The Town Hall Presents: Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History: Holiday Sauce

In 24-Decade History: Holiday Sauce, a concert at The Town Hall in New York City, on Tuesday, December 12th, Taylor Mac explores Christmas as calamity, celebrating the holiday season in all of its dysfunction.

This is Mac's first New York appearance since the dazzling October 2016 premiere of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a stamina-defying 24-hour performance art concert that re-examined the political and cultural history of the United States through an immense range of songs popular from 1776 to 2016.

Taylor Mac's latest focus? Christmas, the songs you know and love - and the holidays you hate.

Playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer, Taylor Mac is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and is the author of seventeen full-length works of theater. Mac's A 24-Decade History of Popular Musicwon the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Award for Drama inspired by American History and was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama. The work was also made The New York Times "Best of 2016" lists in three categories: Performance, Theater and Classical Music.

In last year's complete performance of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in Brooklyn [October 2016], New York Times critic Wesley Morris called the event "one of the great experiences of my life." Mac offered battle hymns, black spirituals, Tin Pan Alley songs, blues, Broadway musicals, reconstructions of "Yankee Doodle" and lesbian-feminist punk -- 246 songs in all, and all popular in one community or another in the United States over the last 240 years.

Still, "just because it premiered doesn't mean it's finished," Mac wrote. "Each time we do it, it is a workshop, premiere, and small part of a long run."

For this special New York holiday installment, produced by Pomegranate Arts, Mac will be joined by longtime collaborators: costume designer Machine Dazzle, music director Matt Ray and a band of eight.

Taylor Mac's work has been described in Theater Journal as "a fight against conformity and categorization." Mac's sources are as disparate as The Theater of the Ridiculous and Greek drama, the late actor and playwright Charles Ludlam and drag performance.

"I bring people together and give them some kind of shared experience, not a homogenous one, but a shared one they can use to help as a foundation for further communing," states Mac.

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