Talking Band to Celebrate 40th Anniversary in 2015

Since its founding in 1974 by Paul Zimet, Ellen Maddow, and Tina Shepard-all former members of Joseph Chaikin's seminal Open Theater- Talking Band has remained a cornerstone of New York City's avant-garde theater community. Ben Brantley of The New York Times recently called them "one of the boldest and most venerable politically minded companies in New York experimental theater." American Theater magazine has deemed them "one of the most exceptional theater companies in the country." The Talking Band celebrates their 40th anniversary with The Golden Toad, a four-part epic whose world premiere La MaMa presents January 23 - February 8, 2015.

Performances of The Golden Toad will take place at LaMaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 E 4th St.) January 23, 24, 26, 28-31 and February 5-8 at 8pm; and Jan 24, 25, 31 and February 1 & 7, 8 at 4pm. Critics are welcome as of Saturday Jan 24 at 8pm for an official opening on January 25 at 4pm. Tickets, $25 ($20 Student and Senior) are available by calling 646-430-5374 or visiting www.lamama.org.

Whether through collaboration or simply via the lasting impact of their paradigmatic artistry, the Talking Band-with its commitment to radical collaboration, and to the fusion of diverse theatrical styles and perspectives-has influenced generations of artists, both experimental and more mainstream, even in art forms beyond theater. To name just a few of their past and present collaborators: Julie Taymor, Anne Bogart, David Greenspan, Taylor Mac, Loudon Wainwright, Lisa D'Amour, Eisa Davis, Anne Kaufmann, Ken Rus Schmoll, Julie Atlas Muz, Machine Dazzle, Peter Gordon, Blue "Gene" Tyranny and Jack Ferver.

The Golden Toad exemplifies Talking Band's artistry. Written Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet, directed by Zimet, and featuring songs by Ellen Maddow and Elizabeth Swados, the work investigates the essence of character and identity, tracking a diverse set of characters over years and shifting circumstances. For the last year and a half, the Talking Band has been presenting each episode as a site-specific work-in-progress. The shifting location adds to the fluid notions of identity that the play is exploring. A multi sensory experience, The Golden Toad asks the question "Where is the 'real' person to be found in the ebb and flow of identity?"

Part 1 took place in townhouse garden in downtown Brooklyn surrounded by glass office towers, condominiums and construction sites-a small sliver of an older Brooklyn on the verge of erasure. Part 2 took place on a bus tour of the New Jersey Meadowlands, with a guide pointing out sites that no longer exist, or that exist only in traces. Part 3 took place in a pop-up thrift store, an ephemeral space. Part 4 takes place on October 25 & 26 at the Golden Toad karaoke bar (address?), a crossroad space where all the characters' lives finally intersect for an evening of revelation and transformation.

For the world premiere of The Golden Toad, the creative team-including Anna Kiraly (Set and Video Designer), Kiki Smith (Costume Designer), Lenore Doxsee (Lighting Designer), and Eric Wright (Puppets) will transform LaMaMa's Ellen Stuart Theater into four separate, immersive worlds. For each episode, the audience will move to a new area of the theater, with a new configuration and design-music, video and stunning puppetry-that at once references and reimagines the four original locales.

The cast features Finn Cutler, Michael Evans, James Tigger! Ferguson, Helen Gutowski, Melanie Herrera, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Maria Kovacevic, Ellen Maddow, Nicolas Noreña, Dara Orland and Tina Shepard.

The Golden Toad is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; as well as New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Talking Band has been making innovative and influential theater works in New York for 40 years. Collectively, the founders have earned 11 OBIE awards and numerous other honors. The company has performed at nearly all of New York City's celebrated downtown venues, including La MaMa, PS 122, Theater for the New City, Dance Theater Workshop, The Ohio Theater, The Flea Theater and HERE Arts Center. Nearly 50 of its original productions have toured the United States and the world. Notable productions include Marcellus Shale, The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, Bitterroot, Radnevsky's Real Magic, Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, Black Milk Quartet and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol.

Paul Zimet is the Artistic Director of Talking Band. Born and raised in New York City, he studied clarinet and voice at the High School of Music and Art, comparative literature at Columbia College, and medicine at Harvard Medical School. Music-theater works he has written and directed include Marcellus Shale, New Islands Archipelago, Radnevsky's Real Magic, Imminence, Belize, The Parrot, Star Messengers, Bitterroot, Party Time, Black Milk Quartet and New Cities. He also wrote Shadow Passports and Bone Room, and episodes 2 and 8 of Talking Band's serial mystery drama The Necklace. Zimet has directed over thirty productions for the Talking Band, and received a 2003 Village Voice OBIE award for his direction of Painted Snake in a Painted Chair by Ellen Maddow. In 2011, he directed Taylor Mac's The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, which Charles Isherwood of The New York Times named one of the year's top 10 productions. In 2010, Zimet directed The Deity, the first section of Taylor Mac's OBIE award winning epic The Lily's Revenge. He also received three OBIE awards for his work with the Open Theater and the Winter Project, both directed by Joseph Chaikin. Zimet has received the John C. Lippmann "New Frontier" Award and the Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theater, a Playwrights' Center National McKnight Fellowship, playwriting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a New Dramatists/Children's Theatre Playground commission, a Rockefeller/Creative Capital MAP Fund grant, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a 2008 NewYorkTheatre.Com People of the Year award. In addition to performing with Talking Band (most recently in The Peripherals and Panic! Euphoria! Blackout, both by Ellen Maddow), Zimet has performed with Mallory Catlett's Restless NYC, Otrabanda Company, The Stratford Festival of Canada, and the New York Shakespeare Festival. Zimet has taught for many years at colleges and universities, including Princeton, Williams, NYU, and Fordham. He is Associate Professor Emeritus in Theatre at Smith College, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Ellen Maddow has been working in the theatre in New York as a writer, composer, and performer for the last forty years. Born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of a screenwriter and a modern dancer, she attended Hollywood High School and received a B.A. in theatre from Antioch College in Ohio. She was a member of the Open Theatre from 1971-1973, performing in Terminal, Mutation Show, and Nightwalk. Ellen is a founding member of Talking Band and has performed in most of its works. Works she has written for the company include The Golden Toad (episodes 1 and 3), The Peripherals(studio album available on itunes), Panic!Euphoria!Blackout, Flip Side (published in Plays and Playwrights 2010), Delicious Rivers, Painted Snake in a Painted Chair (for which she received an Obie award), The Necklace (episodes 3 and 7), Tilt, Brown Dog is Dead, Fern and Rose, and five pieces about the avant-garde housewife, Betty Suffer: Bedroom Suite, Betty and the Blenders, Betty Blends the Blues, Dopplebetty, and Betty Suffer's Theory of Relativity. In addition to writing music for a number of the works mentioned above, she wrote the scores for Talking Band's production of Marcellus Shale, Hot Lunch Apostles,Taylor Mac's - Walk Across America for Mother Earth(published by Playscripts.), New Islands Archipelago, Radnevsky's Real Magic, Imminence (with Peter Gordon),Belize, The Parrot, Black Milk, The Plumber's Helper, New Cities, Star Messengers. She also composed the music for 1969 Terminal 1996 (directed by Joseph Chaikin), Jubileeand Home/Wire Walking for Risa Jarislow and Dancers. She wrote Persephone for Mettawee River Theatre Company. Ellen was a performer in Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge. She wrote music for Liz Duffy Adam's - Buccaneers commissioned and performed by the Children's Theatre of Minneapolis, and John Fleming's Superhuman Happiness commissioned and performed by Yellow Springs Kids Playhouse. Ellen is the recipient of an OBIE Award, a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, the Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theatre, a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship. She was a participant in the NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights, and received a New York Theatre.com People of the Year Award. She is an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Musical artist Elizabeth Swados is the author of twelve children's books, four novels, two collections of poetry, a collection of short non-fiction, and two books on creating musical theater for young people. She has composed, written, and directed theater for over thirty years and is perhaps best known for her Broadway and international hit Runaways. Her works include the Obie Award winning Trilogy at La Mama and Alice at the Palace with Meryl Streep at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Swados has had over thirty works performed in the off and off-off Broadway theater scene as well as in festivals and tours around the world. She also does workshops with at risk teenagers and people who suffer from cranial facial disorders. She is a full time teacher in the drama department at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and also teaches at The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts as a visiting artist. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, and Vogue. Her awards include five Tony nominations, three Obie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Fellowship, Helen Hayes Award, Lila Acheson Wallace award, and a Special International PEN Citation. Her latest awards include Best Book for Young Adults from New York Public Library and the Gaudium Award for enhancing the lives of others through art. Recent works include Piano Bar, a new musical about gentrification and the rising cost of living in NYC; musical compositions for The Tempest at La Mama; and an upcoming production of The Nomad.

Tina Shepard, though not involved in this production, is a founding member of Talking Band. She has worked as an actor/collaborator in most of the plays the company has created. In 1988 she was awarded an OBIE for her performance in The Talking Band production The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol. In 1987 Talking Band collaborated with The Otrabanda Company and director Anne Bogart to create No Plays, No Poetry. . . , a show based on the theoretical texts of Bertolt Brecht which won an OBIE in 1988. Tina continued working with Anne Bogart in several projects, among them American Vaudeville - in which she played both Mae West and Harpo Marx - at the Alley Theater, Houston; and Charles Mee's Orestes, performed at Tadashi Suzuki's theater in Togamura, Japan. Shepard has also worked extensively with Brian Jucha/Via Theater; Brooke Oharra/Theater of a Two Headed Calf; David Herskovits/Target Margin Theater; and John Kurzynowski/Theater Reconstruction Ensemble. She has taught acting, directing, voice & movement for actors at Princeton University, Smith College, and Williams College. She directed eleven productions at Williams, most of them original pieces created in collaboration with her students. For the past 12 years Tina has been teaching acting and movement (aikido) at Experimental Theater Wing/ NYU. She has directed a production of Poe In April, a script she made from some of Poe's stories; Plays, a script she made from Gertrude Stein's essay 'Plays'; Wilde Thing, a script she developed from Oscar Wilde's essay "The Decay of Lying"; and most recently, a production of The Serpent, originally created and toured in 1968 by the Open Theater ensemble.