If you go looking for messages in Hir, you'd be well-advised to bring along a stenographer with a big pad. From its first moments until its final tableau, this new play by Taylor Mac at the Magic Theatre is densely packed with crashing sympathies amid the chaos of sudden liberation and upended gender hierarchies. To the victor go the spoils, and the spoils in this case can be a rotting reward.
Mac was previously represented at the Magic in 2011, both as actor and playwright, in the nearly five-hour phantasmagoria The Lily's Revenge. Mac does not appear in his new play, a densely packed two-hour production, and its setting is a simple middle-class house in a second-tier city. But both literally and figuratively, this home looks as if some force has shaken it violently before setting it back on its uneasy foundation.
So much household debris has mounted in the house that the front door is no longer usable. "We were getting rid of stuff and stopped caring," Paige tells her son before he abandons pushing at the blockade and gains entrance through the back door. Isaac is back home from three years of Marine duty in Afghanistan, and it is through his eyes we can see how the family home, and the family within it, has changed during is absence.
While Paige still looks every bit the happy homemaker, she is surrounded by mountains of unsorted laundry, dirty dishes reaching out to the ceiling, and takeout food containers building new walls in the house. Isaac lets out a shriek when he views the mess, and then a louder one when he sees his father in a nightgown, clown makeup, and a giant diaper. Paige is taking pleasurable, sadistic revenge on her abusive husband since his stroke. But that's only the first chord in Paige's uncharted, unchained melody. Her teenage daughter has begun transitioning into a gay man, further freaking out Isaac, but enforcing Paige's own transition from her gender-assigned wife-and-mother role to a dangerously anything-goes philosophy.
The playwright seems gleeful in keeping us off-balance as liberal kneejerk sentiments take us into ugly territories. Amid the unnerving swerves, Mac also provides richly sardonic humor based both in jabs at popular-culture paradigms and dialogue that isn't so much about wisecracks as unwise self-revelations. Director Niegel Smith finds control and balance in a scenario filled with dramatic hairpin turns.
The title of the play, Hir, is the gender pronoun now preferred by the sexually evolving Max, but Hir, the play, really belongs to Paige. And as Paige, Nancy Opel gives a brilliantly alive performance, a heady brew of joy and anger that can be scary in its intensity. Ben Euphrat offers solemn strength as the returning Marine, trying to take in some of the upheaval while fighting for vestiges of a once masculine-dominated environment. Jax Jackson plays Max with an at times endearing uncertainty of the proper degree of masculinity to be mustered. As the stroke-disabled Arnold, Mark Anderson Phillips offers a bravely convincing performance of a bashed man.
Hir is billed as an "absurdist comedy," and while those two words have applicability to the proceedings, the play has a mean streak of terror running through it. Freedom, in this case of restrictive gender norms, is a wonderful thing, but you can't always color outside the lines without breaking a few crayons, or lives, in the process.
Hir will run at the Magic Theatre through Feb. 23. Tickets are $20-$60. Call 441-8822 or go to www.magictheatre.org.