Q & A
Taylor Mac
Will have You on Your Feet
The gender-bending artist performs at the Montclair Film Festival
INTERVIEW BY CINDY SCHWEICH HANDLER PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF TEDDY WOLFF
IS IT FAIR TO SAY THAT YOUR
WORK DEFIES CATEGORIZATION?
If you have to categorize it, I’d say
it’s a hybrid. I think I’m fascinated
with heterogeneity. Our country is
supposed to celebrate diversity and
freedom of religion, and yet its core
ideology is “one nation under one
God.” How can we be many things
if we’re supposed to be one thing?
What I’m interest in as a human
being is being multi-faceted.
A
ward-winning theater artist Taylor Mac likes to blend
genres and ignore boundaries, including the one
that separates the players in Mac’s shows from the
ticketholders watching them. In A 24-Decade History
of Popular Music, which is performed over a 24-hour
period, audience members are asked to throw ping
pong balls at each other as part of a passage on the
Civil War. “The sheer act of throwing something helps
you consider it in a different way,” says the MacArthur
Fellowship recipient. Mac will present a two-hour version of the show at the
Wellmont on May 4 as part of the Montclair Film Festival. Montclair Magazine
had questions for the talented provocateur.
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MAY 2018 MONTCLAIR MAGAZINE
YOU’VE RECEIVED MULTIPLE
HONORS, INCLUDING THE KENNEDY
PRIZE FOR DRAMA, A GUGGENHEIM
AWARD AND A NY DRAMA CRITICS
AWARD. DID ANY OF THESE CHANGE
YOUR LIFE? The money awards help
because up until now, I haven’t had
a commercial production. So it helps
you with your next project, not the
one you’re making. I’ve always made
the kind of art that people doubt
can be done, so I have to prove I
can do it before the money comes
along. After my first Obie Award
[for Off-Broadway theater, in 2010],
I thought it would be so easy to do
what I want, and that was totally
false. I had to convince people yet
again.
DO YOU CREATE WITH THE
CRITICS IN MIND? I always do work
I’m passionate about. To me, it’s
when people have visions that they
put their whole hearts and souls
into that perspectives are changed.