With Filmed Dragstravaganza, Taylor Mac Wants to Dream Queer Culture Forward

judy is a proud queer playwright, actor, performance artist, innovator, director, producer, composer, lyricist... the list just keeps growing. "judy" is the preferred pronoun of none other than the indefatigable Taylor Mac (who is also fine with "he").

The artist has had numerous shows produced over the last two decades, including his critically acclaimed play "Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus," starring Nathan Lane and Julie White, which bowed on Broadway in 2019 and received seven Tony nominations, including Best Play. His most recent work, "Joy and Pandemic," recently premiered at the Huntington Theater in Boston.

His most celebrated and ambitious work to date is "Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music," an astounding, queer-soaked day- and night-long concert/musical/performance installation/interactive and inclusive dragstravaganza. Over a decade in the making, the event was presented in four six-hour chapters at various locations, but the culmination of Mac's vision was achieved at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in October of 2016, when Mac and his ridiculously talented team presented the show to a sold-out audience as a 24-hour marathon performance. Mac's work won an Obie, a Drama Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Now, thanks to HBO and Oscar-winning directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ("The Times of Harvey Milk," "Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt," "The Celluloid Closet," "Paragraph 175") viewers who were not privy to that monumental show can get a taste via a most enthralling documentary about the making of the spectacular production, which boasts terrific footage from the live show. In a full day, Taylor, takes a decidedly queer-positive approach and deconstructs the American myth via pertinent songs from each decade, beginning with our country's birth, right through 2016. It's a truly beguiling and significant addition to the queer canon (the work and the doc).

"Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music," world premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and plays Frameline and Provincetown, and will debut on HBO and Max on June 27, 2023.

EDGE: As someone who did not have the good fortune of attending the show back in October of 2016, is there any possibility that it will see the light of day again onstage? And/or, will a complete filmed version ever be made available?

Taylor Mac: Well, we worked on it for 10 years, so I'm making a new piece that we're premiering in the fall... It's called "Bark of Millions," and it's another epic piece, some four hours long. All original music that Matt Ray, who's in the "24-Decade" film, and I wrote together... But it's definitely in the same spirit of this show. It's an ensemble of 21 with lots of singers and stuff. So, that's my way of saying "No," and/or "Yes," and/or "In some weird way." The kind of work that we started with "24-Decade" is continuing, and it's in a different form. With this show we get this film... But luckily, the film, at least to me, really doesn't feel like we're saying to the audience, "Ah, you should have been there." It feels like you're really experiencing it with the film. It turned out quite beautiful. And I feel like it's not a tease, it feels like it is the thing...

We're trying to raise money to do the new one. (Laughs) But I think we'll be bringing ("Bark of Millions") to New York and other places within the next year.

EDGE: You have a great quote in the doc: "An artist's job is to dream the culture forward."

Taylor Mac: That isn't mine. I have no idea what the original source is. Someone told me it was Jung, but then someone else said no. (Laughs)

But I say that a lot, because it's something I'm considering a lot. Is that the artist's job? I'm always wondering about it, but I like considering that.

EDGE: Well, I feel like it's something you do, because you were exploring sexual and gender fluidity, toxic masculinity, what it means to be queer, way before it suddenly became our norm.

Taylor Mac: Thank you for noticing. (Laughs) That's your polite way of saying I'm old. (Laughs) I mean, I didn't invent any of this stuff. But I'm part of a community that prides itself not just on being queer, but also in deconstructing how the world works – that's part of our survival technique – and how we can try to make it work better for people who are systemically abused. That's just been my practice since I was a teenager. And so, a lot of these things that people are talking about now, it's just taken this long to get it into the mainstream conversation, but we've been having [these conversations] for decades. And they've been having them for decades before I came around. So, it's both gratifying to see the larger culture talking about it. And it's also a little demoralizing in the sense that, "Really, we're still talking about this?" (Laughs)

EDGE: Tell me about the genesis of this project. When did that first germ of an idea come to you?

Taylor Mac: I was touring in Australia, and I was doing this show – I call it a palate cleanser show – where I was just singing covers of Tiny Tim and David Bowie songs, and I was kind of squishing them together. It was a little show about comparison. I had just done this big epic show, and I wanted something fun and easy to do. And then, lo and behold, doing that fun and easy thing, I heard that Tiny Tim had given a 24-hour concert on just his ukulele in a park as a fundraiser. And I'd been looking for a form for the show that I wanted to make about how communities are built as a result of being torn apart. And it suddenly clicked, [but] I don't want it to just be me and a ukulele, I want it to be an orchestra of 24 musicians, and every hour we lose a musician. And I want it to be songs that were popular in the United States from 1776 all the way to the present. So, I started getting the other ideas that kind of elevated the work beyond just an idea or a gimmick.

EDGE: Did Rob and Jeffrey see the smaller six-hour versions and come to you?

Taylor Mac: They saw a production of my play "The Lily's Revenge," and they saw my "Holiday Sauce" show out in San Francisco, but they'd actually never seen any of the "24-Decade" stuff, which I think was a good thing, because they were really able to take the footage that we had and view it from a film audience [perspective]... "What is this as a film instead of a stage show?" When they said they were interested, it was an immediate "Yes," for me, because I don't think the stage show would exist, had it not been for their art, and what they've made with their documentary films. Because that was my introduction to so much of my understanding of queer politics and community building itself as a result of being torn apart. That was their films, time and time again: "Common Threads" and "The Times of Harvey Milk." Almost all their docs have scenes where lots of people gather to try to do something together. So, when they said they wanted to do it, I just thought, "Oh, my gosh, this is a dream."

EDGE: Queer appropriation is an integral part of the show; something that fascinates me is that you take something that's homophobic and you deconstruct it. Tell me about your decision to do that with certain songs.

Taylor Mac: Ooh! (A breath, laughter) Well, you know that the whole show is not about history as much as it's that we all have a lot of history on our backs, and we're trying to figure out what to do with it. So, one of the things that we have on our backs is these songs that have trained us to see the world a certain way, in subconscious ways, sometimes conscious. We don't necessarily know that we view the world and certain people with disdain, because we've been singing songs about how we ridicule them as part of our tradition and our rituals.

So, it's not about correcting that history. It's about making history now for me. I've no interest in correcting the past. But I am interested in us, in this room together, you in your home, watching this on the screen, and trying to figure out, between the liminal space, how we can actually dream the culture forward. How we can make history now together, using everything that we have from our past

So, you take a song that's intended to be homophobic, that's making fun of people who dress fancy on a stage, like "Snakeskin Cowboy"... as stated by Ted Nugent, it's homophobic song. He's proud of that. You take that and you turn it into a junior gay prom dance and ask everybody in the audience to slow dance with someone of their same gender. And that transforms the history in the moment. It doesn't change the past... it transforms our relationship to the song instead of feeling oppressed by that song. Everyone who's been through that experience or seen that section in the show has that memory now, instead of the memory of Ted Nugent being homophobic. So it takes everything, and it elevates. I just love that moment. It's really moving.

EDGE: I must ask: Did you go to sleep right after the performance.

Taylor Mac: I did. I came home with my husband and my dear friend Kat, who was staying with us in our apartment, and by the time I got home – the show ended at noon – it was probably like 2 pm. I was eating some food because I hadn't really eaten, and I fell asleep at the lunch table. Mid-bite, I just fell asleep. And Pat, my husband, was like, "Aw, baby, I'm gonna take you to bed." (Laughs) So we both went to bed... But then we woke up maybe four hours later and couldn't get back to sleep again because we were so jazzed about wanting to talk about everything that had happened. It was really a wonderful little after-moment.

EDGE: I know it's hard to single one out, but do you have a favorite moment from that 24-hour event?

Taylor Mac: Oh... oof... it is really hard to single it out. I find the ending to be very moving. The very last little bit when the lights go down and the audience – I don't want to spoil it for the viewer – but the audience takes over. I think that maybe that's my favorite moment, because in some ways that's what the whole show is leading to – it's like this gift to the audience to then take it out into the world and see what they make of it.

EDGE: Our society leans towards everybody wanting to be like everybody else. And your work celebrates the individual and the uniqueness of people. How can we get more people on board with that?

Taylor Mac: (Laughs) Well, I think it's a little bit about the individual being part of society, it's not so much about individualism... I just think if we try to make us homogenous in order to make society work, then what you get is a communist arena. (Laughs) That's not what I want. And so, it is about blending these things, and having a more heterogeneous experience so that we can say we're individuals inside of a society and that means that we're communicating with each other and sharing. It has a lot to do with how the film is structured, actually. It's an invitation. We just keep inviting everybody to this idea, to this costume, to this way of looking at our history – to just keep offering up the invitation. I think that's maybe the way? (Laughs) That's what I'm gonna stick with for now.

"Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music," premieres on HBO and Max on June 27, 2023. For more information, follow this link.

Watch the trailer below: