Tony-Nominated Taylor Mac on “Camping With Radical Fairies,” Penis Jokes, and His Gender Pronoun, Judy

A new guard of progressive, provocative artists is reshaping Broadway, and chief among them is a singular talent who inspires a great many slashes: playwright/performance artist/Pulitzer Prize finalist/MacArthur “genius grant” fellow Taylor Mac. This season Mac—whose preferred gender pronoun is judy—adds another accolade: first-time Tony nominee, for best play, as author of Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.

Mac manages to follow up one of Shakespeare’s least popular (and arguably least readable) works with a show that is both a riotous black comedy (including a chorus line of corpses, their penises moving to and fro) and a biting political commentary: the curtain rises to reveal a mountain of bloodied bodies after the fall of the Roman Empire—not too far off from the real-life rot of the Trump administration. National treasure Nathan Lane plays Gary, the titular clown tasked with cleaning up the bodies, along with a dutiful maid, Janice (a glorious Kristine Nielsen), and a midwife, Carol (Julie White, who hemorrhages fake blood on to the first row).

"They say it's a comedy because that's the easiest way to market it, but I think of it as the genre of fooling," Mac told Vogue. "It is something that is trying to take the mess of the world and not ignore it, not sweep it under the rug, and not perpetuate it but transform that calamity into something that is useful.

Mac emerged as one of the most exciting voices in theatre with 2015's A 24-Decade History of Popular Music—a marathon, day-long performance in which judy—in resplendent, glittering drag—covered songs from 1776 to the present, everything from "Yankee Doodle" to "Purple Rain." Ahead of the Tonys, in the midst of Pride month, Vogue spoke with Mac about camping with drag queens, the plethora of penises in Gary, and gender pronouns as a form of activism.

Gary is your first play on Broadway and you're nominated for a Tony. What was the first thought that crossed your mind when you found out?

Honestly, I was in rural Tennessee, camping with a bunch of radical fairies, about 400 drag queens in the woods. And my phone went off, and as I was looking out my tent, I was seeing two naked men with fluorescent pink cock rings on walk by brushing their teeth. It was an odd experience because nobody there cared, you know?

What a perfect setting! Do the Tonys carry any special significance, coinciding with Pride Month?

Well, I can't speak for women and the trans members of the community, but I think it's pretty clear that theater is one of the fields that gay men feel the most comfortable in, and feel like they can thrive in. There aren't that many of those fields, so I think it's an emotional thing. It always feels like it's our art form, even though so many straight people participate in it.

People seem endlessly curious that you chose to make a sequel to this particular Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus, which is not one of the most popular. What made you do it?

The answer is that when I turn on the TV, all I see are sequels to Titus Andronicus. When I go to the movies, all I see are sequels to Titus Andronicus. Every TV show that you see uses blood and gore to hook us in. There would be no Game of Thrones without Titus Andronicus. One of the things that I always wonder about is, how can you talk about our cycles of violence and dysfunction without making a sensationalistic piece that perpetuates violence? How can we talk about Trump without perpetuating Trump? I decided that the best way was to find somebody who is not violent and make them the center of the story. So who's not violent? It's the clown. And the people who have to clean up the violence, always.

I read somewhere that Gary was inspired in part by the 2016 election and the passing of your mom. Did those two things happen around the same time?

My mom died two days after the election. She'd been a Republican her whole life. She voted for Obama, actually... but she had this hatred for Hillary Clinton, this absurd hatred that made absolutely no sense, but it was 30 years of conditioning to hate a woman who is in charge. My friend always says, “Bernie Sanders didn't have to be the wife of the governor of Arkansas.” I wanted to put all of those feelings that I had about my mom, and her progressing and embracing my queerness and then going backward as she was dying to the point where she didn't vote for Trump because she was too sick, but she was passing out all of his propaganda to the world. She was so moral her entire life and yet a man who was grabbing pussies was less horrible than Hillary Clinton. I wanted to put all of that into the character of Janice.

It’s an interesting contrast: you address in Gary all the horrors women suffered—rape, dismembering—in the original Shakespeare play. But the women in Gary are so fierce. How did you approach their roles as women?

I really wanted to write Janice, a character that we don't spend a lot of time within our culture, which is a maid, and give her more dignity. We see the cliché in every single play; she's got five lines and she's the hard ass. I wanted her to be able to find [an epiphany] herself in the same way that Hamlet finds it himself through soliloquy. She's the one who puts the pieces together. They're not handed to her by the hero, by the lead male character.

I want to ask you, if you're comfortable talking about it, about your preferred gender pronoun of judy. Is it true that it’s in tribute to Judy Garland?

I wouldn't say no to Judy Garland, but that wasn't the reason. Back when everybody was closeted, the gays would call their boyfriend “Mary” or “Judy” so that if they were talking in public about them, people would think it was a girl. Non-binary people have chosen “they/them” as the pronouns and I support everybody in their choices, but I just think, if you're queer, why would you choose something that is kind of mundane? Like, do something fun. That's what queerness is, right? I kind of identify as a gay male; I kind of identify as genderqueer. Really, my gender is “performer”' because I feel like I'm always performing gender.

Has been progress in terms of accepting people who identify outside the gender norms of just “man” or “woman?"

There are definitely more queers who are doing it now. People would introduce me as “he” when I would come out on stage or they would introduce me as “she” and none of those seemed to work for me. So, I chose the gender pronoun that was an art piece and my friend who's transgender said, “You know you chose the right one when, when people use it, it makes you happy.” And it does. It makes everybody pause and it makes people laugh. It makes some people roll their eyes, which immediately emasculates them, because you can't say “judy” and roll your eyes at the same time without being camp. My gender pronoun is my little activism in the world.

*So, Gary… is a penis-heavy play.

Ugh.

Are people too obsessed with the penises in this play?

This is what I'll say. I've seen a lot of penises in my life... I mean, a lot of them. And when I see a penis, it's not the only thing I see. In fact, I don't even think about it. So, I wrote one dick joke in the entire play that's actually not a dick joke. It’s a political comment. Gary says, "What if we moved all the men's penises from right to left at the same time? Would that be enough to end all tragedy?" That's about patriarchy, but I guess it has the flavor of a dick joke. It's revisited at the end, when I say, “all the male penises of the corpses move from right to left at the same time.” Now, [director] George [C. Wolfe] and Nathan have added as many dick jokes as they want into the movement of the play. I don't mind it. I think it's funny. There's a whole history of phalluses in the theater and you can combine scatological humor and high-brow considerations. What I've been amazed by is the critics, the audiences, everybody is obsessed over how many dicks are in the play. And I'm just like, “Wow, I think it's because people aren't getting enough dick.”

Everyone is showing their cards. So, at one point, when a corpse "pees" on Nathan, that was actually Nathan’s add, right?

He did that one, which I think is funny. I think it's amazing that Nathan Lane gives himself a golden shower on a Broadway stage from a corpse.

People continue to talk about A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and how seminal that was. Are you liking anyone in pop music today?

Wow. God, I feel like I should go look at my playlist. I did go see My Fair Lady the other day. I think that's pop music. I was crying at “Get Me to the Church on Time,” because it's the dumbest song in the world, but that’s production. I've been listening a little to Perfume Genius, and I have been going on an old 10,000 Maniacs kick. I just opened up my iTunes to see who have I listened to lately and it was all Grace Jones.

Wait, I forgot to ask you about Steve Bannon reportedly co-writing his own Titus adaptation set in outer space.

That's what I've been told. I haven't seen it or read it but I did know that he was a producer on the Titus film that Julie Taymor did. And that he's had some obsession with Titus Andronicus. I found that very interesting because Donald Trump and his presidency is, in some ways, a revenge tragedy on the Obama administration. And what is this need to always get revenge? Like, how much dumber can we be? Instead of actually trying to make the world a little bit more equitable.

Do you have any grand plans to rule the red carpet at the Tonys?

I'm going to dress in a [costume designer] Machine Dazzle original. I haven't seen it yet. I won't see it until the day-of because Machine never gives me anything until the day of, but I'm going to wear whatever he makes for me. I just decided that I would have more fun if I was dressed up. I spend too many times a year being a cater waiter to have fun in a tux.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Originally Appeared on Vogue