Here is my first interview with performance artist Taylor Mac. We talked in 2015 at The Study hotel in New Haven just prior to his show at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas that June, He was still working on his 24-Hour marathon show (which he would eventually do in 2016 and which is now the subject of an extraordinary HBO documentary).

By FRANK RIZZO

Looking at American history with “outsider” perspectives is a trending topic. There’s Larry Kramer’s epic gay-themed novel, “The American People, Vol 1.” And Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about a founding immigrant father, “Hamilton,” is the hottest ticket in New York.

Taylor Mac enters the American-History-From-Another-Angle arena with an ambitious project of his own. The New York-based performance artist, actor, drag queen, designer and singer is developing “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” which is a decade-by-decade look at our history and attitudes through its popular music. From 1776 to the present day, it’s a look at our past through the lens of a genderqueer artist. Each decade will be presented as a separate show, with live band and audience involvement. He will be premiering his 16th, “The ’90s” (representing 1990, that is) at New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which commissioned this chapter of his endeavor for the festival’s 20th anniversary.

In the fall of 2016 all 24 shows — slightly abridged to 60 minutes each — will be presented in a marathon noon-to-noon session in New York.

So far the Obie Award-winning Mac, 41, performed 15 of the decades with shows in various stages of development at venues such as Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

So much of the show is about appropriation — in good ways and bad, as we re-invent and re-texturize things,” says Mac during a recent visit to New Haven. “But that’s America. That’s our history: seeing the variations and possibilities and discovering that we aren’t just one way. We are many ways.”

The Many Shades Of Fab

TimeOut New York has called Mac, “One of the most exciting theater artists of our time” and The New York Times says of Mac: “Fabulousness can come in many forms, and Taylor Mac seems intent on assuming every one of them”.

Off stage, Mac has a gentler kind of fab, possessing a disarmingly sweet smile accompanied by a wicked gleam in his eye. Slight of build and bald, he looks a bit like Michael Stipe of the band R.E.M.

Born Taylor Mac Bowyer, he grew up in the small, suburban city of Stockton, Calif.

“I grew up in a WASP family during the Reagan years,” he says. “We were Christians who didn’t express ourselves. It was a strict culture where you had to adhere to one type of form, style and spirit. But I longed for variance, for heterogeneity, for things not to be just one thing, and to have multiple genders and have multiple ideas about things.”

His mother ran an art school where collage was encouraged and “mistakes” were non-existent, but he says he knew he was going to be an artist years before she opened the school when he was 5. “And a theater artist. It was all about doing a live performance.”

But having an artistic sensibility was not easy in his town that wasn’t welcoming to outsiders, or even insiders who were different.

“I remember a moment when I was walking down the street when I was about 14. I was wearing a jacket that had some fringe on it and everyone was staring at me like I was crazy. I hadn’t even thought about it. It wasn’t a conscious fashion choice. I just put the jacket on because it was in the closet and no one was wearing it and it was collecting mothballs and I thought it looked neat — so I just wore it. And people started shouting things at me. Now I always got ‘faggot’ shouted at me but this was really intense.”

Hedwig Calls

He left for New York in 1994 to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. He started out as an actor but work was hard to come by. “I couldn’t even get an audition,” he says. “I would be miserable now if I was trying to be a regular actor. It just wasn’t my calling.”

A major influence and inspiration was John Cameron Mitchell, book author and star of the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which was just starting out at small venues in the late ’90s. (Last year, the musical about a rock ‘n’ roll band, fronted by a transgender woman, made it to Broadway where it is still playing.)

Mitchell and the show “reminded me of who I was and who I am,” says Mac, “and I didn’t have to do it the way that everyone was telling me how to do it. He showed there were actually alternatives.”

He started creating his own pieces and soon developed a following, acclaim and honors for his visually and vocally-arresting, gender-ambiguous performances that combined extravaganza and intimacy, including “The Hot Month,” “The Levee,” “Hir,” “Red Tide Blooming” “The Young Ladies Of,” “The Walk Across America For Mother Earth,” and the phantasmagoria, “The Lily’s Revenge.” “The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac” was presented at Yale Rep in 2010.

Activism History

The idea for the 24-decade show was an indirect outgrowth of Mac’s attending gay march rallies in the late ’80s during the height of the AIDS epidemic when he was a teenager.

“It was the first time I was reminded that there was a queer history. I went to one of the worst school districts in the country yet we learned about civil rights, suffragettes, immigration and all the different sub-cultures of people, at least to know they existed. But there was zero mention of anything queer.

“So to see thousands of gays together in a march was profound. But the community I saw being created and becoming a huge force was a result of its very deterioration.”

Each decade of his epic show has a different narrative thread and theme.

“The ’90s” — which really starts in the mid-to-late ’80s and extending to the mid-to-late ’90s — centers on the coming-of-age of the radical lesbian community in the AIDS era.

“What happened with AIDS,” says Mac, ” was that the families of gay men were not supporting them and the people who stepped up and took care of them were these radical lesbians and the ’90s was a time when lesbians — and everyone — really started to come out, so you see k.d lang and Melissa Etheridge and Joan Baez.

But why a 24-hour endeavor?

“I want to tell the story about a community being built through imperfection, through deterioration. So what’s the form that best represents that? Duration performances. In so doing we create a bond with each other, even though we’re so weak [toward the end] all we want to do is go to bed.”

This “shared ritual” is quite a commitment for not only Mac but for the audience, too.

“The audience is going to sign an agreement when they purchase tickets saying they will stay for the 24-hour experience,” he says.

Mac says he’s sure he can perform it all the way through, though he’s not sure if his voice will give out or be faced with other problems.

He’s already “in marathon training” for the big run next year. He’s performed six shows together and he’s envisioning several 12-hour presentations. “I’ll do one 18-hour one on my own without an audience,” he says before he attempts the 24-hour endeavor.

Musical Tastes

For Mac, the pop music that personally resonates with him when he was growing up was the art-rock band The B-52s. “They were the queerest thing I could find,” says Mac.

But he had eclectic tastes. He connected with actor-singer Mandy Patinkin, too. “It was his dynamic sound, that big-belt voice. It was something I was genetically born with, too. So singing along gave me access to a certain kind of expression that was unique.

“The cast album to ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ was wonderful. That’s when I sort of liked musical theater. I still do, but not really. I have a love-hate relationship with it.”

If the 24-hour Project isn’t enough to keep him busy he also performs a two-person show, “The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville,” directed by Susan Stroman and co-starring none other than Patinkin. It recently ended its run at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. That show, which has no dialogue, features two lost souls communicating only through popular songs.

Mac’s musical tastes also include Nina Simone and Patti Smith. “My favorite singers are people who can’t really sing. Nina always sings just a little below or above the pitch and Patti just screams everything. They both can carry a tune but they choose not to. They chose their vulnerability to be more important than the tone. And it’s the imperfection that is so powerful, that is helping build their communities and that helps stream the culture forward. I find that healing and revelatory.”