Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus

＂Fabulous and bedraggled: a defiant and beautiful mess... Welcome to the world of Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, where carnage and camp coexist.＂ --Jesse Green, New York Times

In Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Taylor Mac’s singular worldview intersects with William Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. Set during the fall of the Roman Empire, Mac’s extraordinary play picks up where Shakespeare’s blood-soaked tale left off: the coup has ended, the country has been stolen by madmen, and there are casualties everywhere. Two lowly servants, Gary and Janice, are charged with cleaning up the bodies. It’s the year 400--but it feels like the end of the world.

Taylor Mac--who uses ＂judy＂ (lowercase sic unless at the start of a sentence, just like a regular pronoun), not as a name but as a gender pronoun--is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer. Judy’s work has been performed in hundreds venues including on Broadway and in New York’s Town Hall, Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as London’s Hackney Empire and Barbican, D.C.’s Kennedy Center, Los Angeles’s Royce Hall and Ace Theater (through the Center for the Art of Performance), Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, The Melbourne Festival (Forum Theater), Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, and San Francisco’s Curran Theater and MOMA.

Judy is the author of many works of theater including, Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus; A 24-Decade History of Popular Music; Hir; The Walk Across America for Mother Earth; Comparison is Violence; The Lily’s Revenge; The Young Ladies Of; Red Tide Blooming; The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac; Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam; The Face of Liberalism; Okay; Maurizio Pollini; A Crevice; and The Hot Month and the soon to be premiered plays Prosperous Fools and The Fre.

Sometimes Taylor acts in other people’s plays (or co-creations). Notably: Shen Teh/Shui Ta in The Foundry Theater’s production of Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama and the Public Theater, in the City Center’s Encores production of Gone Missing, Puck/Egeus in the Classic Stage Company’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and in the two-man vaudeville, The Last Two People On Earth opposite Mandy Patinkin and directed by Susan Stroman.

Mac is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama, a Tony nominated playwright, and the recipient of multiple awards including the Kennedy Prize, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, 2 Bessies, 2 Obies, a Helpmann, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is currently a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and the Resident playwright at the Here Arts Center.