The genre-busting, glitter-dusting performance artist Taylor Mac and his musical director, Matt Ray, have been named winners of the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, for their 24-hour work, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.”

The piece, billed as a “radical fairy realness ritual,” is a decade-by-decade walk through American history from 1776 to 2016, told through the songs of the time, reinterpreted through a radical queer lens.

It was performed in its entirety last fall at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, first in three-hour segments and then in a continuous 24-hour marathon, complete with shared audience meals, group dance breaks and, mercifully, a sleeping loft for weaklings (like this reporter).

The prize jury called it “a vast, immersive, subversive, audacious and outrageous experience,” that uses a variety of techniques to “explode our country’s history” and show, in Mr. Mac’s words, how “in America the oppressor is forgiven but the outsider is vilified.” (Wesley Morris, reviewing the marathon performance in The New York Times, called it simply “one of the great experiences of my life.”)