Off-Broadway Theater Review: Hir

Your Family Might Not Be the Craziest Option This Holiday……
By Lauren Yarger
If you are dreading Thanksgiving and the family time it brings, think again. Your crazy uncle Harry or weird Aunt Sally might look pretty good when compared to the bizarre family in Taylor Mac’s Hir getting a New York premiere Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons where it has been extended through Dec. 20.

This family gives being stuck eating turkey with odd folks a certain dignity. Because you haven’t really defined odd until you meet this clan created by Mac and directed here by Niegel Smith, who is the artistic director at the Flea.

First of all, most everybody coming to the theater is asking how to pronounce the title. What does it mean? Well, it sounds like “here” and is a gender neutral pronoun to use when referring to a transgendered person, instead of his or her. The term comes into play when Isaac (Cameron Scoggins) returns from several tours in a war zone, where he specialized in collecting the blown-up body parts of his fallen comrades-in-arms to send back home. The experience has left him shaken and unable to stop throwing up. After dreaming of coming home for so long, Isaac discovers that he has just walked into another war zone.

His father, Arnold (Daniel Oreskes), had a stroke over a year ago and his mother, Paige (Kristine Neilsen), failed to let him know. She has been enjoying torturing the man, who wanders around in a diaper and dress, forced to do Paige’s bidding in their shabby home (designed by David Zinn), which is kept a mess (she refuses to clean) and frigid with an air conditioner kept running full blast against Arnold’s wishes (a metaphor for the icy atmosphere in the home, no doubt.) 

Arnold gets sprayed with water like a disobedient pet if he doesn’t obey, or sometimes, just because Paige feels like it…..

If that weren’t enough, Isaac discovers that his sister, Max (Tom Phelam) is now his brother, Max. Apparently she/he has decided to go for hormone therapy, grow a beard and change genders (unfortunately Smith casts a male in the role. Why not a transgenedered or male-looking woman?) It’s a lot for Isaac to take in all at once, but when he gets his bearings, he tries to support Max, but can’t get behind his mother’s cruelty to his father, even if it is payback for years of treating his wife horribly.

Can this family find a way to forgive and support each other? While the questions raised are thought-provoking, the over-the-top environment in which they are explored makes them hard to relate to and leaves us not quite sure what we’re supposed to think about anything. 

Paige is pretty much insane (though any time we get to see Nielsen play a crazy woman, it’s worth the price of the ticket) and needs some heavy duty therapy immediately. Her husband and son/daughter need to be removed from an unhealthy environment and Isaac’s attempts to clean up their mess are inadequate, especially since he has his own, very big issues looming.

It’s an engaging, if puzzling two hours. 

Hir is extended through Jan. 3 at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd St., NYC. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 pm, Saturdays at 2 and 7:30 pm and Sundays at 2 and 7 pm. Tickets $65-$80: www.TicketCentral.com; (212) 279-4200.

Christians might like to know:

-- Obvious sexual identity issues-- Max also thinks "hir" is gay, because now that she's a he, he is attracted to men.....

-- Max considers Noah a genderphobe because he took male and female animals aboard the ark.

-- Sexual images

-- Sexual dialogue

-- God's name taken in vain

-- Language