“I’m the bridge between the normative and the insane, between the folk music and the rock music, between the highbrow and the lowbrow. I like being that bridge between things. I guess I’m a bit of a pastiche artist in that I like a little bit of it all,” says Taylor Mac. Working as a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer, Mac creates work that simultaneously challenges conventions while also promoting tolerance and empathy.
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Mac put these diverse skills to good use with two new offerings: Holiday Sauce, an album released in November featuring a truly unique spin on Christmas songs; and Holiday Sauce…Pandemic!, a visually and sonically dazzling virtual variety show encompassing everything from glorious musical performances (from Mac and guest musicians) to animation and even a routine by burlesque artist Tigger. (The show is available on demand here through January 2.)
Both projects shift across a wide range of musical genres, though Mac’s signature wit runs through it all. Even though Mac takes aim at some aspects of the Christmas tradition (i.e., excessive consumerism), it never comes across as disrespectful. “As I say in the show, ‘Irreverence is a tool, but not a way of life.’ If it only is irreverent, you’re not telling the whole story.”
Holiday Sauce was initially performed at New York City’s famed Town Hall in 2017. As that show was being prepared, Mac lost a dear friend, Mother Flawless Sabrina. Mac calls her “my drag mother,” and says that the show’s title came from a phrase she’d often say: “’You’re the boss, applesauce!’ – you’re in charge of your own story. That means if you don’t like something in the world, instead of just critiquing it and complaining about it, how can you manifest a better version of that? Manifest the world that you’re actually interested in living in.”
Mac followed that advice when creating a holiday show, because “Every year, I feel like I’m not in charge of my life anymore, and that the larger culture infiltrates with a lot of dictates on how to behave and how to be, and capitalism takes over. So I just thought, ‘How can I exist in this world and make December something that I enjoy?’ We find our way in the culture instead of the culture always being given to us during December.”
The original song “Christmas with Grandma” is, Mac says, “the centerpiece for the whole show.” While the lyrics are often humorous, and are delivered in a lighthearted tone, they reveal the often complex and sometimes heartbreaking reality of family interactions, particularly during the holiday season. Though it’s autobiographical, Mac believes everyone can probably relate to the story: “I mean, everyone’s had a horrible Christmas at one point in their life. Even if they love their family. Even if they love Christmas.
“So many people that I know have had a hard childhood, and it seems like the holidays are a time when traditionally we’re asked to ignore that and pretend like everything’s okay,” Mac continues. “I would rather engage with how awful it has been so that it doesn’t have to be that awful anymore.” To that end, Mac made sure that “Christmas with Grandma” ends on a hopeful note.
That song offers a glimpse into Mac’s childhood in Stockton, California. “It was a repressive place, growing up there in the ‘80s, because of the AIDS epidemic. There was a lot of homophobia in that decade, particularly in places where queerness wasn’t so visible. I never learned about anything gay in school, but people would say ‘faggot’ to me on the street all the time, or during recess I was always dodging lots of aggression. So for me, I needed to escape in order to survive and thrive.”
Moving to a bigger city also made sense from a career standpoint, Mac says. “I dreamed of being onstage and making theater: I knew that was the way that somehow the fates had arranged for me to be able to do good on the planet.”
When Mac moved to New York City in 1993, things didn’t go as planned, though. “I couldn’t quite figure out how to even get into the audition room, let alone get the part, so I felt like there was no way in.” Undaunted, Mac found a workaround, performing in nightclubs around the city instead “because the clubs were more open – you never had to ask permission to enter. I could perform as many times as I wanted to, as long as I kept showing up.”
Mac ventured into songwriting after realizing that it was possible to put monologues to music. With lyrics, “I always think dramaturgically – I look at the lyrics and I say, ‘How does this apply to the story that I’m telling?’ I bring the ideas to the table and then Matt [Ray, musical director] bounces off that idea and comes up with the musical arrangement.” Even with this unique approach, Mac found that it took a lot of trial and error to really get confident as an artist.
“You mess up one night, and then you can’t sleep because you’re thinking, ‘How could I have done it better?’ And you slowly start to build a craft,” Mac says. “You build memories of, ‘Oh, right – I’ve been here before; I’ve had somebody throw something at me when I was on the stage, and I didn’t deal with it very well. This time I have a good comeback!’ So you start to develop those skills.”
That club circuit background still informs Mac’s performance style. “I ended up learning a certain kind of craft in the clubs, which was so different from what the American theater offered. It was so much about paying attention to what exactly is happening in the room. Instead of pretending the people aren’t there, you acknowledge that the people are there and you allow them to change everything that’s happening. So it became about crafting banter or storytelling or writing in a way that it could be changed in the moment and still hold on to its core drive. It’s a challenging technique.”
This has led to a truly unique performance style, resulting in Mac winning a long list of prestigious awards and grants in both the theater and music fields, as well as being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017. Most recently, Mac received the 2020 International Ibsen Award.
“I do look around and go, I’m a unicorn in the field of the American theater. There’s nobody else doing exactly what I’m doing,” Mac says. “Surprise is a useful tool. When you see something and you are surprised because you haven’t seen that exact kind of way before, it does open you up. It allows you to view things differently. And that is the job of the artist, to break people’s patterns a little bit so they can view the world slightly differently.”
