Interview: Taylor Mac Revisits 24 Decades of American Music in New HBO Documentary

In October 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, playwright and performer Taylor Mac took the stage for one whole day, presenting the large-scale performance piece A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in full for the first and only time.

In the years prior and hence, Mac did this show in four-hour chunks, a series of wild concerts charting a subjective history of American music and activism from 1776 to the present. Along for the ride were co-director Niegel Smith, musical director and conductor Matt Ray, costume designer Machine Dazzle, make-up designer Anastasia Durasova, scenic designer Mimi Lien, lighting designer John Torres, hundreds of backup performers, and enthusiastic audience members who were cast as colonial needleworkers, World War I soldiers, characters from The Mikado, and participants in a Cold War battle of giant inflatable penis balloons.

Theater is ephemeral, but not always. Mac and the team captured the full concert (which earned a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and Pulitzer finalist status) in the hopes that someone would actually turn it into a film. Enter Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, who condense a 24-hour marathon into 106 minutes. It debuts on HBO and streaming service Max on June 27 at 9pm ET.

Here, Mac recounts the experience of doing the show live, and why it’s so unexpectedly moving to see it up close and personal.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Few stage performers get to actually watch their work; what is it like to experience yourself doing your magnum opus?
I’ve been watching it for seven years, you know? It’s a long process making a film. I’d never made a film before — it’s really Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film — but I’ve been part of the whole process. We shot the footage even before they came on board, because we were just like “We have to shoot it, otherwise it’s just gone forever.” There was lots of cataloguing and watching it over and over and over again in trying to make the film. I guess I just felt like it’s been a little bit more of a practice than it has been the emotional cringe fest of watching yourself.

There has been an element of that, of course, because I work in the ephemeral arts, so not being able to change something — and especially since the kind of work that I make within this show is radically different in each performance — is a little disorienting. But I’ve really come to appreciate it now. The conversation about the piece and my feelings about how I perform changes every time I see it, and I don’t expect that will ever change for me or any audience member. So that opens my heart up to being printed.

In the film, you get to see the whole process of getting in and out of costume and makeup, just like in the live performance. I really appreciated the level of theatricality on screen, which could easily have been edited away.
Rob and Jeff really captured the spirit of the show in general. What I feel strongly about when I watch the film is how they capture our anti-capitalist leanings. You rarely ever see queer work given such a big platform like HBO, where it doesn’t flatten the work out or make it feel like it’s all about trying to win capitalism. That’s not the case here. You truly just feel the authentic work that we’re making, and it elevates it to a conversation that can happen outside of the theater. I’m really touched by that aspect, that our aesthetic and vibe and the politics of it all are still there. We’re just being here together wondering about our country through some popular songs.

In light of that, what is it like for you as the creator to have this coming into the world at a time with drag bans and all the other political BS that’s happening?
I know you say bullshit, and I think that’s the key word in a sense. It’s not that there aren’t real-world consequence to the bullshit, and there certainly are. But I also feel like they’re pretending to be more homophobic and transphobic than they actually are for a political agenda. It’s a challenge to know how to address it, because it’s not really about trying to convince them that drag is OK. They know drag is OK. They know drag queens aren’t molesting children. They know that. But they’re still gonna accuse you of it anyway.

What you learn when you work with 24 decades-worth of American history is the Mark Twain quote that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. George W. Bush rallied his base using homophobia to get re-elected, and some of his good friends were gay. Now they’re rallying their base using transphobia. So it’s not an exact repeat, but it’s all rhyming.

It’s still hypocrisy and it always has been, so to address the moment is just to say, we’re gonna keep doing our thing and keep inviting everybody to the party. I hope that’s what our film does. I think it does. Even the most staunch person who’s gonna get online and call me a child molester just because I wore high heels is invited to the party, you know? But I’m in charge, and hopefully we’ll just chisel away at the resolve everyone seems to have.

In terms of a work like A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, what does a MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer finalist status add to the mix?
This work started before RuPaul’s Drag Race. I started doing this kind of work before Will and Grace. The country wasn’t open to queer work or anything with a gay sensibility to it. So those types of rewards, I think, help counterbalance people’s bias. Audiences often would come in with a bias about what they think the work is going to be. They would say, “My only experience with drag is that it’s frivolous.” And then, when the words Pulitzer Finalist get attached to a project, people say, “Oh, maybe there’s more to this than just a party.” On the flip side of that, there’s the bias that maybe we don’t really even know what we’re doing. We’re just drag queens that created this by accident.

It helps a little bit. It has helped me. I’ve always had to kind of pretend like I was a bigger deal than I was for a really long time, just to get people to treat me almost to neutral. Now I don’t have to pretend anymore. And I like that.

I know the full 24-hour show was a one-off. Are you still doing the segmented performances?
No. We’ve ended all live performances of 24-Decade, but we are continuing that spirit in a new show Matt Ray and I wrote together. It’s four hours long and all original music. We’re currently raising money and premiering it in October in Australia, and then we’re hopefully going to bring it to New York in February. The spirit of the show is continuing, but it’s taking a totally different form. I’m anxious to further the conversation in a different work.

Take me back to 2016. How long did you sleep after you finished performing the full-day performance?
It was strange, because I fell asleep at the dinner table. I got home and we got some food and I was asleep mid fork-to-mouth. And then we went to sleep, and we only slept for about four hours before we woke up, and we couldn’t stop talking about the show. It was like our brains wouldn’t turn off. And then I slept for quite a long time after that.