 Can you hear me? You so can. For those of you I don't know, my name is Scott Mellia. I'm the chair of the theater department. I'm super psyched to be here. This is being live streamed by HowlRound through Arts Emerson. So this is actually going to be available to other people which I'm super, super excited about. So what I'd like to do is start off by introducing our guest. We're going to have a little bit of a chat and then at the end we'll save some time so that you guys can ask some questions. So if you're students that gives you time to start thinking right now. If you're faculty and you didn't have questions prepared, like look at your choices. So our guest today, Taylor Mack, who uses Judy, like just like a regular pronoun, not as a name but as a gender pronoun, is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer. Judy's work has been performed in hundreds of venues including on Broadway and in New York's Town Hall Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn and Playwrights Horizon, as well as London's Hackney Empire and Barbican, DC's Kennedy Center, Los Angeles's Roy's Center and ACE Theater through the Center of the Art of Performance, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater and the Sydney Opera House, the Melbourne Festival Forum Theater, Stockholm's Sodra Teatern and the Spoleto Festival and San Francisco's Curran Theater and MoMA. Judy is the author of many works of theater including Gary, a sequel to Titus Andronicus, a 24-decade history of popular music which we'll see a bit of tomorrow night, Holiday Sauce here, The Walk Across America from Mother Earth, Comparison is Violence, The Lily's Revenge, The Young Ladies of Red-Tied Blooming, The Beast of Taylor Mack, Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam, the face of liberalism, okay, Maurizio Polini, a crevice and the hot month and the soon to be premiered plays Prosperous Fools and the Bright. Sometimes Taylor acts in other people's plays and other co-creations, notably Shente, Shweta and the Foundry Theater's production of The Good Person of Szechuan, Atla Mama and the Public Theater and the City Center's Encore's production of Gone Missing. Puck Aegeus in the classic stage companies in Midsummer Night's Dream and in the two-man vaudeville, The Last Two People on Earth, opposite Mandy Patinkin and directed by Susan Strowman. Mack is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama, a Tony-nominated playwright and the recipient of multiple awards including the Kennedy Prize, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Arts Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Bessie's, two Obie's, the Heltman and an Ethel Eichelberger Award. An alumnus of New Dramatist Studios currently in New York Theater Workshop, usual suspect and the resident playwright at the Heer Arts Center. Please join me in giving a very, very warm welcome to the divine and very patient, Taylor Mack. Hello. That's so funny because I think that's on my website, you know. And normally you wouldn't, for a bio, you know, just say a few things and that's all you say. But as a queer person, your range is just like, promote yourself nonstop, because no one else will do it for you. But now I'm at this place where I'm like, oh, I should tone that down a bit. I'm glad we could start off by embarrassing you. That's great. So since it comes up right at the beginning of your bio, could you explain particularly for our students a little bit about the pronoun Judy? Sure. Well, I call this my relative man, Drag. I perform, you'll see if you come to the show tomorrow night, I perform and I guess what some people would call drag. It's not really female impersonation drag, it's something else, a gender queer drag, if you will. I say my gender isn't male or female, my gender is performer. And I would perform on stage and people would introduce me as he and then they would introduce me as she. And it never felt right. And I thought, you know, I'm a queer person and I'm a creative. So why don't I make my pronoun an art project? So I chose the pronoun Judy because for a number of reasons, I wanted people to pause and have to think about pronouns and gender and all that kind of stuff. Also because of the lineage of Judy. But Punchin' Judy as well and Judy Garland and... And not Judge Judy, no. But also gay men, before most people were out, used to call their boyfriends Mary or Judy when they were talking about them in public. So people would think it was their girlfriend they were talking about. So I liked that kind of lineage to it. And then the other reason is that people tend to judge gender pronouns when you have one that's not part of the binary. And so I thought, and they tend to roll their eyes and I thought, well, I wanna choose a pronoun that will immediately emasculate you if you judge it. Because you can't roll your eyes and say Judy at the same time without being camp. So that's, those are my, that was why I chose Judy. Great. So you mentioned a little bit about drag, your work being drag adjacent or not traditional drag. I mean, I think a lot of people when they, if they're not super familiar with drag, they think of like RuPaul's drag race and female impersonation. So how did your own drag work develop since obviously that's a big part of the history of it, but not necessarily your particular aesthetic? Yeah, well, I mean, I'd always seen drag queens. I mean, I moved to San Francisco and I was 17. No, yeah, 17. And so I'd seen drag queens around. And, but I never really related to them because the ones that I'd seen in terms of the art form, it was a lot of lip syncing and vagina jokes. And that was not something that I wanted my art form to be. So I just didn't think it was for me. And then I learned that it's like all art forms, it's varied. There's all many, there's so many different kinds. It's like saying, I don't like realism. Well, I mean, there's so many different kinds of realism. So how do you know if you don't like it? Just explore a little bit or even more than that it's like saying, I don't like dance. Well, okay, well, there's lots of dance. So then I started getting a little access to some other types of performers. And I found it very inspiring and I found it that it was connected to a thing I was longing for, which it was connected to a Greek performance, which was they would wear platform high heel shoes and they had big arm extensions and they didn't have makeup but they had masks that were, it was like makeup and the masks were shaped so that their voices would go out farther and they would, so it's like a microphone and so it just felt and there was heightened language. And I just thought that that's the tradition of performance that I wanted to work in. And I was trained in Greeks and Elizabethans and Comedia and so Comedia's in there as well and I think I ultimately just, I wanted to be an Elizabethan fool more than anything else. So this was my way of finding my way to that. That's great. So you mentioned some of the people you were exposed to were there certain artists that you were looking at growing up or either as a young person who really sort of inspired you or? As a young person, I can't say, I mean I grew up in Stockton, California. We didn't have culture. We had Hollywood movies and we had at that point three or plus PBS. So four TV stations and PBS only had news as a kid, you didn't want to watch news or it had Peter Paul and Mary fundraising. So, which I liked, I liked Peter Paul and Mary but how many times can you watch Peter Paul and Mary? So it was like cheers was considered culture. And so I can't say that as a young person, I did. I didn't really know anything about anybody. I guess I would, in terms of Hollywood, you're drawn to people like Bed Midler and it's the usual gay icons, like Judy Gollum, Bed Midler, like there you go, those are my girls. But then as I got older, I got exposed to a playwright, composer by the name of Elizabeth Swaydos who was the first time I discovered that theater could be something other than just entertainment, that it could grapple issues and inspire you to dive into the ideas and the problems of our times. And so that was an eye-opener at a young-gish age. And then when I came to New York City, most of the people who would have passed the torch down, like the Ethel Eichelberger, Charles Ludlem and all that kind of stuff, they had passed away from AIDS just as I had moved to New York City. So it took me a while to find a community and find the people that I could, I kind of felt like I had to invent it from scratch, but meanwhile, I wasn't inventing it from scratch. I was pulling from people who had pulled from those people. So there was Mabu Mines and people like that, that I was watching their work and that was fascinating. And again, it just opened up my brain. And yeah. You mentioned actually being a young person in the city at the height of the AIDS crisis, and whenever we talk about this to our students, to them it's very different from them, it's history and I don't think that they necessarily view HIV in the same way. So what's it like to be a young queer person coming of age, again also finding yourself as an artist, at the height of that particular crisis? It was tough. Homosexuality was a national conversation because of AIDS, because the active activists had made it a national conversation. The government was choosing to ignore it and it turned it into an epidemic and because it was only queer people and only gay men and IV drug users primarily and sex workers were being affected by it. So Reagan administration didn't want to even mention those people so didn't do anything about it. So people were, thousands of people were dying and everybody was, homophobia was really, really intense at the time because everybody thought that if you were a queer kid, you would give them AIDS. People thought I'd never had sex and I wasn't a hemophiliac so I wasn't gonna give anyone AIDS but everyone, all the kids in school thought I was gonna give them AIDS so you would get beat up all the time and all this kind of stuff. And then you have to think of it like if every single person that you know, if you basically think about all the people in your life and they're all dead. So I have older friends who 100 people that they know died within the course of a few years. So that's traumatic in a way and it frames how you think about sex certainly and what happened was all the radicals, all the radicals were having radical sex so they were the ones who died, they were the ones who were progressing our culture forward and they died all the big thinkers and the creatives. And so then what we found was that the heterosexuals who were in charge of the media would then hire the gays that they felt comfortable to talk for the gay community. So we had all these radical leaders and then suddenly we had all these very conservative leaders who were advocating for gay marriage and gays in the military when that was never the agenda, the queer agenda before that. So it really, Sarah Shulman calls it the gentrification of the mind. It kind of transformed the queer movement in a way in the queer community. So it was, it wasn't a great time. On the flip side of that, the community was being torn apart and it was building itself because it was being torn apart so the activism that Larry Kramer and the act that people did and Queer Nation that they were doing and the Lesbian Avengers in terms of visibility was unheard of and has changed the world. So that is something that's eternally grateful for. So can you remember the first time you performed drag in a club or a bar of what that experience was like? Oh, I was in Provincetown. The first time I, I mean I've done drag a few times but the first time I performed in a bar or a club, like a club show was in the show called Showgirls in Provincetown where Ryan Landry was host and my boyfriend at the time dressed me up and I went and I sang a song and won 100 bucks and the rest was history. So I have a, I'm going to try not to do this to you too much but I have a couple of quotes from you. One is you said you can't really be an artist and not embrace failure and that's certainly something for our students that we really try to get across with them that it's okay to fail. It's okay to not know what you're going to do next and I think particularly in a performance setting that's got to be a serious title so can you speak to experiences you had where you actively experienced failure but you did feel like you came out the other side of it? I mean, every single time I perform you'll see, I'm going to fail tomorrow night you'll see me, we'll figure our way through it you know, it happens every single time. Well, I could tell a story about where I realized that perfection wasn't ever as good sometimes as authentic failure which is performing in a club and I got up and I sang a song it was another one of these competition things which, you know, I blame my drag mother mother flawless Sabrina, she created the drag competitions across the US in the late fifties and so now the drag queens always have to compete for each other but we were, I was trying to pay my rent you know, and it was $100 per hour I could pay my rent, you know, and it was a $100 prize at the splash bar which is a bar I would never go to in New York City but I was like, I dressed up I went to that splash bar in desperation so I could pay my rent and I sang a song and my voice is great and I gave the, I really, like, objectively fantastic performance and the audience was like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay and then a queen got up and she's lip synced very badly to that song my pussy and my crack, you know that and can I say that in the church? she lip synced badly to it and then she took out her teeth she had two teeth, she took out her felsies and at the end she went and the audience went crazy and I went crazy we were all screaming and cheering for her and it was a moment where I realized in my little epiphany moment where I realized that authentic failure exposing your vulnerability and your humanity is sometimes better than polish and craft and that it could ever be I choose to try to put myself in a situation where I can do both I use my virtuosity and I set myself up in a situation where perfection is ridiculous we were just joking today that our show is we try to make our shows so big they will fail so that's kind of always the goal 24 decade history it was a 24 hour concert and there was no way I could do that perfectly it was 246 songs and memorize them it was all this dialogue that I have and sleep deprivation and there's no way I could do it perfectly the voice is going to crack but that's part of the art of it and part of the joy and fun is to figure out what you can do when the calamity comes into the performance how you can transform it and focus everybody's attention on the transformation of the calamity as art and in performance how much of what you do changes I know you'll have a set song of this and obviously there's certain dialogue monologue sections that you want to include since some of it is so interactive how much of it changes from night to night or even from 4 to 4 if you will probably like 20% yeah I mean the songs basically are the same sometimes I'll say hey Matt let's sing this different song tonight and maybe we'll have rehearsed recently and maybe everyone will be like okay we'll try it and we find our way through usually we perform with guest performers too so that's always a new element everywhere we go we like to perform with somebody local bring somebody local into the show and then it depends on what's happening in the news what's happening with the weather what time the show is what the venue is like all of that thing what was happening right before the show happened last night there was this whole parade in Providence of Fire in the river kind of thing so everyone was kind of jazzed to be outside and sing this and then they all came in and there was all this big energy so I felt like oh great we can start the show off big and celebrate but you know maybe who knows what will happen tomorrow night but I imagine it will be a little more subdued and that yeah maybe yeah that could happen I imagine that at the Holy Cross that even though it's Catholic the Puritan dominance over expression might be present in Rhode Island and so that it might be subdued so we might have to warm everybody up a little bit more and then we'll just change the show in order to do it that way and when you're developing I can't say that I can walk out and everyone's like you never know and it's really bad to prejudge and then you start to you start to make your plan about how it's going to be and then you're not open to the present moment so how do you what is your process for developing a performance piece like that whether it's two or three hours a little over 24 how do you begin developing we worked a very in hindsight it was more like a no theater process where everybody learns their own separately and then we get together and we just do it in front of the audience so we would not really rehearse ever if it was a three hour show we would rehearse with the band for three hours just to make sure the charts were the right form but what we would do is we would perform it perform it perform it perform it perform it over and over and over again then after each performance we would talk about what worked what didn't work and then we would just change it to the next performance and that's including the costumes my costume designer would show up the day of the show with the outfit and sometimes five minutes before I go on I put it on for the first time sometimes on stage he'll come out with something that he just made and put it on me so it's it's very spontaneous in that way and it's there's a liveness to it that is bigger than most the theater that is pretending to be live but is really just kind of hitting the marks and they call it freezing the show on Broadway that's what they say is the show frozen? you're like stop that they want it to be exactly the same every night and I just find that go make a movie okay so I started thinking about the musical frozen I got a little bit of it so how is that process different than when you work as a playwright? well it's not I mean it wouldn't have to be different I certainly know Penny Arcade a mentor of mine she said to me that she never writes her plays she does these primarily she does solo shows probably but where she does these monologue shows and she says I don't write it down I just perform it and then I hone it hone it and eventually I have a show and I'm a little bit of both so with a play like the lilies revenge which is a five hour play that I wrote I wrote the five hour play and we would perform it but then every night I would say you know I think that that line is not working it didn't work last night let me try something different and I change it or I might tell somebody in the cast hey say this right before we go on stage say this instead so we can change it that way for something like here which I'm not in didn't write a part for myself I would basically I expect the dialogue to be what I've written but I create moments in the play that are clearly clearly things that each production is going to be able to create new and that hopefully every night they're able to do new so things like the puppet show in here is never been the same by any company that's ever done it there's been something like 70 productions and they're all so different you know so those kinds of things I really enjoyed doing putting into the plays you've described yourself as a maximalist because that's counterpoint to minimalism so could you tell us a little bit about what that means well I mean what I love about maximalism is that minimalism is in it so minimalism does not have maximalism in it so so I prefer what I'm an artist what I like is I'm interested in heterogeneity I grew up in the suburbs I mean I grew up in Stockton where it felt like a suburb and it everyone was expected to be the same but nobody was it created a lot of tension a lot of economic disparity a lot of racism a lot of homophobia sexism all that stuff because everyone was supposed to adhere to a certain kind of American whiteness you know and that just didn't work it was one of the more violent places in America growing up it was one of the highest illiteracy rates in America growing up so it obviously didn't work so I thought the goal isn't homogeneity the goal isn't to reduce ourselves down to one thing one nation under one God the goal is to kind of expand ourselves and see how how large we can be how expressive how multifaceted how we don't know anything I was just saying to some people earlier today I'm more like Socrates in the sense that the only thing I know is that I don't know and that's just a really good way to approach life I think I don't know so my feeling is that it's the heterogeneity that I'm after more than anything and so that's that's where the maximalism comes in because you know try a little of this, try a little of that see when you take everything and you squish it all together you make something new and I find that very fascinating but it doesn't mean you do that all at the same time I mean sometimes you do but sometimes you just go for the minimalism for five minutes but if you have a two hour show or a 24 hour show you have time to do a lot you know you've described the 24 decade history as a radical fairy realness ritual which I want to get a tattoo of at some point but could you tell us a little bit about what that means especially because not everybody may be familiar with radical fairy the radical fairies are started by Harry Hay and a bunch of other gay men at the time and now it's everybody it's lesbians, gays, transgender everybody, pansexual whatever everybody's everyone's welcome now but it's still primarily I would say primarily gay men you could describe them as hippies they just were queers who wanted to not define the way that they live their life based on the status quo based on heterosexual ways of being and wanted to figure out was there another way that they could live that was better for them so it's a lot about 400 drag queens in the woods of rural Tennessee living in a commune it's like that kind of thing but it's also I think the sisters are perpetual indulgence which is a group of drag queen nuns came out of it that have done hospice work and great political work it's a lot of alternative thinking and radical consent the reason that we're talking about consent right now is a lot because of the radical queers who've been working with radical consent for decades now so and that came from these workshops that the radical fairies would do and it came from other places as well but also there and so they're just wonderful and I've been a part of the community kind of lightly for 25 years and was down at the commune and inspired by how they've incorporated ritual into their into their lives and their practice and I was looking for a form for 24 decade and I discovered what I wanted the form to be while I was there so I just wanted to honor them by acknowledging that in the title and so is partly what you do in performance, is it ritual or does it have a ritual command for students there's a lot of points in history where we see very clear tying of ritual to performance so is that sort of a goal in the piece? yeah absolutely it was the piece, as I was saying the piece was designed by performing performing performing it was built that way so there was a ritual aspect where people would come back and see a decade that we performed performance and there's 24 of them so we worked on the show for 6 years before we put the entire thing together and so people would come back over and over and over again for 6 years usually in the theater what you do is you take something tangible like a script and you make something ephemeral out of it like production and in this process it was more like we take something ephemeral like performance and we made something tangible out of it we made each other at the shows start businesses together create other art pieces together multiple babies have been born as a result of people meeting at the shows I've been invited to weddings so it's political movements have kind of like come up from people I won't say political movements but political groups have come up from people meeting so things have sprung up out of it so you can actually hold in your hand in a way that is not a chachki and that's fascinating I think to think of that theater has that potential to do that and I think usually it's ritual theater and what we don't have a lot in our lives are ritual anymore especially ritual that is asking you to be multiple things instead of one thing we have events that ask you to root for one team and we have the ritual of church that ask you to root for one god but we don't have a lot of rituals that say hey we could be expansive and so that's the that's the hope that 24 decade is helping to fill some of that gap and when you're performing on stage you talked earlier about costumes a new piece might come out and that's obviously going to change how you perform how close is the you on stage to who you are in real life is an exaggerated version of yourself a complete character where you feel like whatever is happening in the performance dictates who you are that night or do you feel like an extension of yourself I feel like it's what I look like on the inside expressed outwardly when you're on stage you're in a heightened circumstance so it's really just me in a heightened circumstance so my voice is louder I'm trying to get to the back row I'm certainly in a heightened circumstance of grappling with the history of America all that history on our backs what are we going to do with it so those are the types of things that I just think that my particular drag is just me but in a heightened circumstance people will say are you hiding under all that drag and I say no no no I'm it's a reveal of who I am on the inside that I don't normally show so this is my relative man drag I would walk down the street in and people wouldn't really notice me but my responsibility on a stage is to actually be brave and show something that I wouldn't I wouldn't normally show not the thing that's going to make me look like everybody else and that I'll hide so like this is I mean relative camouflage you know what I mean what you're all wearing right now is camouflage because you could walk down the street and somebody else could be wearing the exact same thing well maybe not that shirt right there but you know so that's when that's us hiding is when we're dressed like this that's us hiding but on stage you show up the revisionist part of your description of 24 Decades revisionist history often gets a very sort of negative connotation right whether it's people of color people of non-christian faith LGBT people going back and quote-unquote rewriting history digging through history within an agenda if you know is 24 Decades in many ways is tackling America just through a different lens so is it in some ways how can you correct that negative connotation of the idea of revising history where certain groups of people have been eliminated or overlooked or I yeah that's not my approach I'm not going in and inventing queerness in history where there probably wasn't or first off I know I'm a queer which means that they were queers hundreds of years ago well yeah Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln we know this but the historians won't admit it because they're uptight well they are and they're a little homophobic and they won't admit that either but my goal wasn't to do that my goal was it's very rare for queer people or people of color to represent anything other than themselves in art their group a queer can represent other queers but a queer cannot represent America and so with the 24 Decades the queer is going to be the metaphor for America with my play here the transgender child is going to be the metaphor for America instead of this other thing where we're always having to stretch the queers are always having to stretch towards the status quo and make the status quo stretch towards to see themselves in us so so that's that's how I saw it with the history I didn't have to say that the American Revolution was queer I just have to perform the American Revolution on stage and I'm a queer body and a queer person and suddenly it's queer and that's the truth of our history as well and then there are things that help a little bit along the way like Yankee Doodle Dandy well who was that Dandy I mean right so and I know the history of like why it got written and blah blah blah blah blah but the fact is that there was a Dandy and there's lots of songs that make fun of Dandy throughout our history which means they were there right I could ask you a lot more questions I would like to open it up to our audience to see if you have any questions that you'd like to ask Taylor and if you could speak nice and loud otherwise I'll like Oprah style come at you with a microphone ah how do I deal with negative criticism I'll do that thing where I repeat the question so that people there can hear it um uh it's uh um I read all of it and but now I'm getting to a place where maybe I don't want to because it's turning into a different kind of criticism because after you get a certain amount of success the negative criticism is about do you deserve that success it's about trying to stop you from um working instead of actually wondering about your art right um and it's very hard to know uh where the agenda is um from the negative criticism so I think I might be at a place where I'm like I'm just going to stop reading criticism which is sad to me but uh it is a little bit of the state of the world and it just it's you know you just gotta bat it away bat it away bat it away bat it away uh self consciousness kills creativity so we have to put ourselves in a situation where we can be as unselfconscious as we possibly can and if anything is threatening to take the story away from the storyteller then you have to incorporate that threatening thing into the story so if you get negative criticism then you kind of you've got to figure out a way to bring that into the story and I don't always want to do that you know so um but sometimes you can't avoid it and then you just you know you just gotta go okay that the important thing to know is that most of the people who um uh want to tell their opinion um haven't really considered their opinion and that's very helpful to just constantly remind yourself of that that people like to decide and move on to the next thing and um my goal as an artist isn't to I don't want people to like it or dislike it I want them to perpetually consider it perpetually consider the ideas um so there's nothing more annoying to me than a review that is like it was amazing okay you know what was it what did what did you think about what did you do what do you want to do in the world blah blah blah blah like further the conversation that the artist is putting for that's what I'm hoping for um but when people want to reduce it down to whether it worked or it didn't work um then it's just that person is invalid in my in my estimation so you can kind of dismiss them yeah but it's you know easier said than done uh so when to let a project go well with 24 decade I designed it as a 10 year project because it has so much to do with decades in our history so I wanted the project itself to last a decade um so we've been working on it for nine years we've got another year we're going to Berlin to do the whole thing and then we're gonna hopefully bring the whole thing back to New York City and do it one last hurrah um not in a 24 hour form but in you know um the entire show in smaller uh evening performances and and then I'm kind of done with performing the entire thing I think we'll probably do a bridge shows what we're gonna do tomorrow night for a number of years after that but um but I'm anxious for new you know so but I I work that picture into into the performance of the piece and it's been just divine um with something like here um my play or uh I um that I'm not in we did three productions uh and I felt like that was enough I I I uh I I learned uh a lot about the play in those three productions I did it's all through them and then we we published it and and it's out in the world and maybe I'll revisit it you know in 10 years and and be involved in another production but I prefer to let other people play with it and and um so I've kind of let that one go out into the world uh with something like Gary uh which is only had one production so far on Broadway um uh I I'm I'm anxious to do more productions and and see what other people come up with it come up with it and actually to um well I won't go into that but uh but I'm I'm looking forward to other other productions so I don't know how many more I would do but I guess I I guess the answer is you just kind of feel it out and you see what feels right in the American theater it's challenging because you have all this energy adrenaline for a project uh you you want to finish it and then the American theater is so slow that like my play Prosperous Fools I wrote it five years ago and it's just now maybe gonna get a production but we're still not sure you know and so eventually I'm gonna have to decide do I produce it myself um because I just can't get a theater to produce a play about that is critical of philanthropy because nobody wants to produce a play that is critical of philanthropy when they need philanthropists so I might have to produce it myself and that will mean another five years so it might not get done for another five years you know it could be done in the next two years or not um and you just uh I don't it's hard because my heart always goes to the next project um once I write it I'm I'm moving on you know but you gotta you gotta figure out a way to manage the back and forth and I don't really have a strategy for it I just I got one project at a time but that might mean two weeks one at a time for two weeks I'm working on this project and then the next two weeks I'm working on this one that I wrote five years ago but I'm doing a new draft and then you know the next two weeks I'm learning a new song for this show you know it's just kind of constant juggling how do I find my collaborators I see work I don't audition I try not to audition sometimes I work with directors who audition I ask them not to audition sometimes they agree with me sometimes they don't um I don't like to audition I don't I don't want to do it I just want to go and see work and find people that I find fascinating I just want to meet people and I just want to play with people you know I want to make work and see if it works out and if it works out then we'll make something else together and if it doesn't work out then then we won't or we won't for another five or ten years and then maybe we'll find each other again I mean am I at the table I guess I am I guess this is the table I don't know you know I just had an experience where I where I first day of rehearsal the director said okay great we don't need you anymore and I was like oh I I just wrote a play it's a brand new play and I haven't said a single thing and I'm already not in the room I'm not already I'm already not in the room where it's happening and it's my play so that was a new one for me I think the way I've gotten in the room is to make sure that it's my room um not that I own the rehearsal room but that I'm also a producer that I'm also I play I do multiple things I'm also often times I act in my own work so they can't kick me out of the room so that's one of the ways that I've done it and then the other thing is just like the theater will ask you to ask for permission to be creative over and over and over and over again the clubs or the streets or buses or anywhere else you might want to put on a play because people put them on all over the place you know in bakeries and phone booths I mean they put them on all over so if you go to Edinburgh there's a play in every single space in the entire city during the festival and you don't have to ask permission you can just do it and that is thrilling especially as a young person so I would just go to the clubs where they would let anyone do it you know I show up you show up dressed up in some fabulous outfit you stand up on the bar and you do something interesting and they're like oh will you come back next week that's how I got a career is basically just by not asking for permission and just doing it so that's what I would recommend and eventually you get enough people around you that you realize this is some really good advice I got by a Hollywood person years ago he said you have to go to the party and what do you manage you have to show up you have to go to the party but you don't have to hang out with the people that you don't like and then in 10 years 15 years you'll discover that all the people that you like are now in charge and so you don't have to network you don't have to try to get Oscar Ustis to have a conversation with you and to throw his graces on you you just like hang out with the people you like and then one day Nigel Smith my co-director on 21st Decade will be the artistic director of the public theater you know what I mean now he's the artistic director of the flea and he's doing my play at the flea so that's just I've seen that happen all the people that I like to nobody in the theater are now like Rachel Chavkin just won the Tony and Rachel Haug just won the Tony and you know they're just all the people that are working Heidi Schreck and all the people I've worked with over the years and Young Jean Lee and I mean so that's the way to do it hang out with the people that are around you don't try to you know don't try to get into anyone else sorry I didn't hear that question at all I was like thinking about something oh Rachel just had her baby and I'm so sorry I hope Rachel's baby is really happy in the future on the planet for what's my hope for the I don't know if she wanted that to be public news sorry um what did I what do I want for the future of the LGBT community um I hope we take over all the alphabet um I always made fun of the Lugabut Squiao community is what I call it but uh but I um but there's also a part of me that's like yeah we need a W and we need a you know we need all of them all those letters give it to us all make everybody be like A B C D E F G H I J K all the mental P Q R S G W X Y Zee community every time you know what I mean that would be amazing uh not shorter longer uh so that's what I hope um not less more I hope I hope that we can get away from the infantilization of America uh I I I long for um uh more critical thinking and I don't mean opinions I think there's a plague of opinions um which is an opinion itself uh but I I I would really like us to get away from um feeling like we our status will raise in the community by what we like and dislike and by what we shut down and what we encourage um I would like us to get away from that would like us to just uh consider and celebrate considering and celebrate people who are um digging deep and inspiring us to uh go deep into our considerations um that's that would be my hope so that you know I like a comic book movie ever so often but does that does it have to be the biggest I mean you know the great authors used to be celebrities and now who's the biggest celebrity Donald Trump you know so um so I would like to change that and I think that's uh I would like where people to get a little away from um identity politics if I'm honest um I don't I think that identity is the reference for contextualization but not the point and um that's I'm not sure if I'm totally on board with that as I say I don't know if all I know is I don't know but um that's something I'm thinking about a lot is uh is is identity um is focusing on like everyone wants to be seen all the time and I think people in the LGBT community were starved of not seeing themselves growing up they want to be seen and but I tend to I see myself every day not just because I'm semi-famous now but because I walk by windows every day and I see my reflection every day every morning I see my reflection in the mirror and I think I have to see myself even in the culture I can't just like you know just like see myself when I see myself you know so um I'm I'm curious about this desire to always have everything reflected back at us that is us and and how can we inspire more curiosity instead of um more uh um political reflection as identity uh which maybe sometimes feels like just a lot of self-indulgent people trying to um um be seen and heard I understand the reasons why but I I still I still I question it I don't know it's what I'm really grappling with right now oh I said you guys were on Rhode Island I'm sorry I was in Rhode Island earlier I know it's Massachusetts anyways we call it I got the punitzer change your hair color ever so often really I think it's that simple right you know like just like um put on something you wouldn't normally wear walk down the street in that uh whatever you're wearing is the drag is the story you're telling the world so right now you're all wearing um we're going to a lecture talk and uh drag right and um and okay you know you're wearing a way we don't mind wearing these corporate clothes drag and that's fine like I okay but also what's the other story you could be telling there's a possibility for a storytelling and art making every time you leave the house and um uh that's I think a way to participate uh in that in that community and um and I also think it's just like encouraging people to break outside the social etiquette and the norms and stuff and um and to challenge yourself to do it I prefer to live by example rather than tell people what to do so you know I just try to try to do it myself and I have to hide sometimes often um just so I can have the energy I have friends who live their life as art and they walk every time they walk on the street they are art and I'm really inspired by those people but I'm psychologically I know I have to hibernate um which means jeans and a t-shirt sometimes yeah um well in terms of uh early theater the Egyptians they would um their early theater was more kind of like parades with stories that would happen but there was a moment where somebody would die in the storytelling they would actually while they were acting out somebody dying over here they would kill somebody over here like actually have a human sacrifice so I was like that's kind of exciting so uh I thought how can I how can I do that on a on a stage but not actually kill somebody but you know use metaphorical death but also um how can people sacrifice things that aren't useful to them right now and one of the problems I think we have in the U.S. is that our um uh nostalgia is uh make America great again uh is um stopping us from moving forward uh and uh stopping the progression and and also so much of our country is built on pretty dysfunctional dysfunctional foundation um and so how and we've built our community based on things like um well there's a song in 24 decade uh called uh Col Black Rose it's a sea shanty adaptation of the very first minstrel song so we don't do it we're not doing it tomorrow night but um we do it in the big show and um it is the the community of sailors in the song are are singing the song to um build their community to get the work done and they're using the idea that if they get the uh the sail up and everything ready they can go into town and their reward will be that they can gang rape a woman who is enslaved that is the um um if you just listen the song it's like hey it's a sea shanty when you really look at the lyric that's what the lyric is saying so the community is building itself on this horrible thing so I think as a country we have to look at all of the little details of our lives how we have built ourselves based on um horrible thing nobody wants to give up community because community is pretty great but if the community it um was created because of something as um horrible as slavery and sexism and homophobia um and capitalism too uh then we have to think about how we can um build new foundations so that's um where the sacrifice comes in can we sacrifice some of these things we hold so dear that actually aren't useful to us? uh the research well Eric and a very smart playwriting teacher and playwright uh was teaching this silent retreat with him and he talks a little bit during it about you're all silent for nine days and he just he gives you prompts and you write it's really incredible and during that he he said uh because part of the silent retreat is that we don't communicate at all um with each other so there's no like smiling and nodding there's no opening a door for someone and you know or there's no saying thank you or anything like that and there was also uh no internet searching you know and so there was a fear that we couldn't write our play if we weren't able to do research and he said you know you have your play inside of you already you don't need to do any research everything you know about it you you already know so uh now I think you know that's the way that's the place to start write the play and then you can do the research um now there's no hard and fast rule for any of this you know you might with 24 decade uh I would say you know I need to do a little research because I didn't know anything about history and part of the joy of making the project was that I wanted um to learn I had a really bad education public school education um and we just my history teacher was an alcoholic and you know like it was there was like 40 kids in the class and we couldn't learn anything um plus I was getting beat up and you know I couldn't focus then so um I what I what the great thing about theater is you can say if I want to learn something I make a show about it then I can learn about it so um I would say okay we're working on the 1920s uh decade right now let me just read something briefly about what was going on in the 20s see if something grabs me and then it would say okay great the um content dictates the form so um uh it's just after uh world war one um 16 and a half million people I think died uh clearly there's gonna be some um trauma happening and then they call it the gay you know the gay 20s or whatever you know like and so we're not the gay it's the gay 1890s and the whatever the 20s was called so you know so you're you're thinking why are they why are they also happy because the war's over but I think somebody's not telling the truth here so then we make the entire 20s about um that everyone's trying to force their fun on you because they're traumatized so that's something that comes from me and my idea about the history I'm not a historian or a musicologist you know but I I do think we have all this history on our backs what are we going to do with it that's what we're trying to figure out in the show and so um and that kind of relates more to this present moment where you know everyone's like yay yay we're having a good time we're having a good time and everyone's trying to force their good time and you look at me I'm like Instagram I'm having a great life I'm living life living life you know and meanwhile you're like maybe you might not be living life um you know they're like living life living life living life uh okay um so I don't know you know I'm like I'm I'm touring the world I'm at these fabulous places being an influencer you know you're like oh I don't think that's living but um that's my that's my opinion again uh so that's my long way of saying everything and nothing yeah yeah Taylor we're really really grateful for your time today and we are really really excited to have you performing here at Holy Cross tomorrow so could you please join me in thanking Judy for being here today