| “What do you mean by virtue? What do you mean by good?” These sensible questions arrive midway through THE HANG, and they have a force of clarity that’s otherwise intermittent in this “jazz opera.” Taylor Mac favors mythopoetic speech and while this can sometimes be bracing, it’s more often inscrutable. The piece renders the last day of Socrates’ life as a kind of pre post-mortem, a “hang” where the impieties for which Socrates was sentenced to death are extolled by a ragtag bunch of Radical Faeries. Structurally reminiscent of HAIR and GODSPELL, it’s a splendid idea. In Mac’s hands, ethics, knowledge, virtue, and dissent are correspondent practices. Only from the margins—“queers” are the modern pagans—can truth be recognized. Visually, the show is a festival of whimsy and the score, by Matt Ray, is even better. It bops and stomps with great aplomb, making plain that a death sentence—and we are all so sentenced—can be an invitation to party. These successes makes the book and lyric fuzziness all the more frustrating. Still, THE HANG is inventive and daring. Somewhere Socrates is grinning. |
