Blame Game

"LAST SUMMER, the polymath performer Taylor Mac skewered the system of arts philanthropy-and they did not spare themselves. Mac's unlikely vehicle: a loose adaptation of Molière's 1670 play The Bourgeois Gentle­man, presented at Brooklyn's Theatre for a New Audience. Running under the name Prosperous Fools, Mac's version takes place at a gala event for a theater company where unnamed figures populate the stage-an artistic director, a pair of honorees, a stage manager, an intern, various dancers, a puppet version of the actor Wally Shawn."

"Mac, speaking as the artist who choreographs the evening's entertainment, confesses to their audience that they are trapped in the patronage game: "I wanted to be able to have automatic deposit. Just once. And lemon curd from the farmers market. And nice soaps. But why do I feel dirtier now that I'm clean?" Molière, the seventeenth-century French playwright, has been hurled from the Baroque into the contemporary."

Taylor Mac staged Prosperous Fools, a loose adaptation of Molière's The Bourgeois Gentleman, set at a theatrical gala to satirize arts philanthropy and personal complicity. The production populated the stage with archetypal theater figures and even a puppet, using humor to expose the moral compromises of patronage. Molière's seventeenth-century comedies have appeared widely across New York stages this season, translating Baroque satire into contemporary critique. Contemporary theater is elevating popular, lowbrow forms and farce while using classical satire to demand self-reflection from cultural elites and the arts community.

Read at Artforum