Somewhere in the suburbs, Isaac has returned from the wars to help take care of his ailing father, only to discover a household in revolt. The insurgent: his mom. Liberated from an oppressive marriage, with Isaac’s newly out transgender sibling as her ally, she’s on a crusade to dismantle the patriarchy. But in Taylor Mac’s sly, subversive comedy, annihilating the past doesn’t always free you from it.
Scenic Design: David Zinn Costume Design: Gabriel Berry Lighting Design: Mike Inwood Sound Design: Fitz Patton Production Stage Manager: Stephen Milosevich
Reviews
“
A crackling production of a remarkable, audacious, uproarious black comedy with a daring combination of realism and madcap absurdity.
—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
“
A beautiful trinity of Nielsen’s pained and profound performance, Mac’s script, and Smith’s direction.
Smart. Dark. Difficult. Deliberately disorienting. If you don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this spectacle, I suspect that’s how Taylor Mac likes it.
—Jesse Green, New York magazine
**** Critic’s Pick. A dizzying theatrical tilt-a-whirl!
A behind-the-scenes look at the transformation of Kristine Nielsen into the ‘Hir’ artwork. With the fabulous makeup stylings of Darrell Thorne, flawless photography of Zack DeZon, and Kristine's charisma, we had a truly magical day bringing this artwork to life.
Taylor Mac: I was an artist, I realized, first, and the way that I thought about the world was different than the way other kids or people thought about the world. I was constantly the person that was pointing out something that was just slightly different than everybody else. It may have been that we were Christian Scientists, so there was this big, huge thing in my family where we were from a weird religion.
I’m a lover and maker of the alternative, underground, and radical movements, and basically every work I’ve made is somehow rooted in a subculture. Hir, however, is a new kind of play for me as it’s dealing with the mainstream; rather, the remnants of the former body politic and the rise of a new progressive body politic.
Warning to all Taylor Mac fans: Taylor does not appear in this play. Second warning: when the lights come up and the play begins to unfold before you, by all appearances it is as if we are witnessing a classically structured, fourth wall, living room family play. It even has a couch!
In the opening moments of the show, an actress who introduces herself as “Time,” stuffed into a scrappy-glamorous, beautifully ornate hourglass dress, her head trapped inside a cuckoo clock, rails against the play we’re about to see: a love story between Bride and Groom that culminates in a wedding. “INSTITUTIONALIZED NARRATIVE!” Time cries, “This is not something to enjoy. It is ugly. Plastic. Is a plastic deck chair fun? No! It is tacky! This is the most base, poorly crafted, pulled together at the last minute, ready for mass consumption, demonstrative, manipulative, repetitive, oversexed, histrionic, reductive piece of crap known to mankind… Now I, we, are forced to play stock characters.”
The Oxford English Dictionary added about 500 new words in its latest quarterly update, including such splendid neologisms as jeggings, kettlebell, photobomb, and twerk. These additions serve as a reminder that language is a tool and a living thing, constantly evolving to reflect the changing world it describes.
