TAYLOR MAC is a boundarybreaking 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 titledThe Taylor Mac Book. Following a general introduction to Macs work are essays that examine several of their plays, including The Lilys 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 Macs 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 workwhich was short-listed for a Pulitzer in Drama, though it is variously described as performance art, a concert, or a playis 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. 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. Anns Warehouse in Brooklyn in early 2016. The performance was an epic spectacle, divided into eight three-hour chapters. Mac took the stage in extravagant, colorful, gender-fluid costumes designed by Machine Dazzle. 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 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. Anns performance, observes that Mac not only encouraged the audience to sing along, dance, and even join them on stage; he also witnessed Macs singular ability to forgeoften against the audiences own willa community, however imperfect. Several of the scholars identify this communal energy as springing from Macs experience attending an AIDS Walk in 1987, which opened up possibilities for what queerness and community could be. WithA 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 Macs process, including the complete performance at St. Anns 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, theres a tendency to connect aspects of Macs work directly to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, or to its best-known and most influential pracAmerican History as Sung by Taylor Mac THOMAS KEITH THE TAYLOR MAC BOOK Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance Edited by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb Univ. of Michigan. 320 pages, $39.95 Thomas Keith has written for American Theatreabout Everett Quinton, La MaMa E.T.C., and Tennessee Williams. BOOKS SeptemberOctober 2023 33 Taylor Mac in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Teddy Wolff photo.
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