St. Taylor Mac is a theatre artist who prefers to write a bio in the first person. Hello. I’m also a theatre artist who longs to be rid of the usual bios, which are lists of achievements. Here’s something different.

In case you don’t know, my pronoun is judy (only capitalized when at the start of a sentence, like a normal pronoun). A few people have claimed I use it as a joke. They are uninformed. It’s not a joke, which doesn’t mean it isn't funny. It’s a personalized pronoun for someone whose gender (professionally and personally) is constantly changing. My gender isn’t male or female or non-binary (which oddly creates a binary between people who are non-binary and people who are binary). My gender is “performer” (one day I’ll get it on the passport) and continually changing. It’s also an art piece and as annoying to navigate as it is delicious. You too may change yourself.

Here’s something a bunch of us theatre folk are considering in terms of change: How can we make wondering the center of dramatic action, rather than centering the achievement of goals that are inherent in conflict? Sarah Ruhl says most theatre is made in the form of a male orgasm. That seems accurate, in terms of theatre usually engorging to catharsis. But may we add that the radical queer understands a male orgasm may be varied, multiple, and circular? All this to agree: There’s more than one way to engage with others.

There was once an acting teacher who said, “When your character is alone on stage, their action is one of three things:  praying, figuring out, or recalling.” Wise as that craft may be, may we transform this triumvirate into a truncation, one which offers an expansion? While the method acting teacher is interested in showing how people are, some of us are—also?—interested in using theatre to explore possibility. Could we turn our craft into a vagary of wondering? In other words, how do we become less knowing and more Socratic?

And are these actions reserved only for when we’re alone? Or singular? Or hierarchical? Here’s a funny thing you start to wonder about as you climb the ladder: If access to the tower means no access to the street, maybe, baby, it ain’t worth it.

I also wonder: Would an isolated child really dream toward theatre if it meant spending even more alone time? Though, is a character ever alone? Even when rehearsing a one-person show, the ancestral makers are present. So, rather than being in a tantrum-tower-building, isolating, your-turn-my-turn conflict, how might we wonder WITH them?

A start may be to rid ourselves of numbers. Twenty-four hours. Two hundred people. Eight acts.  Five-character play. Ninety-minutes. Are all these numbers ways to disengage from the challenge of content? Does form do the same?

Judy’s been a form queen. I love a hand-painted map, one that’s personalized, researched, detailed, figurative, metaphorical, and imperfect. Essentially: Stack the genres, layer the forms, delight in the human warbles, throw in a little direction, notice the image is faded, get lost, damp, realize it’s grown something that might be harming you, try to clean it, hope it worked, realize it hasn’t, choose to make use of the harm, find a different way, repeat with variation, and call it theatre.

And . . .  I wonder if it’s time to consider that form, style, aesthetics, pace, duration, craft, and process may not be content? Gosh forbid. We haven’t yet achieved enough critical mass of agreement that they are content. Don’t give up yet, Taylor Mac. There is more work to be done before derailing this holistic approach by sabotaging doubt. Commit, gyrl.

Still . . .  there is a nagging question: Are we all behaving like Virgos, obsessing over categories, stratagems, and lists in order to ground our nomadic insecurities with an organizing principle chained to want?

Here’s a biographical detail for this bio: I’m a Virgo. Though I don’t believe in astrology. Most of the people I hold dear are astrology nuts. It’s hard to hold firm to a belief when dearness gets in the way.

Another dear thing which keeps getting in the way of belief:  How can we be quiet while still freeing ourselves from the Puritan dominance over expression? Another way to ask it: How may we maintain our gentle souls in a tough place full of so many rules and mountains?  Must the tender queens be “fierce” to chisel a place for themselves in the world? In order to survive? Must they be queens, rulers with subjects?  May they not be tender? Must they pull up their bootstraps and emerge from dark caves, ready for battle? Must they brag and promote and grow, grow, grow, simply to be considered?

There’s a Stoic middle-aged consideration for ya.

Speaking of middle age and bragging and promoting . . . back to the bio. Some theaters, producers, and playbills have rules about bios: no jokes; don’t thank anyone; get rid of the personal; forget the philosophy; 100-word count; and simply list.  And perhaps, in a world of so many themes, a list is kinder. Must we be challenged everywhere? Shall we manifesto ourselves into corners, even in the playbill? Shall we exhaust the reader with questions before the show has even begun?

And a different framing: Is the “list” similar to the peaceful and important work of the calling of the names—a way of saying, “This happened!  You may not have been there to witness, but it happened!  Recognize!” And if the title of a play fails to provide you with the information that it was a sideshow musical about the gentrification of Coney Island—starring Bridget Everett, Tigger!, Dirty Martini, Bianca Leigh, and Ruby Lynn Maher, where Julie Atlas Muz choreographed Basil Twist’s puppets to watch on as Taylor Mac performed a naked, though painted green, de-tucking—perhaps it is enough to wonder with nothing more than its title: Red Tide Blooming.

In case all this might be true (that a list in a bio is more virtuous), below is the traditional biographical list of shows (rituals), competitive kindnesses (awards), and debt (gratitude). It’s essentially an engorging toward catharsis. Feel free to read it and decide for yourself which gives you the context you need to open your heart (perhaps none of these . . . oh, no, then we’ll have to put our hopes on the show). Or as the drag queen with extra makeup time once said, “Yes, and . . .”

Theatre artist St. Taylor Mac is a MacArthur “genius”, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of an International Ibsen Award, a Kennedy Prize, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, a Drama League Award, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, two Obies, and two Bessies and has the great honor of having Sainthood bestowed by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (naming St. Taylor Macalong with judy’s fellows Matt Ray, Machine Dazzle, Niegel Smith, and Faye Driscoll Our Theatrical Luminaries of Queer Synesthetic Sensorial Delights. Mac’s patronage being hybridity, thus St. Taylor Mac is the Patron Saint of Hybridity).

Works by St. Taylor Mac include Prosperous Fools (a Juvenalian satire on cultural philanthropy longing to be a comédie-ballet about liberation); Sea Songs for the Butt Pirates, Widow’s Watch, and End of the Earth (a sing-along hang about queer sea towns, meant for pubs); Good Morning, Beauty (a song cycle consideration of long-term queer relationships for orchestra and voice, with lyrics by Mac and music by Jake Heggie); Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (a musical inspired by John Berendt's nonfiction novel, with a book by Taylor Mac and music by Jason Robert Brown), Bark of Millions (a parade trance extravaganza of 55 songs—and counting—for the living library of the deviant theme with lyrics by Mac and music by Matt Ray), Joy and Pandemic (a realism play about an abstract art school); The Hang (a jazz opera passion play about the final hours of Socrates with lyrics by Mac and music by Matt Ray); The Fre (a queer children’s play about loving after bullying, set in a ball pit); Gary:  A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (a tragedy determined to become a comedy); A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a 24-hour performance art concert about communities building themselves as a result of being torn apart); Hir (an absurd realist play about a changing America); The Walk Across America for Mother Earth (an anarchist adaptation of Three Sisters about activism, with music by Ellen Maddow); The Lily’s Revenge (a flowergory manifold about a flower who wants to be the center of the story, with music by Rachel Garniez); The Young Ladies Of (a paternal mystery); The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (a ukulele confessional about the War on Terror); Red Tide Blooming (a freak-show musical about gentrification); and The Last Two People on Earth (a two-man cabaret for seagulls about the joy of singing, created with Mandy Patinkin, Susan Stroman, and Paul Ford). 

Films include Whitman in the Woods (directed by Noah Greenberg, streaming on All Arts) and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a concert doc directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, streaming on Max).  

Occasionally Mac acts in plays by others. Most notable: the title role in Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando (Signature Theatre, directed by Will Davis); the title role in The Foundry Theatre’s Good Person of Szechwan (La Mama and The Public Theatre, directed by Lear DeBessonet); and Puck/Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Classic Stage Company, directed by Tony Speciale).

In the late 1950s, Meg Crane moved to Manhattan to study fashion illustration and graphic design at Parsons. It was an exhilarating, frightening, and affirming time for her. Parsons’ encouraging faculty gave her the courage to begin her life in design. A varied freelance career preceded her position with Organon Pharmaceuticals, where she was hired to work on a line of cosmetic products they had recently acquired.

It was in their laboratory one day that Meg noticed a row of test tubes suspended over a mirrored shelf and learned that they were pregnancy tests Organon had performed for doctors and their patients. She was immediately struck by the idea that she could design a test that a woman could do by herself. At home. Privately. She developed a prototype she called Predictor, but the company was adamantly opposed to distributing it. Ten years later, despite an extraordinary amount of controversy, home pregnancy tests were on the drug store shelves.

Meg became co-founder of the advertising firm Ponzi & Weill with her life partner, Ira Sturtevant, working on a wide range of consumer products and pro bono projects.

James Wines is a visual artist, architect, product designer, and writer. He is also a

retired professor of architecture from Penn State University, with a teaching emphasis on the integrative arts. Educated at Syracuse University, he was the founder (in 1970) of SITE New York, a multidisciplinary practice whose work includes buildings, public spaces, environmental art works, master plans, landscapes, interiors, exhibitions, video productions, and graphic designs. SITE’s main focus is on the aesthetic, sociological, and environmental aspects of the building arts. As the organization’s continuing president and creative director, he has originated and built more than 150 art, architecture, and design projects in the United States, Italy, France, England, Austria, Canada, Spain, Qatar, Türkiye, Dubai, China, and Japan. 

Wines has delivered lectures for colleges, universities, and professional conferences in 59 countries and written seven books; including DE-ARCHITECTURE (Rizzoli International) 1987 and GREEN ARCHITECTURE (Taschen Verlag) 2000. In addition, there have been 22 monographs and museum catalogues published on his drawings and projects for SITE. 

He is the winner of 25 art and design awards, including the Smithsonian Institution’s 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 1995 Chrysler Award for Design Innovation (USA) and the 2011 ANCE Award for an International Architect (Italy). Wines was honored in 2002 with a large retrospective exhibition at the Centre FRAC in France, jointly sponsored by Centre Pompidou in Paris and Museé des Beaux Arts in Orleans. His graphic work has been shown in more than one hundred and fifty museums and galleries in the USA, Europe, and Asia. An exhibition of his graphic works, bridging from 1970 to the present, was on view in 2013 at the Atrium Gallery of City College of New York. Drawings and models can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Frac Centre-Val de Loire, The Louvre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Australian National Gallery, Tokyo National Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago and others. Professor Wines lives and works in the Battery Park area of New York City. Among recent projects, he created a Willi Smith fashion installation for Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York and new stores for Virgil Abloh’s ‘Off White’ company in Korea and Japan. He has also been designing a Confucian cemetery in Korea, hospitality projects in the United States, a private house in Temecula, California, and lighting products for Foscarini in Italy. There was an April/May/June 2021 ‘Drawings for SITE’ retrospective at Tchoban Museum für Architekturzeichnung in Berlin.

He continues to research environmental issues in art and architecture, theories of public space and writes on these subjects for design publications internationally. He has recently completed the transfer of SITE research and visual documentation archives to Columbia University’s Avery Library.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks that were presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, and Carnegie International 57 as well as the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist for 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than 80 releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, Chacon has mentored more than 300 Native American high school composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon has received a  United States Artists Fellowship in Music, a Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), a position as the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship.

His solo artworks are part of the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.

Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Simone Handelman Duffy is an interdisciplinary bio-artist and writer whose work engages critical theory, media, and emerging technology. She is the recipient of the 2025 and 2026 Student Research Awards, a Eugene Lang Capstone Grant, and recently spoke at the Eugene Lang Dean’s Honor Symposium. She has worked as an Academic Fellow for "Introduction to Critical Theory", serves as an intern at the Museum of the Moving Image, and founded The Formal Analysis Circle, a registered student organization.