Emmy and Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Felicity Huffman, renowned for her roles in the 2005 film Transamerica and the international hit television series Desperate Housewives, makes her UK stage debut in the revival of Hir, an explosive comedy by Taylor Mac. Playing at Park Theatre until 16 March 2024.

Huffman plays the radical matriarch Paige in HIR, a disarmingly funny and strikingly original comedy. 

Felicity says of playing Paige: “I’m honoured to get to work with Steve Kunis and to perform at the Park Theatre. As an ardent fan of Taylor Mac, I’m so thrilled I get to act in one of Taylor’s brilliant plays. I studied in London back in the palaeolithic era and it has been a dream of mine to come back here and work someday. I’m a lucky gal.”

Taylor Mac explodes the dysfunctional family drama and reinvents it for our times. 

Named ‘one of the most exciting theatre artists of our time’ by Time Out New York, Taylor Mac is an actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter. Judy (Taylor’s preferred pronoun, but any will do) is a MacArthur “genius”, the first (and to date only) American to receive the International Ibsen Award, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of the Kennedy Prize, the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, a Drama League Award, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, two Obie’s, and two Bessies. 

In a revival by critically acclaimed director Steven Kunis, Hir grapples with a family in flux as they attempt to build a brave new world out of pieces of the old.

American director Steven Kunis directed the critically acclaimed revival of Joe DiPietro’s F**king Men (Waterloo East) and the acclaimed three-month run of S. Asher Gelman’s Afterglow (Waterloo East), for which Steven was again nominated Best Director at the Off West End Awards.

Isaac, the prodigal son (Steffan Cennydd), has returned home from the brutality of war, only to discover his family home transformed by domestic revolution. The patriarchy has fallen, and his mother, Paige (Felicity Huffman), has been liberated from an oppressive marriage to Arnold (Simon Startin). Enlisting Isaac’s newly out transgender sibling Max (Thalía Dudek – See interview in QX) as her ally, Paige is on a crusade to tear apart the old regimes – but in Taylor Mac’s funny and strikingly original comedy, annihilating the past doesn’t always free you from it.

“Hir – pronounced “here”, the preferred gender pronoun of the play’s protagonist Max – reminds us of theatre’s potential: to be a brilliant conduit that makes ideas alive and accessible. Hir doesn’t merely explore themes of gender fluidity, queer theory and the subversion of toxic masculinity, because that would be dull. It lightens the weight of concepts that many find foreign or fraught, places them in a family setting and detonates them. Shrapnel flies everywhere”. The Guardian Australia (review of Belvoir Street Theatre Sydney production) *****

Tickets to HIR are available by clicking here.