Nothing says Broadway like a luscious red show curtain.

But look closer: This one, designed by Santo Loquasto, isn’t merely red. It’s blood red speckled with filth and bedazzled with sparkly rosettes.

Welcome to the world of “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” where carnage and camp coexist — if not exactly in peace, then in a constructive dialectic.

Taylor Mac’s new play, which opened on Sunday at the Booth Theater in a production starring Nathan Lane, is the unlikeliest bird to land on Broadway in many a year. Much like Mr. Mac himself at the end of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” his epic revision of American culture, it is fabulous and bedraggled: a defiant and beautiful mess.

Mess is both the aesthetic and the subject of “Gary,” which picks up the story of “Titus” shortly after its finale, among the grisliest in dramatic literature. You don’t need to know Shakespeare’s play to understand “Gary”; when the show curtain rises on George C. Wolfe’s production, you see its result. Mounds of corpses mount toward heaven from the blood-slicked floor of Titus’ opulent banquet room.