“I believe theater is community and I think of myself as a community activist; someone whose job it is to bring people together, give them a shared experience and remind them of the things they’ve forgotten, dismissed or buried.” —Taylor Mac
For the past 20 years, Taylor Mac has created spectacular award-winning performance events that at once provoke and embrace his diverse audience with their passion. Equal parts community organizer, Elizabethan fool and bedazzled bon vivant, Taylor Mac “doesn’t just defy categorization; he makes the categories themselves seem irrelevant.” (Time Out NY)
In Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, he charts the history of popular music and activism in America, from the nation’s founding in 1776 to the present day. This uniquely original performance art concert featuring many special guests will be presented over 2 weeks. Winner of the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the production has been hailed by The New York Times critic Wesley Morris as “one of the great experiences of my life.”
[24-Decade] is “about becoming who we Americans want to be, by recognizing who we have been. It’s about artistic confrontation, reinterpretation and personal transcendence.” (Taylor Mac)
The American Revolution from the perspective of the Yankee Doodle Dandy, the early women’s lib movement, an epic battle between drinking songs and early Temperance songs; a dream sequence where the audience is and the heteronormal narrative of colonization.
Walt Whitman and Stephen Foster go head to head for the title of Father of the American Song culminating in the queerest Civil War Reenactment in history. Oh…and a production of the Mikado set on Mars.
A Jewish tenement, a WWI trench, a speak-easy, a depression and a zoot suit riot all make the white people flee the cities.
Bayard Rustin’s March on Washington leads to a queer riot, sexual deviance as revolution, radical lesbians and a community building itself while under siege.