It’s been a busy holiday season packed with rehearsals for the cast of the latest production at Providence’s Wilbury Theatre Group. Later this month, the Company begins the new year with a performance of Taylor Mac’s HIR, a play the New York Times declared “a remarkable, audacious, uproarious black comedy with a daring combination of realism and madcap absurdity.” (HIR runs from January 18 – February 4. Click here for tickets.)
The play tells the story of a suburban family of four gone haywire when the eldest child, Isaac, returns home with a dishonorable discharge from the military. Once there, he finds his previously dominant and abusive father ailing, his transgender sibling struggling, and his overbearing mother on a crusade to dismantle the patriarchy.
I recently spoke to Director Brien Lang and Will Malloy, who plays Max in the play, to learn more about the production. Thematically, the play is a microcosm of our world today.
“It’s a little hard to describe,” said Lang. “For me, it’s evocative of the theater I grew up loving in high school and college, like Sam Shepard, an intense American family drama. Taylor Mac has catapulted it into the 21st century with a whole new set of challenges and issues facing families now. It’s a four-person, absurd, realistic, dark comedy. It pulls back all the layers and looks at many sensitive and challenging issues we’re facing in America today.”
Malloy, who plays the younger child Max, explained that the play is driven by its characters.
“Max is the youngest member of the family; he is in the process of transitioning, and the play is named after the pronouns Max goes by,” explained Malloy. “That is one of the central challenges facing families – for children to have that ability to name themselves and describe who they are, and to have that seen and respected by their family members.”
“When Max’s older brother Isaac returns after being dishonorably discharged, he hasn’t seen his family in several years,” continued Malloy. “He comes back to find his household completely different from when he left it, including the fact that his younger sibling has come out and transitioned. When he left, he had a sister – when he comes back, he sees his sibling in an entirely new light.”
Max has been living in a household with an abusive father and had to leave school and be homeschooled because of the challenges he was facing in the school environment. He was reckoning with becoming an adult in this household with two incredibly intense parents and without the protection of an older sibling he grew up with. He is this person who is coming of age in a world that is constantly changing and evolving rapidly,” added Malloy.
“What’s really interesting, there are these fundamental questions about what to do with broken pieces, said Malloy. “We talk about this in rehearsal; I think it’s a play that asks, ‘What do you do with the discarded pieces, the things you don’t know what to do with anymore. Taylor Mac overloads you with these sensationalized images that are almost tabloid, and makes them into real people. And then asks you to encounter them all as real human beings who live and love and have to exist in the same place as others, even when that feels contradictory and hard.”
“In many ways, it exposes where we are in American society – scars, warts, and all,” said Lang. “It’s darkly comic but really funny, too.”
Click here for tickets and further information.
