Earlier this month Taylor Mac premiered his five-part extravaganza, The Lily's Revenge, which follows an uprooted lily on a quest to become a man and find a bride, but finds himself at the center of the eternal feud between the God of Presence and the God of Nostalgia. Oh that old story. With a cast of more than 40 performers and six directors, a live band, and a five (or more) hour performance time, The Lily's Revenge takes as it's inspiration from anti-gay marriage agendas, the ever-growing homogenization of our cities, and piles of plastic-wrapped funerary flowers, all while "squishing genres" as diverse as Japanese Noh dramas, poetry, vaudeville, art installation, film, and dance. It's nearly impossible to describe it with words alone, so luckily for us, Ves Pitts documented this monumental spectacle for EVB, while it's creator Taylor Mac does a bit of explaining and insightful commentary. Enjoy! And then go enjoy the real thing at Here Arts Center through November 22 (if you can somehow manage to get a ticket).
ACT I
Scene 1: Bianca Leigh as Time. In the play Time has been fixed to the atomic clock, trapped in the hourglass and cuckoo clock. Once she was the lead of the story and spoke the lines of a face, the drips that made the canyons. She had breadth and possibility but now, because of her child The Great Longing Deity (God of Nostalgia) and its malicious reign, she has been reduced to a stock character. A side-kick. If you've never seen Bianca Leigh act you're really missing something. This is the third time I've cast her in one of my plays. She's a muse.
Scene 1A: Time tries to get the audience to leave before the play starts.
Scene 2: Time warns the audience that if they don't leave they are likely to become trapped here forever. She points out that the Flower Girls (pictured) were once audience members. Our Flower Girls, in real life, are four of New York's finest (three of which, along with our ever-calm and insightful first-act director Paul Zimet, worked with the Living Theater). These are the women who helped make the scene and to watch their fearless performances in this play is complete bliss. They are Tina Shepard, Ellen Maddow, Muriel Mugel, and Rae C. Wright. The youngest of our Flower Girls, who later in the play is revealed to be critical theorists Susan Stewart, is fairly new to the scene but destined for greatness. Her name is Heather Christian and I think she's the most multi-talented person I know.
Scene 3: A Lily (played by me), who has never known love, comes to see the show. It desperately wants to be a part of the show and so becomes a heckler of sorts. Time sees that the Lily is disrupting The Great Longing's tale and forcing the players to acknowledge the present moment. She devises a plan to infest this tale with a Lily in hopes that the here and now will bring an end to the tyranny of nostalgia. The Lily has other hopes. Though one petal is hiding in this photo, the Lily is a five-petaled flower. Just like a star. It wishes to be the lead in the play so everyone will love it.
Scene 4: The play, as told by The Great Longing Deity is one of a sorrowful bride hopeful who is saved from life's drudgery by true love. The Lily devises a plan to become true love and woo bride's sorrow to rosy picture hue and so become the lead in the play. The Lily wins the heart of the Bride Hopeful who is a puppet made by Emily Decola (whose craft and care are just delicious) and played by Kristine Haruna Lee (who is able to sacrifice her ego for the puppets personality to shine and yet shine at the same time).
Scene 5: The Great Longing Deity (played by James Tigger! Ferguson) is represented by a giant stage curtain. It does everything it can to stop the Lily from taking over the story. Tigger is a dream in this role. I wrote the part for him as he's always been an inspiration to me. There's no one like Tigger. He is a true original as a human being and a fantastic performer.
Scene 6: The Great Longing Deity forces The Bride Hopeful to grow up and let go of her childish love for a flower. She sings a song to the Flower Girls about how she is teetering on the edge of too little to late and must settle or never marry. Amelia Zarin-Brown (aka Lady Rizo) plays the bride as adult and has the best comic timing of any artists I've ever worked with (plus that singing voice - hmmmmmm).
Some other stuff happens in Act I but I don't want to give it all away.
ACT II
Scene 1: In an attempt to take the story away from The Great Longing, and win back the love of the Bride, The Lily leaps from a windowsill. It naturally sings a song on a uke as it falls.
Scene 2: In the garden the Lily meets the other flowers who are convinced it is The Chosen Flower: a self-uprooted flower (did I mention the lily uproots itself in an act of desperation) who can save them all from the eternal suffering of flower kind and free their deity, The Dirt, from imprisonment on The Great Longing's factory farm in Ecuador. In this scene Master Sunflower scolds the Lily for treating Baby's Breath (Barb Lanciers) as less than. Someone needs to cast Barb as Puck immediately.
Scene 3: Rather than give you plot points let me just say something about our Flowers and Machine Dazzle the costume designer. From left to right: Kim Rosen as The Rose. I'd never worked with Kim before and had never seen her in anything. I don't believe in auditioning people. Instead I scout for casting choices or rely on recommendations. Rachel Chavkin our director of Act II had worked with Kim so I took a chance (even casting someone from an audition is taking a chance so you might as well take the chance in an honorable way rather than a disrespectful one). She has been a complete delight to work with and proof that you should always trust Rachel (the lady knows). Glenn Marla as Poppy: every time I'm in a room with Glenn I'm happy. Frankly I want to have his baby. Ikuko Ikari plays Tulip and I want to stitch Ikuko into my work for all of time. She just gets it. And then there's Daphne. Daphne Gaines is one of the most talented actors I know. Someone described her as dripping talent and I think that just about says it. Finally Machine Dazzle who is not pictured here but is in every second of The Lily's Revenge (even the blackouts as his costumes are so fantastic the afterglow of them defies visual limitations).
KYOGEN
Kyogen 1: This is me getting ready and using the open dressing room mirror. I decided a way to create community (which is what the play is really about) was to break down the usual walls that create a distance between the user and the maker (in this case the audience and the performers). So we have an open dressing room where the audience can hang out with the performers during the intermissions (or what The World Famous *Bob* more appropriately calls recess. Nick Vaughn created our sets for Lily and did an extraordinary job with so little. I told all the designers and directors the aesthetic for the show should be, hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show. The more human the better. I wanted it to look like the winning parade float that was made by the community and not sponsored by a bank.
Kyogen 2: Tina Shepard's back says it all. She is a star.
ACT III
Scene 1: Act III, or The Love Act, is primarily a dream ballet. In this act the adult bride has a dream version of herself who is essentially her subconscious. I didn't really know Darlinda Just Darlinda before casting her. We'd performed on a couple bills together and I always liked her but didn't really know what she was capable of as a performer. I got a hint of it in Fire Island last summer when we hung out all day at the Invasion of the Pines and decided to take a chance. The best decision I could have made. She's put so much of herself into this role and I've fallen in love.
Scene 2: The Flower Girls in The Love Act are younger and are all dancers. Here they are forcing Susan Stewart to climb a wall. It's because of them I've decided I want to write more dance theater.
Scene 3: Something I said to Faye, our director/choreographer of The Love Act, was that this is the part of the play where everything starts falling apart: narrative, structure, and the aesthetic. It's a difficult challenge to be in charge of the part of a play that isn't supposed to work and make the not working work beautifully. Faye pulled it off with aplomb and such wondrous creativity. I'm not in this act that much and was so jealous of the performers who look like they're having the best time up there.
Scene 4: The characters in The Love Act are bored out of their minds and so create drama from nothing to pass the time. Here they are waiting for the outsourced party supplies to arrive.
Scene 5: Philip Taratula plays the dream ballet Groom. It was important to me to find some way, in this very female and flower heavy show, to let the Groom have his say (not too much of one as the man always gets his say but just enough). I gave Faye and Philip a difficult task of making a dance out of stage directions like: "He does a Man-Through-The-Ages dance". They surpassed anything I could have dreamed up. Everyone's in love with Philip not only because he's a great guy but also because talent is sexy. He's just so damn good.
Scene 6: What would a five-hour epic be without some simulated cunniligus.
Scene 7: As the story is getting taken from The Great Longing he begins to shrink. Here he does a strip-tease.
Scene 8: The Great Longing curtain is saved from destruction by the arrival of the party supplies. A cocktail napkin is strategically placed.
Scene 9: The Great Longing discovers that it can be rebuilt via everyone's dreams. The company writes dreams on cocktail napkins and they bring back the curtain.
ACT IV
We don't have shots if this as it's a film but perhaps once the show has closed we'll put it up on the internet. It is a delight. Essentially what happens is The Lily travels to Ecuador and frees the Dirt from the factory farm. It's all done with dolls in stop motion. Aaron Rhyne did wonders with the film and Justin Bond gave his genius to the voice of The Dirt.
ACT V
Scene 1: Here you see The Great Longing Deity rebuilt by nothing but cocktail napkins. The Flowers have infiltrated the wedding party and are about to begin their revolution against their oppressors. This act has everyone performer previously seen (all 36 of them) and was helmed by director David Drake. This is the second time I've worked with David. The first was on a one-man show I did called The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac. It's extraordinary how easy it is for him to switch from directing one person to 36. A great director.
Scene 2: Baby's Breath pretends to frame the white rose bouquet. We wanted the White Rose to be the perfect specimen and so Emily (our puppet designer) used Amanda Lapore as our model for her. The Brides are mesmerized by her beauty.
Scene 3: The Flowers take charge of the curtains movement and the Flower Girls will soon fight back.
Scene 4: What you're not seeing in this photo is that a giant turd ballet is happening on stage.
Scene 5: After being stripped of my petals throughout the course of the play and getting a makeover on the Factory Farm, I become a physical man with a flower's core. Here I'm taking turns kissing everyone. This play is about altering our pre-existing myths and traditions just enough to foster and expand community. The allegory of the play is about choosing to love others rather than wishing for love. The Lily chooses to bring everyone closer through intimacy and in doing so the ruling traditions and myths, that create distance between the lover and the loved one by saying say we must hope and wish for love, are disempowered.
Scene 6: Here The Great Longing Deity makes a last ditch effort to destroy the Lily.
Scene 7: Ultimately The Great Longing is defeated and everyone thinks we will live happily-ever-after but then the Pope enters and shoots everybody with a bedazzled machine gun.
Scene 8: But being shot simply reminds us of how to live in this moment and we live happily here and now and forget about the whole ever-after thing.
And that concludes my reductive explanation of what The Lily's Revenge is all about. But hopefully we've given you a little pleasure in this moment by sharing the photos and story with you.
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