America In Transition
By Olivia Haller, Production Dramaturg
HIR is an explosion of the traditional living room drama, and not just in the sense that the traditional living room has, well exploded.
Playwright Taylor Mac is no stranger to genre-bending theatre. A good example is Mac’s recent work A 24 Decade History of Popular Music, which was a finalist for the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mac describes this piece as a “deconstruction, reimagining, reframing, and reenactment of 240 years of US history.” It includes both historic and original songs, stunning drag costume, and if performed all the way through would take twenty-four hours. In comparison, HIR might seem like a conventional family drama. However, both pieces upend traditional forms in order to interrogate our ideas about self-expression and identity, especially as they relate to us as Americans.
In HIR, Isaac has just returned to the U.S. after serving in the Marines Mortuary Affairs Unit overseas. When he arrives at this family home, he finds that his abusive father Arnold has suffered a stroke and, as Arnold recovers, Isaac’s mother Paige has taken over house rule. Paige is ushering in a new world order in which she has her own job, doesn’t clean the house, and is engaging in all manner of self-improvement including a newfound interest in art and culture. Isaac’s sister Max, who is taking testosterone, has cast off she and her pronouns in favor of non-binary gender pronouns ze and hir. Once out from under Arnold’s thumb, Paige and Max are finally able to explore new identities and invest in themselves in a way that they never could before — however shocking to Isaac.
Despite its title and the upending traditional gender roles and identities, HIR is not just about gender. Rather, it uses gender as a lens from which we start to view larger questions about our evolving national identity. In an interview with Tim Sanford, the Artistic Director of New York’s Playwrights Horizons which produced HIR in 2015, Taylor Mac stated: “This present moment in history and the characters’ lives, to me, is about transition. So to think of America and the present moment as a transgender character, as someone going through transition and redefining its language and understanding of itself, simply felt right. To think of the American family and the American family drama as transgender was, as Paige would say, a paradigm shift.”
As a country, we are in transition with gender, politics, and identity in much the same way that this family is. Max is exploring hir gender, but ze also is simply a teenager navigating a transition from childhood to adulthood. Paige wants to dismantle the rigid power structures that Arnold upheld in the past to make a better life for herself and her children. However, Isaac was raised to be comfortable with order, and even stands to gain something from maintaining the status quo. As Paige and Isaac battle over how to run the household, Max gets stuck in the middle.
The concept of “radical healing” lies at the heart of this play; specifically, what it means to heal as a country when we feel so divided. Taylor Mac defines radical healing as recognizing the cyclical nature of dysfunction and understanding that patters exist within a larger system. We can overcome these large, systemic patterns by identifying them on both a societal and personal scale. Changing our behavior on a micro level can have impact on a macro level. Radical healing often hurts because it comes with conflict — sometimes you have to break a bone in order to reset it.
This is the position in which the family of HIR finds itself. Arnold’s empty throne has created a power vacuum that no one knows how to fill. Paige desperately wants Isaac to be a part of her new reality, but that reality requires dismantling the orderly household and masculine power that Isaac craves. How do we move forward when one person’s way of being is a fundamental thread to another’s? Is the ultimate goal to reconcile our differences, or is it to dismantle oppressive structures, whatever the cost? What bones are we willing to break to truly heal?
