Theater artist Taylor Mac says he’s been misrepresented by headlines claiming that he wants to make audiences “uncomfortable.” That isn’t the whole truth. Instead, he says, “I use theater to break us open a little bit, to make us doubt and wonder.”
Mac’s oeuvre is vast. He’s written more than a dozen shows in styles ranging from “absurd realism” to “jazz opera,” including what he describes as “a two-man cabaret for seagulls.” He’s acted in films and onstage in his own and others’ plays. But he’s probably best known for his original show A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, despite the fact that it was performed in its entirety only once.
The 24-hour show, which uses popular songs to reframe American history from 1776 to 2016 through the experiences of marginalized people, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017. (An HBO documentary of the event screened at the Provincetown Film Festival last year.)
His professional accomplishments are equally varied. Aside from being a self-described “modern-day fool,” Mac is also the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, the International Ibsen Award, the Kennedy Prize, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, a Drama League Award, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obies, and two Bessies. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize nomination, his 2019 play Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus was nominated for a Tony award.
In his performances, Mac is an artwork himself. Garish spots of rouge meet decadent glitter on the canvas of his face. Sculptural costumes give him wings, or spikes, or fluff, depending on the show. His wigs are more like elaborate crowns and headdresses. His voice, decadent and gritty, is itself a prop and a character, one that made it through that whole performance of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, albeit painfully.
“There was no way to do that show without being strong, and there was no way to do it without being tender,” says Mac. “People might describe it as fierce, but it’s so vulnerable — to perform for 24 hours with all that history on your back, with your memory breaking down and your voice breaking down and your body breaking down.”
On Friday, Aug. 9, Mac will perform at Provincetown Town Hall as part of the Payomet Road Show series. The concert, titled “Born to Run (to Provincetown),” will include new material as well as songs from some of Mac’s previous productions.
What all the numbers have in common is the way they express Mac’s desire to offer “a different understanding of the world” through his art. In a musical adaptation of John Berendt’s 1994 nonfiction novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that premiered two months ago at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago — and for which Mac was the writer — Lady Chablis, a character based on a real-life Black transgender nightclub performer, proclaims, “The Lord knows that the Lord put me on this planet to make the people moist.” It’s a line that Mac says resonates with his own intentions. “If that’s what you mean by uncomfortable,” he says, “then yes, absolutely. I hope that I will make the people moist.”
But first, he says, he’s here to make the people laugh. That mission goes as deep as his identifying pronouns. “I think you can’t get my pronouns wrong,” he says. “She, he, it, shit, whatever.” While he’s on record as being fine with being called “he,” he also invites people to refer to him as “judy,” with a lower-case J.
“It brings me great joy when people use it,” he says. It isn’t a joke — “but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny.” When people do use “judy,” it makes him laugh. If they refuse to use it — well, that makes him laugh, too. And it’s offered as a gift. If you don’t want to use it, “please re-gift it to someone else.
“I like to take things that are hurting us, or that we’re confused by, or that we compartmentalize, and I like to get us to wonder about them collectively,” says Mac. He sees how that makes him a kind of activist. His productions and performances aren’t meant to leave audiences “satisfied with their purchase.” Instead, he says, “I want you to feel like the work is inspiring you to challenge yourself after you leave the theater.”
Often, says Mac, someone will approach him after seeing his show to tell him he changed their life. While he says those interactions are “humbling and honoring,” he’s always a little skeptical. “I want to say, ‘Hey, could you talk to me in 10 years and let me know if that’s true?’ ”
It’s impossible, he says, to know how someone’s been truly changed on the inside. “What I do know is that people have met their life partners at my shows,” he says. “They’ve had babies as a result of meeting people from my shows. They’ve quit jobs and they’ve gotten divorces. They’ve used my shows as the catalyst for change in their lives.”
So maybe Mac’s work does change people. After all, he says, “Theater can startle you out of a lifelong routine. It’s a little bit like doing MDMA.”
These days, Mac says he’s been paying more attention to what he calls a “meditation of queerness.” It’s part of figuring out how he fits into the greater experience of queer culture — and how his work aligns, or doesn’t, with the rest of Provincetown’s summertime entertainment lineup. “There are plenty of queens in Provincetown who will give you a fierce performance,” he says. “But I’m wondering where I’m needed.
“We’ve been living in a very oppressive culture,” he continues. “We’ve been trained to fight. We haven’t necessarily been trained to lean into our tenderness.” Mac sees that development as part of a survival strategy. For a long time, he says, “we chose roles to show that we were strong, that we were fighters, that we could defeat our foes, that we were better than them, that our way was right, that we were dangerous.” But lately he’s curious about a new experiment: “Is there a way to survive using the language of vulnerability over the language of fighting?”
He’s experimented with that language in some of his previous work. In a battle scene in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, he had the audience spit ping-pong balls at each other. The scene became silly instead of violent as a result.
There’s also a cover of Ted Nugent’s song “Snakeskin Cowboys” that Mac has been performing at recent shows. “It’s a song about queer-bashing, and how it’s a good thing to beat up a guy that dresses fancy on the stage,” he says. But Mac uses the song as an occasion to turn the house into a “gay prom.”
“That’s what tenderness looks like,” says Mac. “Tenderness is getting an entire audience to slow dance with someone of the same gender instead of screaming at people that they need to get over their homophobia.”
It isn’t demanding that people see the world differently; it’s an invitation that’s open to everyone.
‘Born to Run (to Provincetown)’
The event: Taylor Mac in concert, part of the Payomet Road Show series
The time: Friday, Aug. 9, 7:30 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $38 to $88, plus fees, at tickets.payomet.org
