"Where carnage and camp coexist — if not exactly in peace, then in a constructive dialectic...For me, at least, the most convincing and powerful moments came when the performances aligned with the gravity of the premise. Gary’s speech about the power of art to create new realities was one such moment for Mr. Lane: You could feel the hope in the hyperbole he spoke of...Strange bird or not, I’m glad it’s here. Not everything perfect is true, and not everything messy isn’t."
Read more

"An outrageous mix of the absurd and the grotesque, designed to make audiences gape...Lane is tremendous, and Julie White is screamingly funny as the play’s third character, Carol...While George C. Wolfe’s production delivers all the flatulence a person could desire, there are stretches where it runs out of gas...The design elements are all first-class, but impressive through Wolfe’s staging is, a smaller and scrappier production might better capture 'Gary'’s essence."
Read more

"As played by Kristine Nielsen and Nathan Lane, they turn this unsavoury spectacle into comic gold. These are Broadway clowns at the top of their game, and they surrender themselves completely to the Ionesco-inspired Theatre of the Absurd...The show is often riotously funny, with a third character Carol, played by the dazzlingly dry and witty Julie White, drawn into the carnage...This is bold, audacious work -- Broadway has not seen anything quite like this before."
Read more

"Though it’s Nathan Lane’s name that tops the marquee and Nielsen’s that comes close behind, it’s all but impossible to imagine ‘Gary’ without White’s brilliantly kooky antics. Of the show’s game trio of actors, she’s the one living most comfortably in its heightened, hyperactive yet pensive, tragical-comical-scatalogical world...Despite the fact that Wolfe’s production is pitched pretty much unrelentingly at 11, ‘Gary’ isn’t as funny or as biting as it could be."
Read more

"It is the work of a real writer expressing depths in a popular form...I have never liked Lane and White as wholeheartedly as I did watching them in 'Gary,' mostly because of their and Neilsen’s admiration for the script, and where it takes them as performers. Mac’s words illuminate them...This show is part burlesque, part lyric. Although I am not especially attracted to the former genre, this doesn’t detract from the lyricism we hear and see.”
Read more

"Lane almost justifies the play during the first half hour as he bumbles around the mound...The play relies on the supposition that all these goings-on have some weighty import—if only they could be properly understood...Perhaps Mac has read too much Walter Benjamin about the salvationary power of death-saturated Baroque tragic drama. What Mac offers us instead is an exercise in self-indulgence, with a dollop of facile allusion and a dose of bad faith."
Read more

"Outrageous, hysterically funny, and connivingly moving...With co-stars Kristine Nielsen and Julie White – both splendid – and director George C. Wolfe, Gary could seem almost greedy bringing in original music by Danny Elfman...The iconoclastic vision, the captivating balance of highbrow and low, the undercurrent of compassion for a rarely deserving species – all stay true and really rather glorious."
Read more

"The weird new play from Mac that, depending on your tolerance for the comedically scatological, circuitous, and nihilistic, will either transfix you or drive you screaming from the theater hoping never again to encounter so many corpses with flatulence...Lane is quite spectacularly good here…‘Gary’ is unlike anything you’ve ever seen and, through its very presence on Broadway, an act of clear desperation and an important meditation on the role of the comic in a geopolitical hellhole."
Read more