Photo Flash: Taylor Mac's THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA FOR MOTHER EARTH

A play with music written by and starring Taylor Mac, with music by Ellen Maddow, THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA is directed by Paul Zimet, artistic director of Talking Band.

Mr. Mac heads the 12-member cast of THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA, which also features Will Badgett, Viva DeConcini, Daphne Gaines, Francis Jue, Ellen Maddow, Steven Rattazzi, Tina Shepard, Jack Wetherall and Nikki Zialcita.

Taylor Mac's celebrated theatricality comes to life in this exuberant tale based on his experiences in 1992 at age 18 when - eager to escape his conservative, suburban upbringing -- he joined a ragtag group of political activists on a nine-month protest walk across America from New York to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Itself a virtual melting pot comprised of aging hippies, baby hippies, punks, anarchists, dykes, radical fairies, men, women, senior citizens, children and an unlikely gaggle of Belgians, the group of marchers discovered during their trek that community, common purpose and camping out in America's Heartland do not necessarily equal unity - and that being an
activist is, in fact, not a cakewalk.

THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA FOR MOTHER EARTH is a theatrical pastiche of humor, Chekhovian introspection, pageantry, heartbreak and coming-of-age as written by Taylor Mac and brought to the stage by Talking Band, one of the country's leading experimental theatre companies. The Talking Band, in fact, commissioned Mr. Mac to write THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA.

In trademark Mac-style, THE WALK ACROSS AMERICA will have costume design by Mr. Mac's LILY'S REVENGE collaborator Machine Dazzle, along with scenic design by Anna Kiraly and lighting design by Lenore Doxsee.

Taylor Mac is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, and sometime director and producer. Time Out New York has called him, "One of the most exciting theater artists of our time" while American Theater Magazine says, "Mac is one of this country's most exciting, heroic and disarmingly funny
playwrights." Taylor's play, THE LILY'S REVENGE was a 36 cast-member extravaganza that
he wrote, starred in, and co-produced with the HERE Arts Center. It was rated the best play in 2009 by Time Out New York and Paper Magazine and appeared on the top ten lists of many other publications including The New Yorker and The New York Post. In his review of LILY'S REVENGE, Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times that the show is "a scrappy spectacle that splashes across the stage."

Other recent plays written and performed by Taylor Mac in include THE YOUNG LADIES OF, RED TIDE BLOOMING and THE BEAST OF TAYLOR MAC. Mr. Mac has performed his work in The Sydney Opera House, The San Francisco MOMA and Opera House, New York's Public Theater, Stockholm's Sodra Teatern, The Spoleto Festival, The Bumbershoot Festival, The Time Based Arts Festival, Dublin's Project Arts Center, London's Soho Theater, and literally hundreds of other theaters, museums, music halls, cabarets, and festivals around the globe. He has acted in many original plays (by others), dozens of revivals, and in
featured roles on television with The BBC2, BBC4, MTV, and The Sci-Fi Channel.

Photo credit: Darien Bates and Kanan Shah