The Lily's Revenge (review)

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 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...