Talking Band to Present 50th Anniversary Season With Three Premieres, 600 Highwaymen & Anne Bogart

Talking Band has revealed details for its 50th Anniversary Season, which includes three world premieres and collaborations with fellow theatrical luminaries 600 Highwaymen and Anne Bogart. The boldness of this milestone season, an accomplishment few artist-led companies have achieved, is one reason Talking Band has been a cornerstone of New York City's avant-garde theater community since its founding in 1974.

 

Talking Band's 50th anniversary season kicks off with the world premiere of The Following Evening, February 1–18 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC). Created by 600 Highwaymen for Talking Band, The Following Evening is an intimate portrait of four artists set against the landscape of New York, a city of perpetual loss and renewal. A unique collaboration between two theater-making couples a generation apart – Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet of Talking Band, and Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen – this affecting new work is a tribute to theater – an art form that vanishes – and the people who are devoted to it. Tickets are now on sale at www.pacnyc.org.

 

Next, Talking Band reunites with director Anne Bogart for Existentialism, presented by La MaMa at the Ellen Stewart Theater from February 23–March 10. Existentialism is an urgent, funny, and poetic work created and directed by Bogart in collaboration with Maddow and Zimet who perform. It takes place in two small houses side by side in a vast space. A woman lives in one. A man in the other—a couple, both close and apart. During their daily routines, they grapple with the big question: how to create a meaningful life in a world where the only certainty is the inexorable passage of time. Bogart won her first Obie award 35 years ago for her previous collaboration with Talking Band, No Plays No Poetry. Tickets are now on sale at www.lamama.org.

Talking Band closes its 50th anniversary season with Shimmer and Herringbone, May 1–19 at Mabou Mines' Second Floor Theater at 122CC. In this music-theater work, Talking Band has commissioned the acclaimed costume designer Olivera Gajic to be the lead artist. Drawing inspiration from Gajic's costume designs, Maddow and Zimet wrote Shimmer and Herringbone (set in a clothing store by that name). The show, with music composed by Maddow for a live string trio, is a farce of chance encounters in which people tired of their old selves hope to find the clothes that will fit their new ones.

Since its founding in 1974 by Paul Zimet, Ellen Maddow, and Tina Shepard—all former members of Joseph Chaikin's iconic Open Theater—Talking Band has remained a cornerstone of New York City's avant-garde theater community. Over the past 50 years, Talking Band has created over 50 new works illuminating the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary life, each marked by a commitment to radical collaboration and a fusion of diverse theatrical styles and perspectives. Combining richly textured music-theater with striking visual imagery, Talking Band's elegant, eloquent, profound performance work is infused with creative generosity that makes each show an experience that is as emotionally moving as it is aesthetically rich. Collectively, the company and founders have earned 15 OBIE Awards and numerous other honors. Talking Band is a resident company at La MaMa and has performed at nearly all of New York City's celebrated downtown venues. Its original productions have toured throughout the U.S. and internationally to 14 countries.

 

Please visit www.talkingband.org to learn more about its 50th anniversary season.

 

About the Artists

Ellen Maddow is a founding member of Talking Band. Plays she has written and composed music for include Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless, Fusiform Gyrus - A Septet For Two Scientists and Five Horn, Fat Skirt Big Nozzle (with Louise Smith), Burnished by Brief, The Golden Toad (with Paul Zimet), The Peripherals, Panic! Euphoria! Blackout, Flip Side, Delicious Rivers, Painted Snake In A Painted Chair and five pieces about the avant-garde housewife, Betty Suffer. She also composed music for Talking Band's production of The City of No Illusions, The Room Sings and Marcellus Shale, Taylor Mac's Walk Across America For Mother Earth, and Liz Duffy Adam's Buccaneers (Children's Theatre of Minneapolis) among others. Maddow performed in Clare Barron's Dance Nation at Playwrights Horizons, for which she received a Drama Desk Award, and at Steppenwolf in Chicago. She is a recipient of a 2020 NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award, an Obie Award for Playwriting, a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship, a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, the Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theatre, and the NEA/TCG Award for Playwrights. She was a member of the Open Theatre from 1971-1973 and is an alumnus of New Dramatists.

 

Paul Zimet (director) 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 Lemon Girls or Art for the Artless, City of No Illusions, The Room Sings, The Golden Toad (with Ellen Maddow) Marcellus Shale, New Islands Archipelago, Imminence, Belize, The Parrot, Star Messengers, Bitterroot, Party Time, Black Milk Quartet and New Cities. Paul has directed over 30 productions for Talking Band and received a 2003 Village Voice OBIE award for his direction of Painted Snake in a Painted Chair by Ellen Maddow. He directed Taylor Mac's The Walk Across America for Mother Earth and The Deity, the first section of Taylor Mac's OBIE award winning epic, The Lily's Revenge. He received three OBIE awards for his work with the Open Theater and the Winter Project, both directed by Joseph Chaikin, 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, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is Associate Professor Emeritus in Theatre at Smith College, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone (together as 600 Highwaymen) have been making theater together since 2009. Their early works were performed in church basements, vacant stores, and bingo halls. Since then, their award-winning performances have been seen in the U.S., at The Public Theater, The Invisible Dog Arts Center, American Repertory Theater, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Kimmel Center, La Jolla Playhouse, Luminato Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, On The Boards, The Public Theater, Spoleto Festival, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Woolly Mammoth; and internationally at Noorderzon (The Netherlands), Bristol Old Vic (UK), Centre Pompidou (France), Dublin Theater Festival (Ireland), Festival Theaterformen (Germany), Luminato Festival (Toronto), Onassis Cultural Centre (Greece), Parc de la Villette (France), Salzburg Festival (Austria), Volkstheater Wien (Austria), Theaterspektakel (Switzerland), Singapore International Festival of Arts, and The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. They are recipients of an Obie Award and Switzerland's ZKB Patronize Prize, and their work has been nominated for two Bessie Awards, a Drama League Award, and Austria's Nestroy Prize. In 2016, Abby and Michael were named artist fellows by the New York Foundation for the Arts. They are currently Associate Artists of IN SITU, the European platform for artistic creation in public space.

Anne Bogart is a theater and opera director and former Co-Artistic Director of the Siti Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is a Professor at Columbia University where she runs the Graduate Directing Program. Later works with SITI include Radio Christmas Carol, Falling & Loving; The Bacchae, Chess Match No. 5; Lost in the Stars; The Theater is a Blank Page; Persians; Steel Hammer; A Rite; Café Variations; Trojan Women (After Euripides); and American Document. Recent operas include Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale, Handel's Alcina, Dvorak's Dimitrij Verdi's Macbeth, Bellini's Norma, and Bizet's Carmen. She is the author of six books: A Director Prepares; The Viewpoints Book; And Then, You Act; Conversations with Anne, What's the Story, and The Art of Resonance.

Costume designer Olivera Gajic was born and raised in Serbia. She began her career designing costumes for Serbian theater and television after studying at Belgrade's Academy of Fine Arts. In 1999, Gajic moved to the U.S., where she received a MFA. in Theatre Design. She has been living and working there ever since. Gajic has 200+ theater, opera, dance, and film productions to her credit. For Talking Band, she designed costumes for The Necklace, New Island Archipelago & Peripherals. Her work has been shown at exhibitions including the U.S. national exhibit at the 2004 & 2007 Prague Quadrennial and Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance (Lincoln Center), Costume at the Turn of the Century (Moscow), Vesuario a Scena (Mexico City). Gajic is a recipient of the 2004 NEA/TCG CDP for Designers, 2010 IT Award for Outstanding Costume Design, 2010 TDF/Irene Sharaff Young Master Award, 2012 Barrymore Award for Outstanding Costume Design, and a 2014 Bessie Award Recipient for Outstanding Visual Design.
 

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