Tuesday, November 5
6:00 p.m.

Taylor Mac. Photo/Sarah Walker. Courtesy of the artist

The 2019 Mitchell Artist Lecture features “What’s Gonna Happen?,” an evocative talk by MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer and Tony Award-nominated Taylor Mac. A playwright, actor, songwriter, performance artist, director and producer, Mac speaks about his vision for the future of the theatre in an uncertain world and the power of transforming calamity into communion.

Mac — who uses “judy” (lowercase sic unless at the start of a sentence, just like a regular pronoun), not as a name but as a gender pronoun — is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director, and producer. Judy’s work has been performed in hundreds venues including on Broadway and in New York’s Town Hall, Lincoln Center, Celebrate Brooklyn, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as London’s Hackney Empire and Barbican, DC’s Kennedy Center, Los Angeles’s Royce Hall and Ace Theater (through the Center for the Art of Performance), Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Sydney Opera House, The Melbourne Festival (Forum Theater), Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, and San Francisco’s Curran Theater and MOMA.

Judy is the author of many works of theater including, Gary, A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Holiday Sauce, Hir, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, Comparison is Violence, The Lily’s Revenge, The Young Ladies Of, Red Tide Blooming, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, Cardiac Arrest or Venus on a Half-Clam, The Face of Liberalism, Okay, Maurizio Pollini, A Crevice, and The Hot Month and the soon-to-be-premiered plays Prosperous Fools and The Fre.

Sometimes Taylor acts in other people’s plays (or co-creations). Notably: Shen Teh/Shui Ta in The Foundry Theater’s production of Good Person of Szechwan at La Mama and the Public Theater, in the City Center’s Encores production of Gone Missing, Puck/Egeus in the Classic Stage Company’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and in the two-man vaudeville The Last Two People On Earth, opposite Mandy Patinkin and directed by Susan Stroman.

Mac is a MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama, a Tony-nominated playwright, and the recipient of multiple awards including the Kennedy Prize, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Bessies, two Obies, a Helpmann, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is currently a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect and the resident playwright at the Here Arts Center.

About the Mitchell Artist Lecture

The annual Mitchell Artist Lecture features individuals emblematic of artistic collaboration and innovation. Each fall, a leading artist discusses the power and potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to a combined audience of university community and the greater public. Past speakers include Tania Bruguera, Jason and Alicia Hall Moran, Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones, The Yes Men, and Suzan-Lori Parks. The Mitchell Artist Lecture is presented by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, which is part of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts.

ADMISSION: The Mitchell Artist Lecture is free to attend but reservations are required. Please reserve your tickets here.

LOCATION: Moores Opera House, University of Houston