A Conversation with Taylor Mac

Taylor Mac

This content is sourced from the National Performing Arts Convention.

I sat down with playwright, director, actor and drag performer, Taylor Mac, to talk about the highs and lows of making theater and community in New York, and to discuss his latest play, The Walk Across the Country For Mother Earth, which looks at idealism, community activism, and the humanity (warts and all) of the individuals who make up a community and seek to make change.

Mac’s play, developed and produced by downtown stalwarts, The Talking Band, follows a motley crew of radical activists as they tramp across the USA in 1992 to draw attention to the 500th anniversary of the country’s cooption of Shoshone land and to protest nuclear testing on the modern-day site in Nevada. A self-proclaimed “pastiche artist”, Mac draws on elements of commedia, drag and the archetypal quest story (think Wizard of Oz but with more sequins and pageantry) to weave an inventive, meandering and ultimately moving story about success and failure and the beautiful messiness of change (both the personal and social kind).

As part of what I hope will be an ongoing series of conversations with theater makers, I asked Mac - a theater artist who I have always admired for his bravery, conscience, innovation and sense of humor - if I could bend his ear on topics of art, community, place, space and my general anxiety about creating a sustainable life for myself and my fellow artists in the theater! I caught him at the tail end of Walk’s downtown run, just a week after the death of LaMama founder, Ellen Stewart, and a week before taking off for a two-month Australian tour of his solo show, Taylor Mac in Concert: Comparison is Violence.

J: How has the show with The Talking Band at LaMama been going?

T: …They are lovely. I feel honored to be working with them and to be a part of this legacy. I mean, with Ellen Stewart dying like two days before we opened…I had never met Ellen and I never worked at LaMama, except for doing a couple of performances here and there, but never an actual run of a play of mine…so to be part of that community at the very end of an era and something else starting up anew has been really moving…

J: But?

T: But, in other ways, I have been very frustrated with the off-off-Broadway system of doing things and I have been working in it for 17 years now. So its not surprising, I know it, but I think I have reached the end of my patience with it.

J: In what respect?

T: A few things, but primarily the preview thing. That people come and they judge your play as being finished when it’s the second time you’ve ever been in front of an audience with it and you only have a two-week run. I have been touring my show, my solo work, so I’ve had these long runs of shows. My one show I’ve done about 200 times and my other show I did about 100 times. So I’ve gotten used to respecting the work more, honestly, that’s how I can describe it. It is about a respect for the work to say this play can only become what it is if it has a chance to live for a length of time.

J: I have always felt that difference with how musicians make and present their work-

T: Right, they don’t write a song and sing it eight times and its done.

J: What I love about seeing a musician friend start a new band is that they are figuring out the project, the entity, what the band is, what their sound is…they are developing it as they go along and in relationship to their audience.

T: Yes, well, The Talking Band thinks of the process of being The Talking Band, of being a theater company as that. So, it is not necessarily each show that does that, they are respecting their company.

But I am not a company, you know, I am working with a company. So I view it more from – this is my play – and this play needs to be able to live and its basically in its infant stage right now and it is being treated like it’s a grown-up…So I basically have decided, no more off-off Broadway for my plays…and if it means I never work in New York again with my plays, I think I am okay with that. Because I can do my plays abroad and regionally and they will still get to see the light of day but they will be treated kindly.

J: So, what would fix that system in your mind? Or, what is broken about how plays are developed and produced in New York?

T: Companies just don’t have the budget for it. It’s not like I expected The Talking Band to do anything different. They did everything that they are supposed to do, you know? And they did it with great grace and they committed wholeheartedly and they raised more money when we needed more money and it’s an expensive show, you know, with a big cast and a lot of costumes and they really went above and beyond what you would normally ask a small company to do and they pay everybody and they pay them Equity wages so they really are respectful of the artists they work with. But it’s more about – there just isn’t the funds for it. There isn’t a system in place. They would have to be raising a good…$200,000 to keep this play running for the time it needs to run.

Read More:

Comments