IF there were a prize for Most Ambitious Nutty Project of the Year, “The Lily’s Revenge” would win, hands down.
Written by downtown luminary Taylor Mac, the show is spread over five parts (each staged by a different director) and boasts 40 performers, puppets, a silent movie, musical numbers, flowers that engage in haiku battles and a curtain striptease — not a striptease at curtain call, mind you, but a striptease by a curtain.
There are also dream sequences and romances, heroes and villains. It’s as if Shakespeare had been reincarnated as a hippie and written a picaresque musical. (Did I mention Rachelle Garniez’s inventive music and the bits in iambic pentameter?)
The story, easier to follow than to summarize, revolves around the quest of a lily (Mac) that wants to become a man so he can marry his human bride (played by Amelia “Lady Rizo” Zirin-Brown and also Darlinda Just Darlinda). In the process, he (it?) must help break the flowers’ curse by fetching mysterious Dust, while fighting off the Great Longing (James “Tigger!” Ferguson), which represents pointless nostalgia and looks like a velvet curtain.
OK, now I should say that the show lasts five hours, which is daunting even at $35 a ticket.
But the evening is surprisingly easy to digest, particularly since the three intermissions are abnormally long to reconfigure the main performance space for every part. The first, directed by Paul Zimet, uses traditional seating, while the second is staged in the round by Rachel Chavkin, and so on.
The breaks even feature their own entertainment. The show takes over the entirety of the HERE theater complex — including the dressing room, hallways, stairs and bathrooms — to immerse the audience in a fantastical alternate reality.
Some sequences do dilly-dally, and even the wacky internal logic falters by the end, but for the most part this experience is sweet, ramshackle and generous — and unique.
As Time (Miss Bianca Leigh) says at the trip’s very beginning, “This play may last the rest of your life.”
She has a point: It won’t be easy to forget “The Lily’s Revenge.”