Red Tide Blooming, is a musical extravaganza, but has so much more than just that going on that it's hard to categorize. Tell us a little bit about the show, and how you would describe it.
Red Tide Blooming is a reflection on the revitalization and homogenization of Coney Island, New York City, and the world at large. It has been written in the genre of pastiche. This means I've used lots of different genres and squished them together. I suppose you could call it a ridiculous-absurdist-agit-prop-vaudevillian-musical-allegorical-epic-dramedy. The play is a celebration of divine variance and so I used a variety of genre's to create it. For example I wanted to have a couple of burlesque numbers strewn through the play. One traditional strip-tease that I love is the balloon routine. A woman (we used a man) comes out and is wearing nothing but balloons. One by one she pops them and is left naked by the end of the number. In Red Tide I didn't want to stop the action of the play in order to have a strip-tease but felt highlighting the burlesque movement and community was important to my metaphor (Coney Island and downtown New York are a hot-bed of burlesque performers). What I decided to do was incorporate the balloon strip-tease into the dialogue and action. I created a blowfish whose outfit is made out of balloons. The blowfish is stabbed to death and the balloons pop, leaving the actor naked and his perpetrator in a heightened, stage-worthy situation. To me, Red Tide Blooming is a call to arms for people to chose to create a counter-culture, rather than mourn it's appropriation.
You tackle a lot of topics in Red Tide Blooming, including our current political climate and today's media-addicted culture. What made you decide this piece would be a good forum for voicing some opinions about those issues?
Well it's hard to talk about homogeneity without mentioning mainstream media and our government and religious leader's actions to eradicate relativism.
You recently performed your show, The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac, at The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival. Tell us some more about that show, and how that experience was.
So much fun! The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac is my solo subversive jukebox musical (of my own original material). In it I perform a lot of monologues and songs I've had in shows over the last eight years. This is material that most people (unless they were willing to venture into a sex club disguised as an East Village basement gay bar) haven't seen before and weren't likely to ever see (I doubt the Signature Theatre will ever produce a season of my older plays). So essentially, now that I'm working in more "legitimate", high profile venues, and I have more of an audience, I wanted them to see what I've been doing in New York City for almost a decade. The fun part is I created an arch for the piece and chose material that juxtaposes the personal with the political and with some new material weaved them all together, making the political and personal intrinsic by the end. Mark Russell, who has really been a great supporter of artists like me, who often get overlooked because of our subject matters, styles, and techniques, has this great festival called The Under The Radar Festival. They've been having it at the Public theatre for the last few years and he asked me to partake. I joked at the Public how I've been performing in basements in large theatrical institutions all over the world and I finally got to a place where I was performing above the radar at a respected big time theatre and what did they do... call it the Under the Radar Festival.
You developed an interest in the theatre at a young age. How old were you, and what happened to spark your interest?
I was five when I performed in my first play but I was 13 when I performed in the first play that would spark an understanding of what theatre could do. It was a musical called Runaways by Elizabeth Swados. Liz (who I've since had the great fortune of working with) turned my little budding trani-activists brain upside down and showed me that theatre could be anything you wanted it to be. Thank you Liz.
I understand that in the early 1990s you took nine months off from performing and walked across the United States. What inspired that journey, and how was it?
It was called The Walk Across America for Mother Earth and was about the U.S. government performing nuclear tests on Western Shoshone land. Like most things it was wonderful, pathetic, exciting, boring, fantastic, fierce, hurtful, beautiful, and so dear. I'm writing a fiction novel inspired by it — stay tuned.
What can audiences expect next from you?
I'm working on a couple projects right now — The Young Ladies Of, which juxtaposes my Texan father's life in Vietnam and my current life as a New York City drag queen. I've done a workshop of it (at P.S. 122) and will be doing another one this spring in London at the Battersea Arts Center and then premiering it in the fall of 2007. Also, part two of my Armageddon coupling (Red Tide Blooming is part one) is called The Lily's Revenge and is being developed currently at the HERE Arts Center.
Interview with Taylor Mac was conducted by Michael Criscuolo February 2007.