In 1964, the scholar Jan Kott wrote that Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is animated by one dream: “a murder that will break the murder cycle, will be the way out of nightmare.” Many protagonists in his other plays suffer from the same illusion, that the murders they commit will be special somehow, and no one else will ever kill a king again.

In “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” playwrightTaylor Macenvisions another way to interrupt the churn of violence. The escape from bloody coups isn’t another bloody coup. Maybe, the show posits, it’s fart, dick and bodily fluid jokes, rhyming verse, clown shtick, dress-up and make-believe that the magic of theater makes real and revolutionary.

InOakland Theater Project’sproduction, which I saw Thursday, Sept. 14, Gary (Jomar Tagatac) doesn’t seem like much at first. Shakespeare’s gory tragedy has just ended, and dead bodies litter the banquet room of Roman Gen. Titus Andronicus. Gary, a two-bit street clown who juggles pigeons for spare change, has just been hired to clean up the slaughter, but he looks like he’s never held a mop before, using it not to swab but prod and jab.

He’s much better at getting a rise out of Janice (Matt Standley), the Cockney maid who’s outlasted many a regime change with her no-nonsense system of disposing of corpses, which involves emptying them of their flatulent sound effects, by designer Ray Archie, that resemble a symphony written in the key of butt.

In Standley’s shrewd rendering, Janice is the perfect target. She clucks with self-importance till Gary ruffles her feathers, and she squawks her head off.

And the feathers aren’t metaphorical. In Marina Polakoff’s costume design, Janice explodes in black lacy hoop skirts, which cannily hints at the character’s delusions of grandeur long before she discovers them in herself. Makeup, with bulging lips and stony eyes, somehow suggests clown, drag and an etched illustration on an ancient Roman urn, all at once.

Under the direction of Emilie Whelan, the play’s copious clowning — “Who’s on first?”-style repartee, chase sequences, a tea party that makes the Mad Hatter’s look sedate — doesn’t always achieve that tightly wound, precise expressivity that finds sense in nonsense. Some choices still pop in out of nowhere, on a “just because” justification. You can’t figure out why a character suddenly cares about something, and the whole play starts to deflate a little. Here, “Gary” can sound a little like a game of pretend that Mac is playing solo, in the cobwebbed corners of the imagination where you needn’t explain yourself to anybody, including your audience.

但没过多久,小丑的逻辑“加里”复苏itself, galumphing along on its own giddiness. Amid his mopping and bodily fluid suctioning, Gary starts to envision a different world, with Janice as emperor, himself promoted to court Fool and Carol (an ingenious Regina Morones), rewriting her own narrative arc from tragic enabler to triumphant hero.

In so doing, “Gary” creates a canvas for artists to lead our revolts. When Tagatac starts embarking on Gary’s grand speeches, he’s a bit foolish, yes, but he’s also as galvanizing as a banner-waving warmonger. Once he enlists the stuffy Janice, with her working-class myopia and bourgeois aspirations, that paves the way for the rest of us to join in. Her reticence is a proxy for ours, and if she can find her inner silliness, by Jove, the play’s light audience participation becomes not just doable but charming and rousing for the rest of us. In “Gary,” the court jester, with his ability to respond to the vicissitudes of the moment, seeing and exploiting the chinks in anyone’s armor, is king, and it’s our own world that looks upside-down.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com