Casting is announced today for the UK premiere of Hir, written by Taylor Mac and directed by Nadia Fall. Arthur Darvill will play Isaac, Griffyn Gilligan plays younger sibling Max, Ashley McGuire will play Paige and Andy Williams plays her husband Arnold.
After winning acclaim in New York, this play from one of America’s most dynamic and distinctive voices comes to London in a new production. Pulitzer Prize finalist Taylor Mac is a multi-award-winning writer and performance artist at the forefront of alternative responses to American culture. Author of seventeen full-length plays, Mac won rave reviews for the extraordinary 24 hour durational concert, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which reframed and re-enacted 240 years of US history (an extract was performed at LIFT Festival 2016).
In Hir, Mac tears apart the kitchen sink genre by challenging gender expectations and subverting all notions of the typical American family.
Isaac gets home from serving in the marines to find war has broken out back home. Fed up with her broken American Dream, Paige has stopped washing, cleaning and caring for their ailing father. Once the breadwinner, dad Arnold has suffered a stroke and toppled from the head of the household to a mere puppet in the new regime. Ally to their mother is Isaac’s sibling Max. Only last time Isaac checked, Max was Maxine.
In Central Valley, in a cheap house made of plywood and glue, notions of masculinity and femininity become weapons with which to defeat the old order. But in Taylor Mac’s sly, subversive comedy, annihilating the past doesn’t always free you from it.
Hir is at The Bush Theatre 15th June – 22nd July 2017.
