GLR September-October 2023

BOOKS

American History as Sung by Taylor Mac

T AYLOR MAC is a boundary breaking theater artist whose cre ativity and accomplishments defy categorization. In a career span ning 25 years to date, the actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter has racked up a slew of awards and nominations in their many fields of endeavor. Their work has attracted the attention of numerous scholars and writers, whose critical essays on Mac have been collected by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb in the aptly titled The Taylor Mac Book . Following a general introduction to Mac ’ s work are essays that examine several of their plays, including The Lily ’ s Re venge , Hir (pronounced “ here ” ), Gary: A Sequel to Titus An dronicus, and The Walk Across America for Mother Earth. However, the editors have chosen to focus chiefly on Mac ’ s most ambitious and successful project to date, A 24-Decade His

ratives from 1776 to 2016. Each decade in the performance is intended to be “ orga nized around the idea of showing how var ious communities, ‘ built themselves as a result of being torn apart. ’” Mac developed the play in one-hour sections over several years and trained with the beloved vocal coach Barbara Maier Gustern for two years before performing the complete work in a continuous 24-hour period at St. Ann ’ s Warehouse in Brooklyn

T HOMAS K EITH

THE TAYLOR MAC BOOK Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance Edited by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb Univ. of Michigan. 320 pages, $39.95

in early 2016. The performance was an epic spectacle, divided into eight three-hour chapters. Mac took the stage in extrava gant, colorful, gender-fluid costumes designed by Machine Daz zle. Each costume represented a different decade, and, as Sissi Liu details in her essay about the collaboration between Mac and Machine Dazzle, the costumes were often decorated with objects representing inventions and discoveries made during a given decade. All five scholars who write about A 24-Decade History of Popular Music attended the full produc tion and offered tantalizing details about the eclectic ensemble of singers, dancers, and actors that Mac brought together. This included a 24-piece orchestra. One member was removed for every decade until Mac was alone onstage playing a ukulele. However, for the entire 24 hours, Mac blurred the line between performer and spectator. David Román, who had at tended the earliest versions of the piece and saw the St. Ann ’ s performance, observes that Mac not only encouraged the audience to sing along, dance, and even join them on stage; he also witnessed “ Mac ’ s singular ability to forge — often against the audience ’ s own will — a community, however imperfect. ” Sev eral of the scholars identify this “ communal energy ” as springing from Mac ’ s experience attending an AIDS Walk in 1987, which opened up possibilities for what queerness and community could be. With A 24-Decade History of Popular Music ,Tay lor Mac challenges traditional accounts of U.S. his tory, performance, music, and activism in a sprawling artistic statement. Their meticulous attention to de tail resulted in an unprecedented work of art that is just beginning to be fully understood. Filmmakers Robert Ep stein and Jeffrey Friedman have produced a documentary cre ated from footage at various stages of Mac ’ s process, including the complete performance at St. Ann ’ s Warehouse, which is streaming on Max as of July 2023. The third most often mentioned person in this collection, after Mac and Dazzle, is Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder Charles Ludlam. In many of the essays, there ’ s a ten dency to connect aspects of Mac ’ s work directly to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, or to its best-known and most influential prac

Taylor Mac in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Teddy Wolff photo.

tory of Popular Music , which is discussed in five essays by sep arate critics. A monumental undertaking that took years of research, planning, and collaboration, this work — which was short-listed for a Pulitzer in Drama, though it is variously de scribed as performance art, a concert, or a play — is an alterna tive history of the United States using 246 songs from dozens of genres as tools for enacting cultural shifts and marginalized nar Thomas Keith has written for American Theatre about Everett Quinton, La MaMa E.T.C., and Tennessee Williams.

September – October 2023

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