THE TAYLOR MAC BOOK
Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance
Edited by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb
Univ. of Michigan. 320 pages, $39.95
TAYLOR MAC is a boundary-breaking theater artist whose creativity and accomplishments defy categorization. In a career spanning 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 Revenge, Hir (pronounced “here”), Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, 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 History of Popular Music, which is discussed in five essays by separate 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 described as performance art, a concert, or a play—is an alternative history of the United States using 246 songs from dozens of genres as tools for enacting cultural shifts and marginalized narratives from 1776 to 2016. Each decade in the performance is intended to be “organized around the idea of showing how various communities, ‘built themselves as a result of being torn apart.’”
All five scholars who write about A 24-Decade History of Popular Music attended the full production 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 attended 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.” Several 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, Taylor Mac challenges traditional accounts of U.S. history, performance, music, and activism in a sprawling artistic statement. Their meticulous attention to detail resulted in an unprecedented work of art that is just beginning to be fully understood. Filmmakers Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have produced a documentary created 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 tendency to connect aspects of Mac’s work directly to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, or to its best-known and most influential practitioner, Ludlam, without context or explanation. Even though not everything that is camp, comical, outrageous, transgressive, queer, or gender-switching is Ridiculous—these have all been part of theater in one form or another for centuries—Ludlam is too often credited as the primary or sole influence for those aspects of Mac’s theatrical vocabulary, which becomes reductive.
On the other hand, only scant reference is made to director John Vaccaro or playwrights Ronald Tavel and Kenneth Bernard and their Play-House of the Ridiculous, which deeply influenced Ludlam and others and created a style particular to the Play-House that can be recognized in Mac’s often gender-free “signature messy æsthetic.” Glitter-covered Play-House performers Jackie Curtis, Ruby-Lynn Reyner, Agosto Machado, and others, as well as the performance art icon Ethel Eichelberger, elements of glam rock, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and even a little Bob Mackie are evoked by Mac’s solo-performance drag or Machine Dazzle’s magnificent creations, which appear throughout the book.
Despite the oversights, this volume is exciting and right on time. The final chapter contains an instructive conversation between Román and Edgeworth, the editors of this volume, in which they engage in a critical discussion that offers a jumping off point for future scholarship and appreciation of Mac’s work.
Thomas Keith has written for American Theatre about Everett Quinton, La MaMa E.T.C., and Tennessee Williams.
