Everyday People’s Reparative Guilt and Revolutionary Rehearsalsin Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus

초록

Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), a reimagination of William Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy, tells a story of everyday people sacrificed by those in power and obliged to clean up the very mess that brought them such doomed consequences.Absorbed by guilt for the bloody massacre, the characters in Gary collaborate to repair the tragic world. In other words, I argue that their sense of guilt—even if they are not liable for the brutal violence caused by the Andronicus family’s revenge—drives them to change their current world into a more empathetic and safer space. Here, I further contend that, through these characters’ sense of guilt, Mac envisions a reparative world after Titus Andronicus. In this context, this article analyzes the concept of guilt in Titus Andronicus and Gary: first through Ronald Broude’s framework of revenge as “the regenerative process” and second through my own term, “reparative guilt.” I particularly focus on Janice’s reparative guilt for her fellow women—whom Titus’ wronged daughter Lavinia metonymizes—and her transformation. This article first analyzes how Janice, a prototypical trope of the loyal maid, attempts to complete Lavinia’s revenge, an act which the Andronicus family neglected to accomplish after revealing the culprits of the conspiracy. Then, borrowing Dorinne Kondo’s concept of “reparative creativity” and Helena Grehan’s concept of “practical responsibility,” I explore how Janice’s reparative guilt helps her transform into a revolutionary after Gary’s Fooling, a creative performance which disturbs the established order and imagines the afterward with campy ridiculosity.

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