Taylor Mac is a theatre artist who prefers to write a bio in the first person.  Hello.  I’m also a theatre artist who longs to be rid of the usual bios that are lists of achievements.  Here’s something different.

In case you don’t know, my pronoun is judy (only capitalized when at the start of a sentence, like a normal pronoun).  A few people have claimed I use it as a joke.  They are uninformed.  It’s not a joke, which doesn’t mean it isn't funny.  It’s a personalized pronoun for someone whose gender (professionally and personally) is constantly changing. My gender isn’t male or female or non-binary (which oddly creates a binary between people who are non-binary and people who are binary).  My gender is “performer” (one day I’ll get it on the passport) and continually changing.  It’s also an art piece and as annoying to navigate as it is delicious.  You too may change yourself.

Here’s something a bunch of us theatre folk are considering, in terms of change: how can we make wondering the center of dramatic action, rather than centering the achievement of goals that are inherit in conflict? Sarah Ruhl says most theatre is made in the form of a male orgasm.  That seems accurate, in terms of theatre usually engorging to catharsis. But may we add that the radical queer understands a male orgasm may be varied, multiple, and circular?  All this to agree: There’s more than one way to engage with others.

There was once an acting teacher who said, “When your character is alone on stage their action is one of three things:  praying, figuring out, or recalling.”  Wise as that craft may be, may we transform this triumvirate into a truncation, one which offers an expansion?  While the method acting teacher is interested in showing how people are, some of us are (also?) interested in using theatre to explore possibility. Could we turn our craft into a vagary of wondering?  In other words, how do we become less knowing and more Socratic?

And are these actions reserved only for when we're alone? Or singular?  Or hierarchical?  Here’s a funny thing you start to wonder about as you climb the ladder:  if access to the tower means no access to the street, maybe, baby, it ain’t worth it.

I also wonder:  would an isolated child really dream towards theatre if it meant spending even more alone time? Though, is a character ever alone? Even when rehearsing a one-person show, the ancestral makers are present. So rather than being in a tantrum-tower-building-isolating-your turn-my-turn conflict, how might we wonder WITH them?

A start may be to rid ourselves of numbers.  Twenty-four hours.  Two hundred people.  Eight acts.  Five-character play.  Ninety-minutes.  Are all these numbers ways to disengage from the challenge of content?  Does form do the same?

Judy’s been a form queen.  I love a hand painted map.   Personalized, researched, detailed, figurative, metaphorical, and imperfect.  Essentially:  stack the genres, layer the forms, delight in the human warbles, throw in a little direction, notice the image is faded, get lost, damp, realize it’s grown something that might be harming you, try to clean it, hope it worked, realize it hasn’t, choose to make use of the harm, find a different way, repeat with variation, and call it theatre.

And… I wonder if it’s time to consider that form, style, aesthetics, pace, duration, craft, and process may not be content?  Gosh forbid.  We haven’t yet achieved enough critical mass of agreement that they are content.  Don’t give up yet Taylor Mac.  There is more work to be done before derailing this wholistic approach with sabotaging doubt.  Commit gyrl.

Still… there is a nagging question:  are we all behaving like Virgos obsessing over the categories, stratagems, and lists in order to ground our nomadic insecurities with an organizing principle chained to want?

Here’s a biographical detail for this bio:  I’m a Virgo.  Though I don’t believe in astrology.  Most of the people I hold dear are astrology nuts.  It’s hard to hold firm to a belief when dearness gets in the way.

Another dear thing, which keeps getting in the way of belief:  how can we be quiet while still freeing ourselves from the Puritan dominance over expression?  Another way to ask it:  how may we maintain our gentle souls in a tough place full of so many rules and mountains?  Must the tender queens be “fierce” to chisel a place for themselves in the world?  In order to survive?  Must they be queens; rulers with subjects?  May they not be tender? Must they pull up their bootstraps and emerge from dark caves, ready for battle? Must they brag and promote and grow, grow, grow, simply to be considered?

There’s a Stoic middle-aged consideration for ya.

Speaking of middle age and bragging and promoting… back to the bio.  Some theaters, producers, and playbills have rules about bios:  no jokes; don’t thank anyone; get rid of the personal; forget the philosophy; 100 word count; and simply list.  And perhaps, in a world of so many themes, a list is kinder.  Must we be challenged everywhere?  Shall we manifesto ourselves into corners, even in the playbill?  Shall we exhaust the reader with questions before the show has even begun?

And a different framing:  is the “list" similar to the peaceful and important work of the calling of the names? A way of saying, “This happened!  You may not have been there to witness, but it happened!  Recognize!”  And if the title of a play fails to provide you with the information that it was a sideshow musical about the gentrification of Coney Island—starring Bridget Everett, Tigger!, Dirty Martini, Bianca Leigh, and Ruby Lynn Maher, where Julie Atlas Muz choreographed Basil Twist’s puppets to watch on as Taylor Mac performed a naked, though painted green, de-tucking—perhaps it is enough to wonder with nothing more than its title: Red Tide Blooming.

In case all this might be true (that a list in a bio is more virtuous), below is the traditional biographical list of shows (rituals), competitive kindnesses (awards), and debt (gratitude). It’s essentially an engorging towards catharsis.  Feel free to read it and decide for yourself which gives you the context you need to open your heart (perhaps neither… oh no, then we’ll have to put our hopes on the show).  Or as the drag queen with extra makeup time once said, “Yes, and...”:

Theatre artist Taylor Mac is a MacArthur “genius”, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of the International Ibsen Award, the Kennedy Prize, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, a Drama League Award, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obie’s, and two Bessies.

Selected works include: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (a musical inspired by John Berendt's non-fiction novel, with a book by Taylor Mac and music by Jason Robert Brown), Bark of Millions (a fifty-five song—and counting—parade trance extravaganza for the living library of the deviant theme, with lyrics by Mac and music by Matt Ray), Joy and Pandemic (a realism play about an abstract art school); The Hang (a jazz opera Passion Play about the final hours of Socrates, with lyrics by Mac and music by Matt Ray); The Fre (a queer children’s play about loving after bullying, set in a ball pit); Gary:  A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (a tragedy determined to become a comedy); A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a 24-hour performance art concert about communities building themself as a result of being torn apart);  Hir (an absurd realism play about a changing America); The Walk Across America for Mother Earth (an anarchist adaptation of Three Sisters about activism, with music by Ellen Maddow); The Lily’s Revenge (a flowergory manifold about a flower who wants to be the center of the story, with music by Rachel Garniez); The Young Ladies Of (a paternal mystery); The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (a ukulele confessional about the War on Terror); Red Tide Blooming (a freak-show musical about gentrification); The Last Two People on Earth (a two-man cabaret for seagulls about the joy of singing, created with Mandy Patinkin, Susan Stroman, and Paul Ford).  

Films include:  Whitman in the Woods (directed by Noah Greenberg, streaming on All Arts) and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a concert doc directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, streaming on Max).  

Occasionally Mac acts in plays by others.  Most notable:  the title role in Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando (Signature Theatre, directed by Will Davis); the title role in The Foundry Theatre’s Good Person of Szechwan (La Mama and The Public Theatre, directed by Lear DeBessonet); and Puck/Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Classic Stage Company, directed by Tony  Speciale).

Thank you Patt Scarlett, Linda Brumbach, Alisa Regas, Kristin Marting, Morgan Jenness, Nina Mankin, Lynbarbara Mahler, Liz Swados, Paul Lucas, Machine Dazzle, Matt Ray, Niegel Smith, Robin Bowyer, Marcy Coburn, Kat Wentworth, mom, all the musicians, performers, designers, choreographers, directors, composers, crews, and administrators who've become part of the creations over the years and all the people who keep coming back.