Taylor Mac | Hir / 2019

hey jude

by Douglas Messerli

 

Taylor Mac Hir / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / Howard Fox and I attended the matinee performance on Sunday, January 27, 2019

 

Don't carry the world upon your shoulder

 

For well you know that it's a fool

 

Who plays it cool

By making his world a little colder

Na na na naa-naa

 

The noted playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac—who last year appeared in Los Angeles at the Ace Theatre in his delirious A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and more recently in a performance at UCLA, has now brought his play (previously performed at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre and in New York) to Los Angeles’ excellent Odyssey Theatre for the occasion of their 50th anniversary.

       Mac (who prefers the sexual signification of judy) does not herself appear in this production, but clearly represents the playwright/performer’s sensibility. Yet, in this play, as director Bart DeLorenzo argues, begins in a small home kitchen that might almost be in Death of a Salesman or A Raisin in the Sun. Frankly, I disagree. This is neither a home set in New York area or in the Chicago black projects. Mac grew up in Stockton, and his set is quite precisely a suburban tract-houses of California, which truly does make a vast difference. And the play, about a returning dishonorably charged veteran, Isaac Connor (Zack Gearing), for doing cocaine. His job, one of worst one can possibly imagine, was piecing together body parts of blown-up soldiers in Afghanistan. Is it any wonder that he is not quite ready to come home into a world that has blown up all gender differences and created a total havoc of family life that he never before experienced?

      His formerly toxic masculine father, Arnold (Ron Bottitta), while he has been away, has suffered a serious stroke, which has allowed his formerly abused wife, Paige (Cynthia Kania)—who has previously had to deal with her husband’s sexual philandering, particularly with her own hairdresser cutting away the wife’s hair to make her look as unappealing as she might, and with spousal rape—now aided by the fact that her previous daughter, Maxine, is now transitioning to the role of a male, Max (played by the real transgender actor Puppett).

      This world is not of the modernist conception but is closer to a strange mash-up of Frank Gilroy’s 1964 tearful drama, The Subject Was Roses and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child—both plays about soldiers returning home to broken families—along with a heavy dash of British playwright Enda Walsh. No, Dorothy, we are no longer in mid-century modernist kitchen dramas.

       The kitchen, including the entire house, has been totally thrown into chaos by Paige, who now refuses to do normal housework and who suddenly has been completely freed from any responsibility of housewifery duties. She, finally, has been able to humiliate her half-dead husband in the way he previously dominated her, forcing him to wear a frilly dress and clown-makeup, while she and Max take in cultivating trips of imagination to Europe and the world of museums, which she hopes, now that he has returned, Isaac might join in.

       What she can’t comprehend is that her soldier boy has not transitioned into her new world, but still desires the normative patterns of the past, the clean piles of clothes she spent years washing and ironing, the disinfected counter and table tops, a father who might even be able to demand his rights.

       Mac joyfully and quite humorously opposes the old world with the “new,” mocking both. The audience, mostly orderly West Side Angelenos surely appreciate the orderliness he recreates in his mother and “brother’s” absence, but also cannot help but celebrate the redemptive chaos Paige has now created.

       Yet, we also know that she and Max are truly headed for doom, having sold the house on a kind reverse mortgage condition (centered upon the death of the father) they will surely soon be totally homeless, living out their crazy dreams of total freedom on the streets.

 

      In this play, however, it is the returning soldier Isaac who is sent out to live on the streets after he angrily and violently lashes out against what he perceives as the totally absurd actions of his mother and his clearly selfish now brother, who can talk only about “his” transition and masturbatory love of men.

         Each of these family members, as Mac has hinted, is a kind of Trumpian figure, who cannot allow anyone else to define what they believe to be the truth. In a world of hurt and pain there can be no subjective and agreed upon reality. These family figures live each in a world of their own definitions. No one even has time, in this vision of the family unit, to even clear up the piss fallen to the floor from the diapered father, who no longer can comprehend his family role or his previous sins. The family “circle” has become a series of standoffs.

      There is no “right” here, all are trapped in worlds of their own making, without any way to rejoin what was previously, at least, a failed family unit. Present/past, order/chaos are terms of war against which any shared empathy has no chance in Hir, one of the pronouns that Max has chosen for “ze” self. Love has clearly lost in the process and each of these family members attempt to transition into a world they have not yet quite imagined might allow all of them to coexist.

      If this play is often very funny, it’s also quite terrifying, after just seeing the 1945 drama An Inspector Calls, at just how similar the family breakdown in this contemporary drama is to that of the figures who led us to both World Wars. There is no right “hir,” only a terribly loneliness that will lead them all into a corner from which they may never escape.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2019).

Thomas Bird | Bearing Witness / 2018

testimony

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas Bird (writer and actor) Bearing Witness, Los Angeles, The Odyssey Theater Ensemble / I attended the matinee on Sunday, June 3, 2018

 

In some respects, Thomas Bird’s Bearing Witness is a rather conventional monologue relating personal experiences of the author/actor. Yet Bird’s story of two generations of military experiences is so different and moving that it far surpasses most such works of its genre.

       One might begin by pointing out that the two different wars in which father and son served were so radically different that they are barely comparable. Bird’s father, a medic serving in World War II, who, with others liberated the Mauthausen–Gusen concentration camp in Linz, Austria, a Holocaust institution described as one of the major of Nazi camps which killed from 122,766 to perhaps 320,000 individuals, including religious figures, Spaniards, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and even errant Boy Scouts of Jehovah Witnesses, along with Jews, many of its inmates worked to death in the nearby granite quarries to help achieve Hitler’s and Albert Speer’s architectural imaginations. Bird’s father, in short, was a hero who saved many of those near death at the end of a War which—from American eyes at least—was a “good war,” a noble cause accomplished as Dan Rather wrote, by the “greatest generation.” The elder Bird returned home as an understated hero to continue is his good work as a doctor.

      By contrast, Bird served in Viet Nam in B Company of the lst Calvary Division in 1965-1966, living through the experiences of a “dirty” war wherein families and individuals were killed in what sometimes might be described as borderline war crimes, several of which Bird painfully recreates in his performance. Although the younger Bird also received numerous awards (among them, the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, a Presidential Unit Citation, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with palm—none of which he mentions in his monologue) the actor returned to a country not at all sympathetic to that war’s soldiers, and who, like so many of his peers, suffered various versions of what might be described as Post-Traumatic Syndrome—including becoming alienated from his family and abusing several drugs. Close to his father’s death, the dying man admitted that he was sorry that he had “given up on him,” obviously also a shock to his now-recovering son.

       Given the two pulls of this work—his loving memories of his father as a child and his admiration of him, and yet his own haunting memories of his war experiences, Bird creates a compelling narrative. And the swings between these two extremes—the author describes them as “circles”—make up the structure of this moving work. At one point, Bird reveals his own “large smile,” entering a Vietnamese Leper Colony to help protect the small, isolated gathering and speaking gently with a woman he describes as “one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen,” yet whose skin was peeling in layers; and at another instance he is commanded to kill an already dying Vietnamese soldier who still holds a grenade in his hand; at another moment he attacks a father simply attempting to protect his family.

 

      But some of the most poignant moments of this monologue are when Bird visits Mauthausen to attempt to put his father’s great heroism into perspective. The curators and archivists caring for what remains of the prison welcome him warmly as the son of a liberator, but are a bit taken aback when he asks questions about deaths of some of the prisoners who had survived, but who died when the Americans and others had taken control of the camp.

       A day before his father’s death, the elder Bird admitted to his son that at least 13 survivors had died when he and others, trying to help revive them in their near-cadaverous conditions, fed them milk. Unfortunately, it was bad medicine. The shock to their systems killed them, the bodies simply unable to quickly consume such a rich diet. The director quietly meets with him, admitting evidently, the facts, but trying to reassure the curious son that it was unintentional and therefore not spoken about nor recorded. It is as if his own father’s “guilt” has been erased, while his 19th-year old sense of guilt will never be forgotten.

      Bird achieves some sense of peace by simply visiting the small cemetery of those were not gassed in the prison showers. The voices seem to speak to him, and through him to us. Indeed, voices of the past might be another way to describe this work, the horrifying whispers of the so many who have died and continue to die in war.

     The actor/author clearly found a personal revival in sharing his experiences through theater and opera while helping others to share their own nightmares. Bird is still clearly haunted by his and his father’s pasts, and suggests, perhaps, that we as citizens who lived through and even silently participated in these wars might as well be haunted by the ghosts of the millions destroyed. If nothing else, Bearing Witness is a testimony to those who died, with at one point, Bird angrily shouting at those who now deny the millions killed in The Holocaust, and by association those who will still not admit to the numerous Vietnamese and Americans who died in a war of shame.  

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2018).