Theatre Journal

Over the past two decades performance artist Taylor Mac has cemented their career as doyenne of downtown queer performance in New York City, following in the giant footsteps of queer icons like Charles Ludlam and Ethyl Eichelberger. Since humble beginnings in the now-fading gay bar scene of the East Village, Mac has consistently filtered their performative “stage-worthy” version of themself through the archetype of the fool. Mac’s well-documented onstage persona (also called Taylor Mac) draws upon theatre history, genderfuck drag aesthetics, and queer positionality to present themself as a contemporary queer fool.

In performing this fool, Mac critiques society from a position of the Other. Mac’s characterization follows Shakespeare’s suggestion to “play the fool with the time,” ignoring the boundaries of history while exerting a magnetism that encourages observers to reconsider bigoted opinions and bias through queer kinship, dialogue, and even discomfort. In their new play, The Hang, Mac continues this tradition, imagining how Socrates spent his final hours after drinking hemlock, working collaboratively with composer Matt Ray, costume and set designer Machine Dazzle, director Niegel Smith, choreographer Chanon Judson, lighting designer Kate McGee, and makeup designer Anastasia Durasova to extend the fool trope and guide the audience on a journey of queer wonderment.

In Theaetetus, Plato imagined a dialogue where Socrates reveals that “[w]isdom begins in wonder.” In response, Jeffrey J. Cohen suggests that when wonder and queerness intersect, they reveal [End Page 374] an alternative “world made strange.” The strange, which invokes both awe and puzzlement as forms of wonder, renders Mac’s fool one who mediates between the known world and what cannot be seen or grasped, embodying themself in the un-fixed, the queer.

As authorial fool, Mac’s book and libretto for The Hang queers the wondrous strange in form, with Socrates (Mac) pronouncing, “I apologize to the people who like structure.” Although loosely built around the story of the state-sanctioned death of the Athenian philosopher, and considering the patriarchal issues inherent in the historical record as represented by an observing, mundane Plato (Ryan Chittaphong), the plot is episodic, messy, and expansive. Mac’s approach is reminiscent of the early “epic” performances of Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre in the late 1960s, leaving the audience with more questions than answers. This theatrical conceit also makes space for the ensemble, as led by Socrates, to question absolutely everything, from the capitalist takeover of Gay Pride by those who would hypocritically engage as consumers to a takedown of policed wokeness by those who “ain’t wakin.’”

While set in a queer fantasia of the fourth century bce but also the present, Mac’s lyrics and Ray’s music gesture to many imagined queer eras: an Elizabethan playhouse, a 1930s underground jazz club, a 1950s Beat café, a late 1960s psychedelic Human Be-In, a gay liberation–era play, a 1970s bathhouse, a Radical Faery encampment, and a carnivalesque gathering of time travelers (not dissimilar to Mac’s recent Pulitzer-nominated A 24-Decade History of Popular Music). Smith’s direction signaled to these rich cultural references without ever confirming them. The audience was left puzzled and transported across these historical spaces of queer celebration with foolishness as a mode with which to dis-mantle boundaries of linear temporality as historical chronicle. As Mac’s Socrates relates, “[p]erhaps we are forward while going back. Foolery reigns.” In making space for jazz improvisation in the score, most notably in an incredible scat-off between ensemble performers Synead Cidney Nicholas and Kat Edmonson in the song “What Do You Mean by Virtue?,” Ray sets up wonderment as a technique to promote surprise and awe. Judson’s manic and gorgeously strange choreography contributed to this cross-temporal world, layering dance...