Mac calls us to create despite past
Musical history tour sends message to act to move culture ahead
To guide audiences through all four six-hour chapters of “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” writer, co-director and performer Taylor Mac repeated a few helpful mantras. “There is no failure, only a perpetual consideration” and “Things go on a lot longer than they should” simultaneously lampooned and elevated that which in another show might seem a lack of polish — costume pieces forgotten, whole songs halted and restarted, a broken finger that demanded on-the-spot rearrangements of ukulele tunes down to just two chords.
But especially for those who witnessed Mac’s musical history from 1776 to the present, another Mac-ism might stand out: “This is what’s going to happen.” Those words always presaged a seismic restructuring of the Curran, where “Chapter III: 1896-1956 ” and “Chapter IV: 1956-the Present” played Friday, Sept. 22, and Sunday, Sept. 24, respectively, in a
co-production with Stanford Live, in association with Magic Theatre and Pomegranate Arts.
Speaking those words, Mac transformed from other guises — glam Valkyrie, insult comic, populist intellectual, benevolent dictator, slapstick clown, serial oversharer — into a ringleader like the one from your childhood gang, the one who scooted everyone else into place for a meticulously envisioned round of pretending.
(Your old neighborhood’s great make-believer, however, probably didn’t have John Torres’ magical lighting design, which here in one especially stunning cue created a seemingly tangible tree out of judiciously angled cones of brown and green light. Nor did that kid likely have a “patriotic phallus dirigible” shipped in from Montclair State University in order to distill U.S.-Russia relations down to some inflated foreskinupon-foreskin canoodling.)
The Curran, whose Beaux Arts grandeur inspires formality in most relationships between performer and audience, was for Mac a playground, a laboratory, a tinder box, a psychological mosh pit. In one instance, “This is what’s gonna happen” heralded a re-enactment of the white flight of the 1950s. Mac, who prefers the gender pronoun judy, bid white audiences to leave the playhouse’s center sections (“the inner city”) and squish into house right and left (“the suburbs”), while also inviting audience members of color to move into the center, all to a ghoulish rendition of “I Put a Spell on You.” (Matt Ray arranged this and the four chapters’ 245 other songs.)
Moments later, judy sought to detox the toxic masculinity of the same era by summoning all the “straight men ages 18-30” to the stage. The intrepid baker’s dozen who heeded judy’s call had to drop to all fours to shake booties at the audience and then mime fellatio.
But it wasn’t a full detox. In each of these scenes, Mac aired our sordid history not to absolve us of it but to make each of us feel in our bodies, in our relationship to the other bodies in the Curran, our greatest shames and our nonetheless great potential to write a history we might be prouder of in coming decades.
During the white flight reenactment, while we whites on the sides looked on silently, some with encouraging smiles, but emphatically with nothing of our own to celebrate, audience members of color greeted one another in the center sections with embraces and cries of joy.
As the decades wore on (the show devoted an hour to each one), Mac de-emphasized the guises and pretending and mass reshuffling of the audience in favor of something rawer, more casual and stripped down. (For Mac, however, performing stripped down need not preclude a final, 24th costume change: leaping into a giant vagina that descended from the ceiling and then trailed him like a deflated bustle. Machine Dazzle designed the ensembles, each of which history should study as if they were inexplicable scientific phenomena.)
Final acts were almost like a campfire sing-along, especially when, for 1996-2006, Mac welcomed all the lesbians in the audience to the stage, where folding deck chairs, beers and covers of songs by “radical lesbian” musicians like Ferron and Tribe 8 greeted them. Mac said judy eschewed the decade’s mainstream hits like “Love Shack” to flout our expectations; the vital project here, and throughout the 24 decades, was to reframe non-heteronormative artists as central rather than marginal to our historiography.
Mac started the show with 24 musicians, losing one each decade, until by the show’s last chapter, judy was onstage alone, performing hard-edged but playful pieces judy judyself had written, accompanied by piano or ukulele and then ultimately a cappella.
If at first it seemed sly selfaggrandizement to posit one’s own songs as the last chapter in the history of popular music, the actual point was much more profound. Throughout the show Mac performed, say, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” or “Pretty Woman” with more irony than judy did a Yiddish tenement song or “Mississippi Goddam” or judy’s own work, but even tongue-in-cheek renditions also paid homage to the frenetic energy, the joy, the bravery of making art.
Guilt and woe, in other words, cannot be the sole response to our historical baggage. Past sins give us a civic, a moral responsibility to create, to “dream the culture forward,” to “get up and play” instead of lying down. Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak