“You can’t mess with content and form at the same time,” cautions a character in “Hir,” a provocative and entertaining play at Mixed Blood Theatre that does exactly that. Transgressive yet accessible, it’s a script and a staging that you’re likely to be talking about long after the curtain rings down.
Playwright Taylor Mac constructs what on the surface might be an offbeat kitchen-sink comedy: Isaac returns home from a hitch in the military to discover that his once-well-ordered family has devolved into chaos: Mom has neglected basic housekeeping for so long that it’s not even possible to open the front door. Dad wears a diaper, a nightie, a purple fright wig and clown makeup. Younger sibling Max sulks and broods and rages, deep in the throes of a hormonal maelstrom.
But it’s not long before the audience discovers that these conflicts do not swim precisely in the mainstream. Paige, the mother, is claiming her power after decades of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Arnold, who has been cognitively hobbled by a stroke. Isaac’s career picking up blown-up body parts for the Marines ended ignobly after a drug offense that was … umm … creative. And Max, who was born as Isaac’s little sister, is now on the way to becoming a little brother, courtesy of testosterone shots and a new self-identification.
Playwright Mac takes his audience on a roller-coaster ride. Sometimes the story smacks of screwball comedy (“Max,” Paige intones impatiently to her younger child, “come in here and explain your ambiguity to your brother”). Other times, the drama is harrowing and dark. In some moments, the playwright lays on some hard-core, fist-in-the-air polemics about gender identity and privilege. In others, Mac is skewering those same polemics, and the newspeak terms and pronouns that have come along for the ride (out with the insufficiently inclusive acronym GLBT; in with the new alphabet-soup term LGBTTSQQIAA, which you are free to pronounce as “lug-a-butt-squee-a”).
For those unversed in the fast-moving world of sexual and gender identity and politics, this may be a perplexing play. It’s muddy from a plot perspective, and it’s filled with characters who offer plenty to dislike. For all that, though, “Hir” (which is pronounced “here” and used as a gender-neutral pronoun) is slyly inviting and engaging in a wry manner that sneaks up on you.
Director Niegel Smith’s adroit staging keeps astride this bucking bronc of a script, seamlessly shifting among the script’s many moods. That sense of surety is undergirded by a fearless and rangy performance by Sally Wingert as Paige. As the matriarch of this dysfunctional clan, Paige is riddled with eccentricities but driven by something deeper and more profound. Wingert expertly and precisely mines these paradoxical veins; she can induce chortles one moment and chills the next.
Given the power of Wingert’s performance, this easily could become a play about Paige, but Wingert’s generosity as a performer — and Smith’s acumen as a director — helps give the other characters room to grow. As older brother Isaac, Dustin Bronson effectively conveys the utter befuddlement of his situation, the steely resolve to impose order and an ultimate lack of resource that makes his task impossible.
As Max, Jay Eisenberg alternately plays for and rebuffs our sympathy, providing a nuanced, petulant picture of the hell that is adolescence, and the particular demons of being a square peg in a round-hole world. As the diminished father, Arnold, John Paul Gamoke is mostly given grunts and monosyllables for lines, but he packs plenty of subtext between his comparatively few words.
Make no mistake: “Hir” is a challenging play. But it’s also an enjoyable one. Equal parts chronicle and critique, it’s a very smart, prescient story that both merits and rewards the brain power it demands.
What: “Hir”
When: through March 22
Where: Mixed Blood Theatre, 1501 S. Fourth St., Minneapolis
Tickets: Day-of-show tickets are free under Mixed Blood’s “radical hospitality” program or may be reserved in advance for $20.
Information: 612-338-6131 or mixedblood.com.
Capsule: Issues of gender sexual identity go through a Cuisinart and a prism.
