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.
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.
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.
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).