Realism, as a genre, isn’t dead. It’s just that the confines of realism no longer seem expansive enough to encompass, well, reality. Especially if you continue to define realism by the tenets of the mid-20th century: white, middle-class, hetero-normative. The world no longer looks like that (if it ever actually did). But what happens when you try to shoehorn the world we now live in into that genre? You end up with a play like Taylor Mac’s HIR, a bizarro-kitchen sink drama opening at Cockroach Theatre this Friday.
“It’s a deconstruction of the classical 20th century, linear, middle-class family drama,” says Chris Brown, who’s directing the piece. He pulled the script off the bookshelf on a trip to a bookstore and started browsing through it. “I ended up sitting there reading the whole thing. I fell in love with it. What was so appealing to me about the show was that this was a playwright who was taking that entire form that has excluded a lot of the alternative-lifestyle members, taking that entire establishment of ‘legitimate,’ value-confirming middle class in theater, and turning it on its head.”
It starts at the top. The show opens with Arnold, the family patriarch, entering in a nightgown and diaper, black socks with garters, a rainbow wig and eating oatmeal mush. This is the sight that greets Isaac, newly returned from a stint in Afghanistan where he worked for Mortuary Affairs before being dishonorably discharged. As he struggles to put the family back together as he knew it, or would like it, he battles with his newly-liberated mother, intent on controlling the father after his years of abuse, and comes to terms with his sibling who is transitioning from female to male, and prefers the pronoun “hir.”
“It’s a love letter to an upbringing in which one felt outcast and ostracized,” Brown says. “And I just really loved the breaking down of the patriarchal sensibility.”
Lest you think it’s solely an agitprop piece, Brown is quick to point out that there’s a lot of heart to the characters in this absurdity. It’s a family drama, and caring for these characters, as extreme as they are, is part of what makes the play work. It helps that the play is full of humor, too.
“Audiences can expect a lot of humor, a lot of laughter—and some serious cathartic moments,” Brown says. “They’ll recognize the world that we are living through right now.” In all its crazy, extreme, realism-for-now glory.
HIR January 19-February 5, days & times vary, $16-$20. Art Square Theatre, 702-818-3422.