation, but still somehow manages to be looking at the Black intern every time she talks about poverty. The Intern may be poor in the sense that she’s not getting paid for this work, but she still can afford therapy and to travel to a country where she’s adjacent to but not actually touched by genocide. The Philanthropoid is willing to grunt like a pig to suck up to $#@%$, but will chastise the attendees for not joining in the dress code. All the performances are strong, pushed right to the line where satire tips over into the grotesque but never losing control of the difference. Boggess and O’Connell in particular embody two different types of monumental narcissism so magnetically that you can’t look away from either, no matter how much you start to want to. And Anita Yavich’s costumes–more spectacularly for ####-### and her entourage but no less pitch-perfectly for $#@%$–help define these characters.
The avatar of Wallace Shawn becomes in a sense the play’s conscience: brought into the piece by $#@%$’s need to “seem cultured by hanging out with cultured people,” he becomes at first a symbol of the Artist’s degradation: You could be an artist who has slowly chipped away at his integrity until he finds he is dressed as Wally Shawn, reciting Ayn Rand. But he’s also the first one to be bold enough to suggest ingratitude, to say out loud that we’re honoring the wrong person. Shawn seems to have found a path through the thicket: as an actor, famously nice and seemingly cuddly, willing to have a great time guest starring on any TV show; as a writer, stark and uncompromising. Yet even he is not so much immune from capitalist pressures as he is more skillful at living with their contradictions. Mac is trying to go one better: to turn over the rock and force us all to look at the contradictions…but yet, here we all are, sitting in a theater funded by the same kind of patronage, paying for our culture.
Prosperous Fools sends itself right off the rails over the course of Act 2, swamping its incisive barbs in rising chaos, beginning by dumping most of the company into the orchestra pit in a commedia dell-arte sequence, from which they–especially $#@%$–emerge changed. The Philanthropoid winds up in a strait-jacket; the Intern and $#@%$ fist-fight over an award; and the whole thing pitches farther and farther into mayhem and inarticulateness, until the bad guy is reduced to literal gibbering, so full of shit that he can make no sound. His victory postponed if not thwarted, he slinks offstage.
And in the space left by the dissipation of all that frenetic energy, we’re left with not the Artist but with Mac alone, who delivers, in classic Fool’s garb, an epilogue in rhymed iambic pentameter (with such precision, restraint, and sense of language that I now want very badly to see judy in Shakespeare). Gently, quietly, it puts before us the questions we’ve been circling all night, and sends us out into the world to resolve them.
For who can pay, is who can go.
And who can go, is who partakes
And who partakes, is who then makes
The rules, based on their own reflections,
And so we’re kept within our sections.
Could theater be emblematic
Of all the ways we’re autocratic?