VIDEO: Taylor Mac Praises The Drama Book Shop As 'A Place Of Ideas'

After completing a successful run at Playwrights Horizons that was extended three times, playwright and performer Taylor Mac paid a recent visit to New York's Drama Book Shop to discuss and sign copies of HIR, newly released by Northwestern University Press.

In HIR, Isaac comes home from the wars, discharged from the Marines under suspicious circumstances, only to find the life he remembers upended. Isaac's father, who once ruled the family with an iron fist, has had a debilitating stroke; his younger sister, Maxine, is now his brother, Max; and their mother, Paige, is committed to revolution at any cost. Determined to be free of any responsibility toward her formerly abusive husband or the home he created Paige fervently believes she can lead the way to a "new world order." HIR, Taylor Mac's subversive comedy, leaves many of our so-called normative and progressive ideas about gender, families, the middle class and cleaning in hilarious and ultimately tragic disarray.

Since 1917 New York's Drama Book Shop has been a regular haunt for both theatre professionals and loyal fans, providing the city's most extensive collection of scripts and theatre-related publications for sale. In 2011, the shop was presented with a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre.

In between signing autographs, Mac (who prefers the use of "judy" as a gender pronoun) took a moment to express love for the shop as "a place of ideas," and to recall working there as an emerging artist before being named by The Village Voice as the Best Theater Actor in New York (2013) and Best Male Vocalist (2015). Judy's work has been performed at New York City's Lincoln Center, The Public Theatre and Playwrights Horizons, the Sydney Opera House, American Repertory Theatre, Stockholm's Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, the SF MOMA, and literally hundreds of other theatres, museums, music halls, opera houses, cabarets, and festivals around the globe.