Taylor Mac Is Not Doing a Straightforward Adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

The new musical, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, with a book by Taylor Mac and music by Jason Robert Brown, received its world premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre on July 8. Adapting the bestselling 1994 “non-fiction novel” by John Berendt, the new work centers on The Lady Chablis, an important (though secondary) character in the book—which is a sprawling exploration of Savannah, Georgia and a true crime story. Lady Chablis, a transgender cabaret performer, is played by Grammy and Tony Award-winning performer J. Harrison Ghee. Rounding out the central trio are Tony Award nominee Tom Hewitt as Jim Williams, a wealthy antiques dealer, and his lover/helper Danny Hansford, played by Austin Colby. Also in the mix is Olivier Award nominee Sierra Boggess as Emma Dawes, a southern Nancy Reaganesque belter.

The creative team is led by Mac, Tony Award-winning composer Brown, choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres, and Tony-winning director Rob Ashford (pointing to the work's Broadway ambitions). The result is a quirky, catchy, at times provocative, thoughtful homage to a book which brought queer characters to the foreground in a time when they were often invisible.

Playbill spoke with the much-lauded Mac during previews, who uses the pronouns "judy." Below is judy's thoughts on taking the novel from the page to the stage.

You’ve known about the Berendt book since its publication 30 years ago.
Taylor Mac: Yes. I had moved to New York City and I didn’t know anyone, and I was starting my young adult life. And I’d never seen America embrace anything queer en masse in the way that it was embracing this book. It launched an idea in my head that I could lean into what made me different, instead of run from it. In acting school, everyone was like, "You’ve got to act more butch. You have to change yourself in order to be accepted into this industry." And it was challenging. It was seven years of not being able to get an audition, let alone get the part. And yet, this book came right at that time, and it was saying, "No, no, no, no, there’s another way to do this." So I have always had the book in the back of my brain. And now that I’ve written this, I feel in a lot of ways I wouldn’t have gone the path that I’ve gone in my artistry had it not been for The Lady Chablis.

How did the story resurface for you?
It was director Rob Ashford. We had met at a gala performance, and we hit it off. But I had no reason to believe that Rob would think I would be right for it. I think he really enjoys trying to find the right person for the right thing. That’s part of the magic for him. And for me, it was a shoo-in. I thought, if I’m ever going to write a commercial musical, this is absolutely it. This is the story that I should be telling.

You’ve bounced off other things before—like 2019’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, your first Broadway show. But have you ever done a piece like this, where you took a work and made it a different thing?
If there’s source material, usually I’ll make something that’s "inspired by." But this is the first time I’ve actually done an adaptation. That said, the book is the book. If you want the book, go to the book. I always ask myself on any project, why does this needs to exist? And this project doesn’t need to exist to give you the book. It wants to exist for things that matter to us now. And so I’m thinking, "Why does it need to sing instead of read?"

The book is rather sprawling, in a way. You must have had to make a lot of decisions on what to leave out.
Of course. I wasn’t going to make a 48-hour show. You could do a version that is durational and has all the characters. But the things that inspired me in the book, those are the things that I wanted to sing. Those are the things that I felt I should sing.

In a recent interview, you talked about not wanting to force the queer character into a narrator position. But there’s a narrator in the book. Did you simply eliminate that role?
I think if you really look at it, I have. What I’ve done is cast the audience as the book writer. The audience is John Berendt. When I read the book, I felt that we didn’t really know that much about him. And one of the reasons we didn’t is so that he could be our avatar in Savannah. So, create the John Berendt character on stage, and everyone follows that person as they’re following the story? No, no, no. Everyone in the show wants to get in the book. Everyone is trying to make sure that the audience, the book writer, understands their story is the story of Savannah. All the characters are competing for the audience’s attention, which in many ways, is very much like America. Everyone’s competing with their fellow Americans, trying to insist that their version of America is America.

Did Berendt collaborate with you at all, or leave you to it?
Basically, he said, ‘Knock yourself out.’ My approach has been that this is not John’s child. This is his grandchild. And grandpa can not like certain things that the grandchild does, or how they behave, but you still want them to love their grandchild, right? So it’s not him. It didn’t come from him, and yet he’s all over it.

Does the musical have an ’80s flair?
Oh, definitely. Jason Robert Brown has worked in certain sounds from the period. The costumes by Toni-Leslie James are fabulous. The hairstyles are very ’80s. And I thought about it in terms of my writing. What was the language of the club world around that time? What was the language of sitcoms around that time? What was the language of preservationists? What was the political language? All of that starts to seep in. And so much of that is in the book already that I don’t have to stretch too far.

Have you strayed from the novel elsewhere?
You’re going to recognize certain things that I’ve done in the book that are my taste. But it’s us reaching towards something. One thing that drives me a little crazy is how Americans, specifically, talk about art and theatre and storytelling, thinking it’s about representation. It’s actually not. It’s about consideration. I can’t represent myself on a stage, let alone somebody else. But what I can do is consider somebody. You’re going to be watching a show that consists of the collaborative—Jason and Tanya and Rob, and all of the designers and all of the cast, and John Berendt, too—all considering this world, and these people, and these themes and ideas. It’s not about reality. It is about how we stretch towards consideration.