"Hir" at the Magic Theatre: Neither here nor there

The Lily's Revenge, Taylor Mac's 4.5-hour carnivalesque fantasia that the Magic Theatre produced in 2011, is still one of my favorite theatergoing experiences in San Francisco. It turned me into a raving Taylor Mac fangirl and filled me with anticipation for his new play at the magic, Hir. I knew that this would be a very different piece from Lily's; Mac isn't starring in it, and it's a two-hour dysfunctional-family drama with a streak of dark comedy. Still, what I loved most about The Lily's Revenge was how smart and well-constructed the script was – it had great bones, underneath all the sequins and makeup. I looked forward to seeing what Mac would do when working in a more realistic mode. I hoped that Hir would be intelligent and insightful and, in its own way, as revolutionary as The Lily's Revenge.

Jax Jackson as Max. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

Hir tells the story of Isaac, a soldier who returns from a 3-year tour of duty to find his home in disarray. His father, Arnie, has suffered a debilitating stroke. His mother, Paige, is refusing to clean the house, running the air conditioner full blast, and abusing and neglecting her invalid husband, all as revenge for the years of domestic abuse he inflicted on her. And his teenage sister is now his teenage brother, Max, a "transmasculine fag" who insists on the pronouns "ze" and "hir."

In its title and its marketing, Hir purports to focus on gender-identity issues. But Max isn't the protagonist; ze's the last character to enter, and at times, hir story feels like an afterthought. Paige's ego and personality dominate the play, and she seems to do most of the talking in Act I. Meanwhile, the character it's easiest to identify with is Isaac – he's shocked to discover how crazy and dysfunctional his family has become, and we're right there making those discoveries alongside him. What this means, though, is that the character we identify with is the only person onstage who's a young, able-bodied, heterosexual, white, cisgender male. I have to believe that Taylor Mac is too smart not to have done this on purpose – but I can't figure out why, after making his name writing plays that speak from the perspective of "drag queens, freaks, queers, mermaids, shamans," he is now asking us to identify with a straight white dude.

Ben Euphrat as Isaac, Nancy Opel as Paige. Photo by Jennifer Reiley.

And, in the end, there were a lot of things about Hir that I just couldn't figure out. It's a perplexing, unsettling play – in the sense that I never understood why the story was being told or what it aimed to accomplish. (The rest of the audience seemed to feel the same way; the applause was the most half-hearted, "WTF was that?" applause I've ever heard.) The Lily's Revenge felt revolutionary both in terms of its form and its content: revolutionary in its empathy, its inclusiveness, its sense of community. Hir feels like a throwback, despite the references to 21st-century issues like the Iraq war, crystal meth, and transgender teens. To a large extent, it's a "they fuck you up, your mom and dad" play – and we've all seen plays like that before.

I suppose it's refreshing to see a play in which a soldier has been made more empathic, rather than more brutal, by the experience of war; and in which a suburban mom embraces her child's gender transition rather than being freaked out by it. But that isn't enough to make Hir a compelling evening of theater. Moreover, Paige's commitment to Max's gender identity may defy stereotype, but in many other respects, she's the biggest cliche of all: the smothering, self-absorbed, monstrous mother, Mama Rose on steroids. Paige is depicted as someone who's read a lot of feminist and postmodernist theory and then completely misinterpreted it, e.g. she thinks that because her husband beat her, it gives her the right to make his life miserable after he has his stroke. You can imagine a conservative pundit watching Hir and then saying "see, feminism turns women into man-hating monsters!" I'm sure that this can't be Taylor Mac's intent… but then, I'm not sure what his intent is. Is Hir supposed to depict the here-and-now? Because it really felt neither here nor there.

Links: Playwriting, "Pleiades," Personals, Paris...

Links to tide you over as I ignore my blog in favor of revising my play. The staged reading is happening one month from tonight!

• So, self-promotion alert: check out the Facebook event for my reading and the Olympians Festival website, which has been updated with a full schedule and all of the artwork.

• Pleiades is set in 1971 and I've been getting my daily dose of visual inspiration from the Sighs and Whispers blog, which posts scans of old fashion magazines, with a heavy focus on the late-'60s early-'70s era. Because my play is about seven sisters, I especially liked "Seven Faces of Beauty," an ad campaign from 1972.
  

• Far more contemporary: N+1 Personals. I love these people. I hate these people. I want to slap these people. I want to date these people. I have more in common with these people than I would like to admit. Is this a ruthless "Stuff White People Like"-style examination of the preoccupations of young, overeducated, underpaid Americans? A collection of desperate lonelyhearts who name-drop Derrida and Pynchon in order to conceal their fear that they're dull and empty inside? An assortment of vibrant individuals who would be my new best friends if we ever met in person? And before you ask, no, I am not the "latter-day Aphra Behn seeking straight Kit Marlowe." I wish I were clever enough to describe myself that way!

• I'm jealous of playwright E.M. Lewis' trip to Paris, as chronicled on her blog!

• Thought-provoking HowlRound post by the brilliant Taylor Mac. Quote: "I would go one step further and suggest not to read plays until after they’ve committed to producing them. Instead get to know artists and their body of work. Give them a date on the calendar for when their new play will be produced and… trust. If you’ve liked plays they’ve written in the past, chances are they’ll write something you’ll be interested in again, and if not, the production will be over in a couple months but the relationship with the artist may last decades." You know, this is kind of how the Olympians Festival works -- we were given a year to write our plays and, come hell or high water, they'll have staged readings in October. And I am immensely grateful for, yes, the trust and faith that our Festival producer has placed in me throughout the process.
  

• All the same, on a near-constant basis these days, I find myself thinking of this other Taylor Mac quote: "The job of a play, before it reaches an audience, is to beat the playwright's ego into submission." So, with that, I'm off to go submit my ego to some more abuse...
  

A Bouquet of Additional Thoughts on "The Lily's Revenge"

Unquestionably, the major event of May 2011 for me was The Lily's Revenge. First, as I said in my earlier blog post, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and it led me to ask myself many questions about what I want to do with my art, what theater can and should accomplish, why I tend to write realistic narrative plays if that's not necessarily the kind of theater that moves me the most, etc. In short, Lily's twined itself around my insides and gave me what I call, partly but not really in jest, "an artistic crisis." Which, I figure, is only healthy; at my age, I ought to have artistic crises. Though I feel humbled and confused, I also feel awed, moved, and inspired. It's funny, I think of myself as a sensitive aesthete, but rarely am I ever so in thrall to a work of art that I see. It happened more often when I was still in school.

Meanwhile, the Lily's cast and crew discovered my blog post and passed it around, and Taylor Mac himself linked to it on Twitter, which completely made my day, and the Magic Theatre invited me to the cast party! So I ended up seeing the show again, at its closing matinée, and dining and drinking and dancing with the cast afterward. I am so grateful to the good and generous Magic staff and Lily's cast. At the party I did not feel like a poser or an interloper, even though I am just an enthusiastic audience member and they had been collaborating on this massive project for 2 months. But then, The Lily's Revenge is the kind of show where you can get randomly hugged by a cast member before you take your seat, where the audience shouldn't feel like they are "just" spectators, where it's all about building connections and spreading the love. The closing-day audience was so supportive -- the show ran about 15 minutes over because we kept interrupting it to applaud -- and the party was so warm and loving. It expanded my faith in humanity.

And I'm glad, too, that I got over my petty fears of "will people think I'm weird if I see the show a second time? Is my having gone nuts for this show a sign of weakness?" Loving something, being enthusiastic, is so often seen as uncool. It is so easy to be jaded. Thus, one of the many points of The Lily's Revenge is that love and commitment are acts of courage, not of weakness. It is an un-jaded piece of theater, and the least we can do is to be un-jaded in return.

OK, by this point you probably think that I have joined some hippie cult, and I admit that The Lily's Revenge is the very definition of cult theater. (if that's not a tautology -- didn't theater evolve out of religious rites and cult ceremonies?) It's something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it, and it resonated very deeply with themes that are preoccupying me.

My blog post about Lily's, therefore, led to some amazing things for me. But I do wonder if it helped to sell any tickets. In contrast to its New York production, The Lily's Revenge wasn't a sellout success here in San Francisco; when I bought my ticket for the closing performance, there were still plenty of seats left. Well, in New York the show got rave reviews in the New York Times, Time Out New York, etc; here, the show got a polite, but hardly enthusiastic review in the Chron and a very snarky headline ("Five-Hour Play Is Five Hours Too Long") in SF Weekly.

Even more strange, to my mind, was the fact that the theater community wasn't as excited about The Lily's Revenge as I expected. Several friends told me that the only reason they wanted to see it is that they knew some of the performers. OK, thanks to that 35-person cast, every theater person in San Francisco knew someone in Lily's (let's praise the Magic, again, for staging the show with local actors and directors) and it's laudable to support your friends' endeavors. But still -- I was amazed that that was the only reason people wanted to see it. If you love theater, why wouldn't you want to see a big, ambitious, wacky and entertaining 4+ hour epic that roared into town in a cloud of literal and figurative glitter? Why wasn't that enough of a selling point?

I can speak only for myself, but I was excited about The Lily's Revenge from the day the Magic Theatre announced it -- long before I knew that friends of mine would be acting in/directing/hanging lights for the show. In fact, my first thought was "SUCK IT, NEW YORK" (my internal monologue can be surprisingly vulgar). I had read the New York reviews and also heard that many New Yorkers who wanted to see this play had been unable to get tickets. But now it was coming to San Francisco, and I'd get to see it! And probably without having to stand in a line! Sometimes there are advantages to living in a smaller, less theater-crazed town. But then, somehow, it went from "Yay, I can get a ticket" to "Hell, I could buy twenty tickets to closing day if I could afford them! What's the matter with San Francisco?"

Is it that we resent the Magic for devoting its resources to a New York-based artist, in a season where they did not produce any Bay Area playwrights? There seem to be two competing schools of thought on this matter: one says "theater should be local, support local artists and stories, don't let New York City dominate the national theatrical conversation, don't be in thrall to the latest New York hit." The other school of thought says, "Isn't it awful that most new plays get only one production and have a very hard time getting produced again? Stop the premiere-itis!" On the one hand, we're supposed to condemn the Magic for producing a "New York hit"; on the other hand, we're supposed to praise it for giving a second production to a challenging and complex play! This kind of thinking can really tie you up in knots -- and take your attention away from the value of the work itself.

And when it comes to the work itself, did The Lily's Revenge affect me so deeply because I was already favorably disposed to it, because I'd looked forward to it for a year? I realize that's a possibility; but it doesn't make my reaction any less true or valid.

Besides, I went to Lily's expecting to have a good time at a crazy and ambitious piece of theater; I was not expecting to have an artistic crisis! And I wrote my earlier blog post about the show in the hopes of encouraging others to go see it, not in the hopes of getting invited to the cast party and meeting Taylor Mac! I really could not have predicted any of this. And I feel very lucky.

Flower Power: "The Lily's Revenge" at Magic Theatre

First things first: Don't be scared, it's not really five hours. It's four hours and fifteen minutes, and Magic Theatre has just slashed ticket prices for the final dozen performances, so what are you waiting for? Don't read my blog post on The Lily's Revenge -- run out and experience it for yourself!
Seriously, there are so many things I want to say about this amazing piece of theater, but I also realize that one reason I loved it so much is that I had almost no idea what to expect and was thus continually surprised. You don't even get a playbill until after the show is over; additionally, the playbill doesn't have a lot of extraneous material in it -- no interview with Taylor Mac or essay(s) about elements of the play. I've seen many plays that aren't very challenging or hard to understand, but whose playbills are nonetheless filled with explanatory essays. Whereas The Lily's Revenge is a five-act, four-hour allegorical fantasia about marriage, environmentalism, community, narrative, meta-theatre, and more -- and the creators have faith that the play can speak for itself. This feels almost radical.

But then, nearly everything about The Lily's Revenge is radical and nervy and surprising and filled with an insane amount of faith and trust. It is a massive undertaking: it has something for everyone, but, because it's so overwhelming/overstuffed, it's also guaranteed to include elements that put you off. Nonetheless, the result is incredibly inspiring on multiple levels. When was the last time you saw a play that began with the gutsy pronouncement "This play could very well last for the rest of your life!" and then actually lived up to that promise? At least, it's been three days since I saw The Lily's Revenge, and I still can't stop thinking about it, and I know it will reverberate for me for a long time to come.

But what's it about, anyway? A stripped-down plot description would be something like: "A walking, talking Lily seeks to become a human so that he can marry the Bride, and gets caught up in a war between the God of Nostalgia and the God of the Here-and-Now." New York theater artist Taylor Mac is the show's creator, writer, and star performer. He acts, mugs, sings, plays the ukulele, exudes charisma, looks good in a tuxedo and even better in his green-glitter-lipped, flower-collared Lily drag. The Lily, as written, is kind of a diva, and Mac is good at grabbing the spotlight, but also good at stepping back and letting his 30+ collaborators have their time to shine.

All of the actors perform with impressive commitment, energy, and passion at every moment; I don't know how they keep it up over the course of 255 minutes, six shows a week. You get the sense that all of the performers and, indeed, all of the artistic collaborators truly believe in what they're doing -- if anyone was even slightly skeptical, this show would topple like a house of cards. But everyone has willingly put all their eggs in Taylor Mac's basket (big kudos to the Magic Theatre for taking this risk!) and they know that this gamble will pay off.

For The Lily's Revenge isn't "just" a play -- it's an exercise in building community between artists and audience. There are moments of audience participation throughout the play and during all three intermissions. The first intermission is a communal dinner, the second is a cast-and-audience dance party. I spent most of the third intermission in line for the restroom, but nonetheless got serenaded by a Lilac as I waited! The intermissions are delightful palate-cleansers; plus, they make you more involved in the show and thus, more receptive to what it has to say.

And The Lily's Revenge has got a lot on its mind. It's a play about marriage, and it has a very queer sensibility, but it's not explicitly about gay marriage. It's a plea for love but also for thoughtfulness -- for deeply caring, in every sense of the word. There's also the big theme about Nostalgia vs. the Here-and-Now; how nostalgia, in the form of outmoded cultural narratives, can be used as a tool of stasis or oppression.

The play is so dense that I am still realizing things about its craftsmanship and structure. For instance, in Act I, the characters frequently name-drop Hegel. In the car on the way home, I realized the reason for this: Hegel's big idea was thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and that's the way The Lily's Revenge is structured. I also got a lot out of reading what critics have said about the play's New York and San Francisco productions. I love this quote from Backstage: "A surprising but suddenly obvious connection lands just right: Both theater and marriage are essentially pure, intimate relationships that have only been corrupted into institutions."

The structure of the play even mirrors the central conflict between nostalgia and the here-and-now. The Lily's Revenge comes down pretty clearly on the side of living in the present (that's probably another reason for the audience participation and community-building), but Taylor Mac also calls himself a "pastiche artist." And a love of pastiche means a love of old-fashioned or passé artistic genres -- that is, a love of nostalgia. A play about anthropomorphic flowers is automatically nostalgic; reminiscent of children's theater, and of works of art from the Victorian era -- think of the talking flowers in Alice in Wonderland.

For a pastiche artist, there are two challenges: to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, and to create something that speaks to the present moment rather than being mired in the past. The Lily's Revenge, in its beautiful and crazy way, overcomes both these hurdles. Like a flower, it has its roots sunk deep into the earth, and a spirit that blossoms toward the light.

Image 1: Lily (Taylor Mac) has his diva moment, surrounded by the Flower Girls; photo by Jennifer Reiley.
Image 2: The Great Longing (Mollena Williams) tries to shut Lily up; photo by Daniel Nicolletta.