Singing the body politic
Taylor Mac’s ferocious epic traces American history through music
theater? Worried Look aboutto Taylorthe future Mac. of American Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” whose first two chapters played Friday, Sept. 15, and Sunday, Sept. 17, respectively, at the Curran, proves that the stage can still be home to a work of mammoth imagination and magical stagecraft, of walloping intellect and ferocious politics, of dastardly humor and mighty heart. Its scope is staggering. The work, 24 hours in total, spends an hour on the folk songs history, of from each 1776of the to decades2016. An of orchestra American that begins with 24 musicians (one leaves at the end of each decade, until Mac’s onstage alone for the last one) plays 246 songs, all with original arrangements by Matt Ray. Mac has a new human-form-defying costume, designed by Machine Dazzle, for each decade. The whole thing was performed sans interruption just once, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York in 2016. This version is arranged in four six-hour chapters, pro-
N Chapters I and II of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”: By Taylor Mac. Co-directed by Mac and Niegel Smith. Friday and Sunday, Sept. 15 and 17, at the Curran Theatre, S.F. Taylor Mac in the first chapter of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” at the Curran.
duced by four companies — the Curran and Stanford Live, in association with Magic Theatre and Pomegranate Arts.
Yet the numbers give only a glimpse of the show’s radical ambition. Mac, who prefers the gender pronoun “judy,” after Judy Garland, doesn’t simply excavate our racist, sexist, xenophobic and still otherwise troubled history through song. Judy interrogates it, subverts it, reappropriates it.
As witness, you are both assistant to Mac as exorcist and the demon being exorcised, which requires a different sort of contract between artist and audience. Mac performs the whole six hours without intermission or break, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit still and behave the whole time.
“You take care of yourself,” judy instructs the audience in both chapters. “I don’t know how to take care of you.”
Audiences keep their phones on and come and go as they please, a dynamic that transforms the grand, recently renovated Curran from a formal spectating arena to a party, a circus, a religious awakening, a free-for-all. We are not judy’s captive audience, so judy has to earn our attention anew in each successive moment.
Any competition is doomed from Mac’s entrance in Chapter I, though. Strings of flashing bulbs, by lighting designer John Torres, evoke the UFO in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Mac’s peacock fan of a
Chapters III and IV of “A 24Decade History of Popular
Music”: Friday and Sunday, Sept. 22 and 24. $49-$285. Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., S.F. (415) 358-1220. www.sfcurran.com
headpiece appears, bobbing behind the orchestra, before Mac judyself does. It’s an alien landing, and that alien keeps metamorphosing into new forms.
Each outfit is an anarchic cornucopia. Hot dogs, barbed wire, chess pieces, potato chip bags, nude male magazine pinups and neon plastic army soldiers line hoop skirts and necklaces and headdresses. Mac doesn’t so much wear pieces as cast them into orbit, as judy teeters at the center, on platform heels.
Instead of merely studying us benighted earthlings as only an outsider can, Mac reflects us back to ourselves through a fun house mirror.
The music is twisted, too. Judy’s opening number, “Amazing Grace,” was set in a minor key, sung often in a growl, as might a witch midhex. In the second chapter, judy performs a “Mikado” set on Mars, complete with an all-neon palette and Alvin and the Chipmunks voices, to counter the orientalism of the Gilbert and Sullivan original. Those distortions let us hear with fresh ears “Camptown Races” and “Yankee Doodle” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” jingles that you know without knowing how you know them, that are interstitial to the fabric of our consciousness as Americans.
To conjure the historical feelings that gave birth to these songs — the headiness of the American Revolution, the nastiness of Civil War combat, the frenzy for property during Oklahoma’s land runs — Mac rallies different sections of the audience as might Poseidon summoning waves. You’re commanded to fling pingpong balls across the theater, or to mime a “slow-motion battle” with your neighbor, a “dirty” one, complete with “groin punches” and “bitch slaps.” You’re asked to spend an hour blindfolded, as a War of 1812 vet who lost his eyesight, during which you feed strangers fruit, and get squeezed in between their bellies and jabbed by their elbows.
It’s uncomfortable, and it’s supposed to be. Is there any other way to feel when Mac uncovers a verse of Kentucky’s state song that includes the word “darkies”? Mac is an expert scorer of discomfort: acknowledging that the audience is probably feeling it, without letting them off the hook for it.
Mac’s renditions remind us that these songs are never just songs. We use them to tell ourselves stories about who we are and where we come from. Often, songs’ subtle goals trace a similar arc: “Forgive the oppressor, but vilify the outsider.” In picking apart these narratives, halting a song midlyric to make fun of it, or to deliver a full exegesis, Mac reverses songs’ original projects. Judy topples oppressors to exalt outsiders. When you leave the theater, you feel ready to rebuild a more just and thoughtful society from the ruins.