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 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, in Isaac might join her and Max, as if traveling through a kind of new world of adventures like a sort of mix between the nanny worlds of Peter Pan and Mary Poppkins.
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 formerly spent years
washing and ironing, the disinfected counter and table tops, a father who might
even be able to demand his rights, despite his abuse of all.
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 after the first act, but also cannot help but celebrate the
redemptive chaos Paige has now created as represented in Act I.

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 new brother, who can talk only
about “his” transition and his 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 presentation 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.
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 (prounounced "here"),
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 to me, after just seeing the 1945 drama An Inspector Calls, for 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).