The Mumpsimus

    "I'm not really interested in this show being about history as much as I am interested in it being about all of us in this room have a lot of history on our backs and we're trying to figure out what to do with it." —Taylor Mac At noon on October 8, 2016, Taylor Mac stepped on stage at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn and sang the first of 240 songs that would fill the space over the next 24 hours in one of the most astonishing works of performance art in American theatrical history.  Mac called the work a "radical faerie realness ritual sacrifce," with the event itself the ritual, the audience the sacrifice. Like much of what Mac says throughout, the statement is both absolutely earnest and aware that it's a funny and provocative thing to say. Mac's approach to personal pronouns is similar, because Mac's preferred personal pronoun is judy : A few people have claimed I use this pronoun as a joke. They are uninformed. It’s not a joke, which...

  When I was a weird kid besotted with dreams of a life in the theatre, a life in New York City, far from the rural home I felt completely alien in, I thought I was the only person in the world who really loved Stephen Sondheim. I knew other people respected him, were interested in him — the shows for which he wrote music and lyrics were commonly enough produced that I got to see quite a few before I left home; I knew a couple professors of music and theatre at the local college who would talk with me about what they appreciated in Sondheim's work. But nobody I knew loved him. Nobody I knew listened to cast recordings obsessively, memorizing not just every glorious lyric but every single strange yet perfect note.  I was not (am not) a musical theatre geek — aside from a handful of shows, I've never been especially enthusiastic about the form. Something about Sondheim was different. The intricacy of the music and lyrics appealed to my more analytical/intellectual side; the uns...

The Museum of Wax  by Charles Ludlam The overall effect is one of denseness and kitsch exoticism. It is clear that these people are creatures of fantasy. —Charles Ludlam, stage directions for The Artificial Jungle 1. For a few weeks now, I have been bothered by the question of why so much American short fiction is, in comparison to poetry and theatre, unadventurous. I got to thinking about this while watching lots of YouTube videos of Taylor Mac . Why, said I to meself, is little to no American short fiction as interesting and provocative and pleasurable as a performance by Taylor Mac? This is unfair, of course: very little of anything is as interesting, provocative, and pleasurable as a performance by Taylor Mac. But still. I wonder. I began to bother a friend, whom I will call Richard, because that's his name. "Richard!" I screamed out to the sky (he lives a ways away, and so I must scream to the sky if he is to hear me), "Why is there little to no American short...

Photo by Ivars Krutainis on Unsplash 1. Suddenly, it feels like post-war France again. Two essays were published within days of each other, both denouncing something they call narrative : "Narrative in the Anthropocene Is the Enemy" by Roy Scranton at LitHub and "Storytelling and Forgetfulness" by Amit Chaudhuri at LA Review of Books . Is the nouveau roman back in vogue? Neither essay is especially illuminating or compelling, I don't think, but it's interesting that they both appeared so close together and from such different writers, with quite different purposes. That fact (their synchronicity) more than anything else is what caught my attention. What work, I wondered, is the concept they call narrative doing within these essays? In his essay, Roy Scranton is doing what he's known for, a shtick that was provocative when Learning to Die in the Anthropocene was published and Scranton positioned himself as the  Norman O. Brown  of the...