Seeking Radical Empathy for Clarence Thomas With an Ambitious Oratorio in Ancram

Pictured: Heather Christian, justice Clarence Thomas and Taylor Mac.

The premise sounds, on its face, like a provocation: a concerned citizen confronts an imagined justice Clarence Thomas before an imagined Supreme Court of past, present, future, and dreamed-up justices. But "Clarence, in a Pause," the new work-in-progress by librettist abd Drag icon Taylor Mac and composer Heather Christian, is less about confrontation than curiosity. It asks, with genuine earnestness, what it means to try to understand someone you despise and what you may gain and sacrifice in the process.

The piece lands at Ancram Center for the Arts this weekend as part of the organization's Play Lab series, with sold out performances on Saturday.

The work is performed by an ensemble that reads like a dispatch from the most interesting corners of New York experimental theater. Singers Carla Duren—a Broadway veteran who has toured with everyone from Bette Midler to Toshi Reagon—and Grace McLean, a Richard Rodgers and Jonathan Larson Grant winner whose debut album earned a "brilliant" from Rolling Stone, give the imagined court its voice. Chris Giarmo, best known as "the mustachioed standout" in "David Byrne's American Utopia" and as drag beauty guru Kimberly Clark, brings his long collaborative history with both Mac and Christian to the piece. Wes Olivier—self-described "black, trans, fat, neurodivergent, disabled, Tolkien-obsessed theatre-drag-sideshow creature" and a veteran of Mac's "Bark of Millions"—rounds out the cast. Music direction and arrangements are by Terence Odonkor, whose Broadway credits include "A Strange Loop," "Dear Evan Hansen," and "Some Like It Hot."

The origin story for this strange conglomeration of ideas and powerful artists, as Mac tells it, begins with a death and a silence broken.

"It was a pivotal moment when (former justice Antonin) Scalia died suddenly," Mac says. "Clarence Thomas started speaking on the bench for the first time, and I started thinking: what wasn't he saying during all those decades before? What was he thinking when he wasn't speaking?" 

From that question, Mac began reading and researching Thomas in depth—his hearings, his rulings, his public statements—approaching the subject through a lens borrowed from Socratic inquiry. "So much of my understanding of Clarence Thomas was based on his horrible rulings, in my opinion, and I hadn't read or heard anything he'd said. So I thought, let me just start asking questions about him, and this kind of poured out of me."

Years of research yielded music. The sonic world snapped into focus when Mac encountered Christian's “Oratorio for Living Things.” “I just felt like, oh, that's the sonic world I want to live in—all these justices harmonizing with each other,” Mac says. The two had worked together many times but never written as a pair. This became the occasion.

Musical Manipulation

Christian, a 2025 MacArthur Fellow and Dutchess County resident, brings to the piece a composer's understanding of music as something that moves through the body. Asked how a work like this might reach beyond an already-sympathetic audience, she didn't hesitate.

"Music is one of the most aggressive forms of dramaturgical manipulation," Christian says. "It can be a superpower in the right hands. When you experience something musically, it goes through your body in a less invasive way than it does going through your brain exclusively. If you turn something into music you're wrapping the broccoli in chocolate."

Music can defang a figure you don't agree with, Christian argues, making audiences more apt to open their hearts and follow a story longer than they otherwise would.

The piece itself resists easy summary and Christian is glad. Built around layered fugues, physical canons, and figurative language pitched precisely to the meter, it is designed to mean different things to different ears. "It is my true belief that art at this level of maximalism and complexity serves as a Rorschach for whoever walks into the room," she says.

Radical Empathy

For Mac, the idea of radical empathy isn't soft-headed, it's strategic, aggressive, and even urgent.

"Clarence Thomas is a man who has actively worked against our rights as human beings for decades,” Mac says. “So what does it mean to stretch toward a person like that? What do you sacrifice when you do that? What happens to your mental state, while you're still fighting for your own rights?"

Mac frames curiosity itself as a form of resistance. "Curiosity is freedom in a way. When our rights are taken away, one of the ways we might be able to get them back is through curiosity—understanding why people are this way. All activism is potentially a form of curiosity. And if you make something at the Ancram Center for the Arts, how does it trickle up through the culture and find its way into the ears of people who wish you ill?"

Christian named the central tension in similarly unflinching terms: how does a person of moral conviction hold empathy for someone radically unlike themselves, while still holding that person accountable for the harm they've done?

Ancram Center's executive director Jeffrey Mousseau, who helped shepherd the project into the Play Lab fold, says the work aligns naturally with how the small Columbia County theater operates—and who it draws.

"Our Play Lab program is truly artist-centric. We reach out to artists we really believe in and want to support," Mousseau says. He finds the work's central question personally resonant and a huge thing to try to wrap his mind around.

He's also clear-eyed about who will fill the Ancram Center’s seats. "We're a small theater. We know many of the folks coming in by name, and I can tell you there is a spectrum of experience and political view coming through the door. The piece will land differently for everyone—and that's okay."

The Play Lab format invites audiences into the work's process, not its finished state. After each performance, Mac and Christian will lead a dialogue and teach the room a song from the show—the intention, as the center frames it, to leave having "de-escalated the rhetoric of our polarization to the tempo and poetry of song."

Mac offered perhaps the most concise case for why their approach is effective. "It is really hard to hate other people when you harmonize with them."