I first encountered Taylor Mac’s work when I was invited to see judy (Mac’s preferred personal pronoun) in an incredible performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center. For those of you not familiar with that venue, it sits on a high floor at Columbus Circle and the stage is set in front of giant floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows overlooking Central Park and the surrounding always-busy streets. The whole evening was special—great band, Taylor’s beautiful voice and incisive social critique, the humor and the truth—all conspired to turn that plate-glass back drop into a telescope trained on the entire city of New York and American culture at-large.
When I read Hir, Mac’s modern contemplation of the new American family, I was immediately sent back to the feelings of that night above my second city, and the sensation of encountering an artist whose view of the world would forever change the shape of my own. In performance, Taylor dives headlong into the politics that surround the topic at hand, whether that is gender, our American identity, or the pop music of a particular decade. These observations are direct, unstinting and totally readable for what they are: a commentary on the at-times hostile contradictions between who we say we are and how we behave. In Hir, Taylor turns that eagle eye on the very structure of American life—the nuclear family—and the traditional roles that we have all been asked to play in a story whose rules just keep changing.
In Hir, an oldest son is returning home from the current war, the youngest child is transitioning and a long-suffering housewife is turning the tables on her now-incapacitated historically-abusive husband. As macabre and dark as that may sound, each character in Hir is immersed in the ever-common familial battle of re-definition: the sometimes futile and always comic attempt we each make to change how we are seen by the people who made us what we are. That Taylor looks at this struggle with as much compassion as critique and as much humor as pathos just makes the play all the more welcoming and vital. That judy wrote the play in response to seeing Steppenwolf’s production of Buried Child makes its home here nothing short of inevitable.
Used to be, when you became a parent, there was only one thing you knew for sure: whether your child was a boy or a girl. And when you married, you entered a partnership with your husband or wife based on the idea of a shared wish for the future and your place in it. Now, all bets are off as so many things we took as facts have turned out to be nothing more than ideological constructs that helped perpetuate the status quo. What we do with this new information—this truth—will perhaps be the real measure of who we are as human beings—both in our families and in the world. And in Hir, Taylor Mac turns those plate glass windows into the mirror that helps us to recognize ourselves and start to understand where to begin.
Anna D. Shapiro, Artistic Director