Manifest A Better World: Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce…Pandemic!

Last year, Providence was lucky enough to experience Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music thanks to FirstWorks and the Brown Arts Initiative from Brown University, and now judy is making a virtual return with Pomegranate Arts production of Holiday Sauce…Pandemic!

This new digital iteration is being live-streamed, and features music from Mac’s acclaimed holiday album. The show itself is judy’s unique blend of burlesque, vaudeville and multimedia extravagance. The Los Angeles Times called it “a present from the island of misfit toys … and a Christmas miracle.”

Every organization presenting the show in their respective city has also chosen to honor a senior member of the community who “has made a significant contribution to nurturing the queer community in their city.” Providence will be well-represented by the incredible Kim Trusty, a musician and educator, who often collaborates with FirstWorks.

It should be noted that Mac isn’t the only one finding ways to adjust to the new — and thankfully temporary — way of presenting live theater. This is just one event in a series of digital offerings FirstWorks is curating, in what is truly an impressive and diverse slate of content that can all be found on their website at first-works.org.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Mac about the upcoming special. We’d previously talked last summer in advance of judy’s show at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, an unforgettable evening of music and performance.

This time around, I was curious to hear about how Mac’s creative process had weathered the past year, what judy thinks of our political moment and what to expect from Holiday Sauce…Pandemic!

Kevin Broccoli (Motif): I’ve enjoyed following your pandemic adventures on Instagram.

Taylor Mac: I really think that they’re not very good songs, but I think that if I write enough of them, the art of onslaught might be really interesting. I always have to limit myself a bit, because I’m not going to give Mark Zuckerberg all my money, all my glamour. I’m not dressing up for Mark Zuckerberg.

KB: I had a great time at your show in Providence. I slow-danced with a very nice man.

TM: We had fun that night.

KB: I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to go over here.

TM: Yeah, [Providence is] a little Puritan, but I remember saying that, and then it being surprisingly exuberant.

KB: I was listening to your holiday album today before the interview. You call it “a Christmas calamity.” I read a great review for the album that said “The whole year has been a calamity, so it’s appropriate that Christmas goes right along with it.” So much of your shows do have this joyous exuberance to them, and I wonder how being in this current time has affected your creation process.

TM: A mentor of mine, Penny Arcade, she did this whole thing about being an introvert. It seems like theater performers, performance artists, would be extroverts, but a lot of us are introverts. I’m a playwright as well as all the other things I do, and so I love my time alone. I really like alone time. It helps me write. It’s always been part of my process — to isolate, and then also to be intensely in community. The kind of juggling of those two things is how I do things. So I’ve had one part of my process, but the other part has been sorely missed, especially at holiday time. 

We made this show so that every year in December, we could change our feelings about December. Most of the queers I know and artists that I know — we have mixed feelings about December. It’s burdensome, there’s always censorship when you go back home, there’s always negotiation that feels like a weight. It also feels like maybe you’re slightly going back in the closet. You always have to navigate a more normative society at that time of year. Capitalism is so ripe. So there’s all these things that are negative about it. But one of the things I learned from my drag mama, Mother Flawless Sabrina, is: “You’re the boss applesauce” is what she would say to all of us. We can change the way that we experience this world. We can’t just comment on the world, or blame it or critique it, we can actually manifest a better world, and so you do that by saying ‘Okay, how can I make December a joyous time?’ Well, if it’s a time where I get to think about Mother Flawless Sabrina every year, that’s really great. If it’s a time where I get all my friends together, and we make a show, and we tour it around, that’s also really great. So now I look forward to December. And with a pandemic, even doing this show, and being together with the collaborators, and seeing them socially distanced so we can record some of the pre-recorded stuff, it lifted my spirits so much. You incorporate the calamity of your life and you twist it around until you can actually enjoy your life.

KB: I remember going up to the afterparty for your show when you were here in Providence, and when you walked in, I remember thinking, ‘How could you possibly do the show you just did and then have the energy to do anything else?’

TM: I’m so tired after I do a show. It’s always like putting on a brave face at those events afterwards, because I’ve given everything on that stage.

KB: I can’t imagine. I do The Glass Menagerie for six people and I go, ‘Get me out of here.’ But I was so struck by your relationship to the audience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen somebody connect with an audience the way you do, and I’ve been struggling a lot with this move to digital, even though we know it’s going to be temporary. I’m the theater reviewer for this magazine, and early on, somebody asked if I would review a digital production, and I went ‘You’re going to make me review this stuff?’

TM: It’s challenging. It can be challenging to watch.

KB: But I was very excited to hear that this digital production was coming to FirstWorks. I’m curious to hear about how you approach performing in a digital medium.

TM: Well, we’ve only done the pre-recorded material so far. I haven’t done the live show, but I have performed live digitally before, and it’s always been a bummer to me. So this year, I said, ‘How can I make it as fun as I possibly can?’ I thought, You know what it really is? It’s like having your own public access show, like being Robin Byrd. Do you know who Robin Byrd is?

KB: I don’t.

TM: It’s a generational thing. It’s a locational and a generational thing. But it’s like a channel where anyone can have a show as long as you were a little eccentric, and that’s kind of what it feels like right now, during pandemic time. Everybody’s got a show. There was something beautiful about the art of the collective eccentrics, putting out their shows. It wasn’t the shows themselves that were so interesting; it was that they were doing it. So I’ve kind of changed my thinking about the virtual shows, and started to say, ‘I’m participating in this much larger art project.’ That’s how I’m doing it. We’re trying to make our version of it as much fun and as juicy as possible, but I see it as– In a hundred years, there’s going to be some library that hosts all the virtual shows.

KB: There’s a drag queen who says, “It’s only for the archives, darling.”

TM: It’s only for the archives. Exactly. That’s kind of how I see it as– ‘Oh look, all these people experimenting all together.’ That’s a lovely thing.

KB: I was struck by the generosity of artists at the beginning of the pandemic.

TM: It’s a combination of generosity and survival. It always is for artists, especially in America. It’s always a combination of ‘I’ve got to do this thing to make myself relevant so that I can pay the bills, but I also want to do this thing because I’m never going to make enough money to pay the bills on this one thing.’ So there’s an element of generosity to it as well. Also, everyone wanted to do something. Normally, what we do is we gather people, and we release the pressure valve of normal life for two hours in a theater, or however long, and we couldn’t do that. So we all kind of suddenly went, ‘Okay! All right! I’ll do what I can!’ For a couple months there, we were saying ‘Yes’ to everything.

KB: Yeah, I said ‘Yes’ to a lot of things at the beginning, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.

TM: You have to set new boundaries for this new way of living.

KB: Before the shutdown, I vividly remember your post about the show you had up in New York, where the audience was seated in a giant ball pit. I’ll regret for the rest of my life not getting to see it. Do you think we’ll ever be able to return to a show like that in the near future?

TM: I guess I could have predicted that there’d be another pandemic in my lifetime. I think most theater artists know that’s all possible, and that you recover, and you go back to semi-normal. It is the United States of Amnesia, so people do forget. I’m sure we’ll all be back in a ball pit in a couple years. But I don’t know if I’m interested in that anymore. That was something I wanted to do for that moment, and now the moment’s different, so I’ll probably have to rewrite the play yet again and figure out a different way for it to exist in the world.

KB: For this album, how much of holiday history — in terms of the customs and the evolution of the holidays — did you and your collaborators look at?

TM: Originally in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, there was going to be a whole decade of holiday songs, but I couldn’t quite gather enough from one particular decade. I really wanted the music to consist of songs just from each decade. So I let go of that idea. But I had done a lot of research on where these songs come from, and also the idea of the resurrection. There’s five million Jesuses. Jesus is a cover story of a cover story of a cover story.

So that’s part of how we’ve crafted the show, and what songs we’ve included, and what we haven’t. Like finding the pagan in ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ was one of my favorite things to do. The holidays originally come from pagan celebrations, you know.

KB: The holidays feel like a perfect fit for you because it’s a convergence of history, religion, politics and fabulosity. 

TM: Yeah, that’s what we always do though.

KB: It’s all pageantry.

TM: I always find a way to bring in pageantry, politics, virtuosity, messiness. I try to find a way to bring all that stuff into it — in every show I ever make. Even the kitchen sink dramas have some of that in there.

KB: Even public access is inherently queer.

Taylor Mac: It was. Tuning in at 3am to learn how to fix a car that you don’t have from a guy in Staten Island. It has a queer element to it.

KB: The last time we talked, I remember it because it was the day Robert Mueller was testifying before Congress, and I was excited to get to talk to you as all that was going on. And right now, we’re in an interesting spot where many people are starting to realize that getting a new President isn’t immediately going to solve all the problems of the world. I was interested in your feelings on the period that we’re entering, having had this Big Bad Wolf for four years to put all our energy into, and now coming out of that, but still being in the midst of a pandemic, and so many other crises, and having to create a show around all of that.

TM: Well, I think Donald Trump is insane. I do think he’s an insane man. But I also feel a little bit like, ‘Been there, done that.’ It wasn’t like Reagan wasn’t going insane. He did have Alzheimer’s while he was running the country, and he did base his government off of his sci-fi movies. It was insane. He perpetuated an epidemic that has killed millions of people. He created an atmosphere of homophobia in America that was unprecedented. Then Bush Sr. got in, then we got Clinton, and we all felt a little calmer, then Bush Jr comes in, and he creates the worst international disaster we’ve ever had in our entire history, and he’s insane in a different way because he’s just inept. Then we all recover from that with Obama — yay yay yay moving forward — and then we’ve got this horrible guy, and now a new guy — moving forward — and are people forgetting that we’ve been here before, and this is how it works? 

To chase perfection is the Great Folly of the Left. It’s actually not that chasing perfection is the Great Folly, but expecting perfection — instead of doing the daily work. Part of living and progressing the culture is the daily work that you have to do. The civil rights movement didn’t just happen because Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus. That was part of it, but they were also doing demonstrations for decades and decades before that. Every single day. It’s still a process. We have to keep that in mind.

KB: Because of the nature of your work, does all of that tumultuous stuff help keep you creatively inspired? I know for so many people, it’s what keeps them stymied.

TM: That’s where discipline comes in. You have to discipline yourself to work. But I love my work. I hate just lying around doing nothing. I go on vacation and I want to write my play. I want to write a song. I want to learn a song. I think if you really enjoy your work then you’re okay, because you want to do it everyday.

When I was in the Club World, and I was getting drugs offered to me all the time, and sometimes I’d partake, but most of the time I didn’t, because I had a show the next day, or I had a rehearsal the next day, and I had something I cared more about, so I never ended up getting an addiction problem, because the work mattered more, and I think that that’s something I wish for people. I wish that they could have that thing in their life that they can’t wait to get up for. It doesn’t have to do with whatever or whoever is in charge in Washington. You can’t base all your art off of conflict. The fallacy of the theater is that it’s all about conflict. If you base everything about off of whether there’s enough conflict in your life in order to fight against something, you’re only seeing part of the picture.

KB: I’m not going to go track-by-track on your new album, but you do hold the trophy for my new favorite version of ‘Silent Night.’

TM: Well, that’s Matt Ray. Matt Ray, our musical director and arranger, he produced the album, and that was his idea. It came as the result of our show also being, in some ways, a wake for Mother Flawless Sabrina, and a celebration of her. The second line is ‘a celebration of someone who dies.’ It’s about inviting people into the procession. It’s a celebratory thing.

Holiday Sauce…Pandemic! will be presented live to FirstWorks audiences on December 12 at 7pm and will be available on-demand on a pay-what-you-can basis from December 13 through January 2, 2021. Tickets are available now at first-works.org/events/taylor-macs-holiday-sauce-pandemic/. The first 100 ticket buyers are invited to a Zoom afterparty with members of the cast and special guests.