The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance ed by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb (review)

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• The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance ed by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb
• Benjamin Gillespie

THE TAYLOR MAC BOOK: RITUAL, REALNESS AND RADICAL PERFORMANCE. Edited by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb. Triangulations Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023; pp. 307.

Written and compiled during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Taylor Mac Book is a celebration not only of the legacy and work of performance artist Taylor Mac but also of the magic and power of live performance as a form of communal ritual and queer kinship. This comprehensive collection surveys the life and career of one of New York’s most celebrated performing artists, offering a much-needed critical and contextual analysis of Mac’s work from the early 2000s to present day, especially their pathbreaking immersive marathon performance A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (added as a documentary to HBO’s streaming platform MAX in 2023). Expertly edited by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb, two of the field’s leading scholars of queer performance, and published in the LGBTQ-focused Triangulations Series, the book positions itself as one that not only celebrates the dazzling career of a singular artist but also recognizes the collaborative nature of both queer [End Page 258] performance and scholarship, advancing theoretical conversations surrounding queer legacy, time, kinship and mentorship, intergenerational exchange, and the importance of a queer archive—themes that dovetail with the previous scholarly contributions of its distinguished editors.

While the volume’s structure mainly follows a chronological path through Mac’s life and career, the editors playfully encourage readers to forge their own queer path in our engagement with the book. While this is a welcome invitation (especially in the age of digital consumption), I urge readers to engage with the book in its entirety, in any order, to fully glean Mac’s theatrical legacy and influence on queer performance and scholarship more broadly. While the editors recognize that no single study could be fully comprehensive, they have ensured a multifocal study on Mac’s theatrical genius that features nearly two dozen diverse contributors, ranging from scholars, artist-collaborators, and Taylor Mac themself.

Mac is known for their genderfuck style of performing, actively deconstructing binary gender norms onstage while questioning society’s hetero-normative values. Mac’s chosen stage pronoun, “judy,” reflects their dragging of gender onstage, although the editors remind us that Mac is not trans-gender in daily life. In a 2019 interview quoted in the book’s introduction, Mac states, “my gender is performer because I feel like I’m always performing my gender” (xi). The editors take time to carefully address Mac’s pronouns at the book’s outset, indicating they do not police the use of pronouns by other authors in the book (as Mac does not police their own pronouns), but that most contributors (including the editors) use the neutral pronoun “they” to refer to Mac’s work (as I do here). This important recognition acknowledges Mac’s queer world-view while also reminding readers that Mac is not transgender, an important distinction in scholarship today given the remarkable and necessary developments in performance scholarship on performance by and about trans and nonbinary folx.

The volume includes a brief introduction contextualizing the history of Mac’s performance followed by roughly a dozen chapters addressing different aspects of Mac’s œuvre over the last twenty-five years. It joyfully embraces and critically frames Mac’s performance history, acknowledging their many and frequent collaborators, especially costume designer Machine Dazzle, performer Tigger! Ferguson, composer and arranger Matt Ray, and musician Viva DeConcini, among others. Notably, the volume features numerous full-color production photos of Mac’s various works, bringing the vibrancy of their costumes and stage presence to the reader.

Román and Edgecomb frame Mac’s work by foregrounding their fool-like persona onstage, always bedazzled with glittering costumes, clown-ish makeup, a camp demeanor, and channeling the fabulousness of drag and theatrical excess. As is the case in classical drama, the fool is always the one who most fully understands the limits of society and pushes those limits as far...