My review of Taylor Mac's Hir at defunkt theatre

After reading interviews and watching clips of Taylor Mac, I fell in love with Mac. (Mac uses the pronoun judy, as in Garland.) The evening I saw defunkt's production of judy's play Hir, judy was performing A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Judy devotes one hour to each decade of popular American music beginning in 1776. The $400 ticket price got you a live band, dinner, lounging accommodations, gorgeous inventive costume changes, Taylor Mac all out for 24 hours with judy's critical, but fun look into ourselves. NY Times critic Wesley Morris described it as one of the greatest experiences of his life. I wish I was there to witness Mac's radical faerie realness ritual, as much as I regret not seeing Sinatra or James Brown in concert. An audience member at defunkt was blown away that the play made reference to the radical faeries and Wolf Creek. He was confiding in me, leaning on my shoulder with a look of "someone speaks my language?" I felt the same way about defunkt's Hir and my introduction to Taylor Mac. I need to develop my own radical faerie realness rituals. You can read my review hir.

My favorite image of Taylor Mac. Photo: Ian Douglas/2015

My Review of Richard III

One of the great joys I get out of writing theater reviews is revisiting Shakespeare scholar and lit crit man Stephen Greenblatt. His writings are insightful, lovely, witty, human.

My latest research for my review of Post5's Richard III, echoed back to the long work I'm doing on the subject of paranoia. Richard was a paranoid dictator, whose rudely formed stamp would be revisited in more recent times with rumors of Hitler's impotence and Joe Stalin's real life withered hand and shorter arm. Greenblatt noted that many contemporary stagings place the play in Nazi Germany and while he hints at a kind of boredom there, I think the directors made a connection. The Nazi higher-ups, particularly Himmler and Göring created an obsessive, unhistoric, warped Romantic revival of the Medieval Teutonic knight. The real Richard has been a trending topic with the finding of his burial site . The pro-monarchist society which funds clearing his name has had him re-interred in an elegant Brutalist looking shrine. With Brexit, Trump and the West in general turning far right, Richard's reputation as a bloodthirsty monster is not in need of a new shine.