Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor
Written by Suzanne Bocanegra; Directed by Geoff Sobelle
The Performing Garage | 33 Wooster Street, New York 10013
Sept 3–6 at 7:00 PM, Sept 7 at 2 pm, Sept 9-13 at 7 pm, Sept 14 at 2 pm
Honor: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra Starring Lili Taylor stands as a singular beacon of theatrical exhilaration—an experience both cerebral and sensorial, riotous yet meticulously composed. Since it made its first appearance post-Covid lockdown, at the time helping to reinitiate all of us into the grand ritual of collective spectatorship—the sacred act of sitting in the dark, letting oneself be driven through a landscape of ideas and images, guided not by mere lecture but by performance, in various appearances two seasons ago at NYU Skirball and now in an extended engagement at The Performing Garage, it sits as a triumph of image, intellect, and irreverence.
This is no ordinary slideshow. In Bocanegra’s hands—and, indeed, through the expressive vessel of actor Lili Taylor—it becomes a baroque opera of PowerPoint and persona, equal parts scholarship and spectacle. The images are vast, projected with a theatrical grandiosity that make even the most academic of visuals shimmer with drama. The words, however, do not emanate from the artist herself. Instead, they are delivered by Taylor, that ever-compelling thespian of film and stage, whose twinkling intelligence and earnest delivery render even the densest historical tangent utterly beguiling.
This outsourcing of authorship has become something of a calling card for Bocanegra, who since 2010 has enlisted various actors—Paul Lazar, Ruth Negga, Frances McDormand among them—to embody her presence on stage. It is a brilliant conceit, one that transforms the often-stultifying form of the “artist talk” into an unpredictable, layered performance. Actors, after all, are trained to beguile. They know how to keep an audience rapt. Bocanegra’s script, transmitted in real time through an earpiece à la Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte, means that Taylor is simultaneously performing and receiving. The result is anything but halting—it is electric.
Taylor evokes the sobriety of the academic while subverting it with the fizz of theatrical charm, standing alone under the spotlight. Bocanegra herself remains visible, stationed at a desk stage right, a kind of live prompt and shadow self. This subtle doubling imbues the evening with a faintly uncanny aura—Who is really speaking? Where does authorship reside?
The nominal focus of Honor is a magnificent sixteenth-century tapestry designed by Bernard van Orley and acquired by the Met Museum in 2015. This monumental weaving, rich in allegorical and historical figures, 69 of them to be exact, presents a vertiginous vision of moral hierarchy: the virtuous arrayed aloft—Biblical heroines, mythic paragons, monarchs of impeccable repute—while the disgraced and dishonorable languished below in ignominy. From this exquisite artifact, Bocanegra’s lecture takes flight—first into the lives of Cardinal Erard de la Marck and the eccentric Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, then outward, wildly and wonderfully, into the farthest reaches of associative logic.
This is no dry art history seminar. Rather, it is a transhistorical fugue—a kind of lecture-as-collage that spirals from the intricacies of tapestry weaving to the brutalities of sixteenth-century plagues, witch trials, and Spanish inquisitions. We become aware of a comfort level in the word “tapestry” as it is used to define businesses: photographs of Tapestry Health Needle Exchange and Tapestry Dementia Care earn hearty belly laughs. The saga of Hansel and Gretel is unspooled to reveal a chilling tale of cannibalism…“Have you ever wondered why she (the witch) could conjure an edible house but still had to eat children?” Rituals of honor and dishonor were placed side by side, from stately Renaissance “joyous entries” (lavish productions of honor and celebration—unfurling like a triumphal masque, replete with ceremonial arches, elevated stages, and meticulously choreographed tableaux vivants. These jubilant processions served not merely as displays of power but as living theater: allegorical, extravagant, and deeply symbolic) to the horrifying pageantry of public executions, the ultimate anti-pageant—a brutal denouement where honor is not conferred but stripped away. Here, the stage is not gilded but grim, and the spectacle, though no less orchestrated, trades majesty for macabre. Both, however, are civic theater at its most potent: one elevating the individual to near-mythic stature, the other reducing them to a cautionary tale writ in flesh and fear.
Just when one has adjusted to this rich historical mille-feuille, the twentieth century barges in with all its bizarre pageantry: the earnest ridiculousness of Renaissance Faires (ironically based in avant garde theatre as it took theatrical conventions and eliminated the boundary between actor space and audience space); the kitschy gravitas of Carole King’s Tapestry; the absurd glory of the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, where community volunteers become living artworks; the preposterous theatricality of the Monkees, the imaginary rock band invented for a television show; the Girl Scout badge as miniature woven myth; and the surreal Texan splendor of the Tyler Rose Festival, with its elaborately allegorical young women.
To call this a lecture is to diminish it. It is a high-velocity semiotic rollercoaster, a polymathic performance-essay where the images come fast and furious—hundreds, perhaps thousands—and the narrative zigzags like a particularly feverish Wikipedia binge at 3 a.m.: “This is Coco Chanel. Liberace said too much is wonderful. Coco Chanel did not.”
And yet, like any great magician—or master weaver—Bocanegra has a pattern beneath the madness. Slowly, subtly, themes begin to braid themselves into clarity: the interplay of gender and craft, of still image and live body, of authenticity and artifice. The lecture, for all its performative razzle-dazzle, becomes deeply intimate, grounded by quiet, recurring references to the artist’s late mother—a thread that stitches seemingly disparate anecdotes into an emotional tapestry.
Then comes the final coup de théâtre. As Taylor delivers her last line, the projections vanish and the scrim lifts, revealing a live tableau vivant—eight performers, silent and radiant, singing the haunting sixteenth-century Spanish carol “Ríu, Ríu, Chíu.” After the onslaught of visuals and verbal virtuosity, this moment of live, unmediated sound—pure voices in harmony—strikes like a revelation. It is, quite simply, breathtaking. This finale does not merely conclude the evening; it crystallizes one of its central tensions: the divide and dialogue between illusion and reality, between simulation and embodiment. Like any great piece of theater, the moment invites the audience to peer behind the curtain, to question where the mask ends and the self begins. It is not merely a point made, but a dramaturgical flourish—echoing the central paradox of performance: that in feigning truth, we may sometimes glimpse it most clearly.
In Honor, Bocanegra has not only elevated the lecture-performance to a new pinnacle of aesthetic and intellectual sophistication; she has also managed to reframe the artist’s talk as something accessible, personal, unruly, and profound. This is not a random flânerie through historical ephemera; it is a precision-guided exegesis masquerading as a meandering drive. And unlike so many artistic presentations that rely on the crutch of aggregation, Honor makes wild connections sing with clarity and resonance. To witness it is to be reminded—vividly, viscerally—of what performance can do when it dares to think, feel, and play all at once.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on September 9, 2025. All rights reserved.