This book shines a spotlight on the gifted theater-maker Taylor Mac. From downtown clubs and alternative performance spaces to Broadway theaters and opera houses, Taylor Mac's queer artistry has radically transformed American theater and performance. Artistic achievements include the acclaimed A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, in which Mac performed a people's history of the U.S. through popular song-for a solid twenty-four hours, with musical arrangements by Matt Ray and costumes designed by Machine Dazzle. The MacArthur Foundation followed by awarding their "genius" award to a "writer, director, actor, singer, and performance artist whose fearlessly experimental works dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community ⦠[and who] interacts with the audience to inspire a reconsideration of assumptions about gender, identity, ethnicity, and performance itself." In the first book of its kind, noted critics and artists-including many of Taylor Mac's talented collaborators-explore the vastness of Mac's theatrical imagination and the full range of their career, from its creative origins in queer nightlife culture to international success as a genre-defying playwright and performer, and to the most recent songwriting projects on queer history. Together the book's essays, interviews, and commentaries bring to light Taylor Mac's fierce creativity, incisive cultural critique, and singular artistic voice, expanding and enriching the conversation on this much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work.
The Taylor Mac Book : Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance