Transcending gender with Taylor Mac
Taylor Mac is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, and sometime director and producer. TimeOut New York has called him, "One of the most exciting theater artists of our time" while American Theater Magazine says, "Mac is one of this country’s most exciting, heroic and disarmingly funny playwrights."
Taylor’s most recent play, The Lily’s Revenge, is a 5-hour, 36 cast-member theatric that he wrote, starred in, and co-produced (with the brave and visionary HERE Arts Center). It was rated the best play in 2009 by TimeOutNY and Paper Magazine and was put on the top ten lists of many other publications including The New Yorker and The New York Post. Other recent plays he’s written and performed in include The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, and The Be(a)st Of Taylor Mac.
Taylor has performed his worked in The Sydney Opera House, The San Francisco MOMA and Opera House, New York’s Public Theater, Stockholm’s Sodra Teatern, The Spoleto Festival, The Bumbershoot Festival, The Time Based Arts Festival, Dublin’s Project Arts Center, London’s Soho Theater, and literally hundreds of other theaters, museums, music halls, cabarets, and festivals around the globe.
Daffy, extravagant, mysterious
The short hour or more I spent with Taylor Mac (over Ciabatta toast and tea) was nothing less than an education for me. After boning up on his website with its daffy, extravagant drag video performances, its cogent yet mystical manifestos, its bizarre and savvy scenarios, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. You needn’t spend a lot of time "studying" Mac’s cutting edge theatrical explorations and plays to grasp that what he’s doing goes far beyond what the media so glibly refers to as "gender bending." There’s a strong element of phantasmagoria in his heavy, fanciful, sequin-studded makeup that yes, seems effeminate, but evokes something like a primitive, extra-terrestrial, loopy, wry, androgynous witch doctor channeling wisdom by way of humor.
He is also the court jester or fool, combined with shaman, bridging the chasm between physical and metaphysical. And lest you think this is all too heavy, like a tweaked-up Mary Poppins, Taylor Mac doles out his medicine with the grown-up confection of hilarity and satire. You hear him plinking on that ukulele and delivering his dry and/or howling observations and you’re gone. Maybe he’ll shriek like Yoko Ono or share some bitchy insight or politically ironic parable.
The man I met Monday afternoon was very soft-spoken and relaxed, with an easy, congenial smile, dressed in what he referred to as his "boy drag", including a pullover sweater and slacks. Apart from a cap covered with yellow sequins, there was nothing unusual about his appearance. He had just returned from a much needed vacation in Belize, and was very gracious and accommodating as I tried to get a feel for the philosophy behind his current show, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac.
He explained that his performance in this show (unlike other pieces he’s written, created, acted in) does not involve a "persona" but rather, a heightened expression of what he’s like on the inside, in a "stage-worthy" context. Mac said by wearing his particular mix of female attire he cultivates the whole range of possible attributes: aggressive, passive, ugly, beautiful, fierce, nurturing, savage, civilized. It reminded me of the line from the Joni Mitchell song, ".....dragon shining with all values known" without the sinister implications.
