Talking Band seems to me the perfect name for a company whose unadorned language and household instrumentation allow the musicality of words, spoken and sung, to reverberate. This homespun ensemble alternates leads. Paul and Ellen are both playwrights plus. And while the company’s canon has a recognizable stamp, as writers they each conjure worlds that both incorporate the other’s sensibilities and remain distinctly their own.
As a performer and director, Paul has honed his work to its essence—utterly natural, though never “naturalistic” or behavioral in the way of much American acting. No movement or mannerism wasted. Paul the playwright has created his own particular style of music-theatre—mythic and contemporary, lush and quotidian, literate and accessible. A master of theatrical epiphany, he stands in anguished wonder at the world, finding moments of rare beauty in the everyday—watering a garden, opening a refrigerator, sugaring tea. It’s not a sentimental pose; it’s an active one, mixing curiosity, affection, and horror, the way characters in his Fata Morgana, on a pleasure cruise to inevitable disaster, intuit the world’s majesty at the instant their death looms.
SOPHIA: Look how beautiful it is. So clean and clear. The sea is transformed—tremendous diamonds refracting rainbows of light. How beautiful it is to be alive here. How terrible it is that we will die here. It’s like a diorama of ice floes and sea lions at the Natural History Museum […]And the painted water is moving all around us[…]and perhaps in the distance there is the smoke of a ship coming to rescue us.
A rough theatre magician, Paul targets the infinite with raw historical materials: a nineteenth-century theatre troupe portraying the Lewis and Clark expedition in Bitterroot or, in Star Messengers, daffy commedia dell ‘arte entr’actes about Renaissance scientists Galileo, Kepler, and Brahe. In search of mystery, he investigates science, divinity, the supernatural, and the hokey. Like romantic polymath William Blake, whom he portrays (stark) nakedly in Belize, Paul sees “the world in a grain of sand…” and strives to “hold infinity in the palm of your hands…”
The sublime, revelatory quality of his writing feels continuous with nineteenth century romanticism and transcendentalism. His language, though, like his acting style, is that of a late-modern, Beckettian world—concentrated, stripped clean. Even pared down, however, his phrases yearn toward awe, the fertile paradise encountered by explorers/despoilers Lewis and Clark in Bitterroot:
Some seek it in the poppy’s seed
Some in the nectar of the vine
Some in work, some in good deed
Some in bodies close entwined
So all seek Paradise
As with his early mentor Joe Chaikin, death has haunted much of Paul’s work from the beginning. He is a scientist and was training at Harvard Medical School before amour de théâtre. In his theatre lab he studies the poisons of the world: colonialism, racism, economic enslavement, political betrayal. He is a political writer in a lyric poet’s clothing.
The first time I saw Ellen Maddow in a play by Ellen Maddow, circa 1986, she was playing music on kitchen appliances. The play was Betty and the Blenders. Ellen was the aforementioned Betty, an avant-garde hausfrau as Smokey Robinson, backed not by the Miracles, but the Miracle Whips. Find a fork and a mixing bowl, play the wooden spoons, or line up the classic Oster beehive blenders, and you’ve got yourself an orchestra. In her oeuvre, people make music with mops in buckets or to the 6/8 rhythm of a bus’s windshield wipers. However strange this might sound to, say, your family in Ohio, it works every time. Einstein on the Hamilton Beach.
If Paul’s simple prose yearns toward the poetic, Ellen’s finds a poetry that is precisely prose. She knows, for example, the lyricism of the list. Her plays are full of them. Panic! Euphoria! Blackout is structured around lists. Based on a series of sixteenth-century Belgian paintings of money lenders, three clearly Jewish traders swap goods and then pack those goods away to make a diasporic escape. One of the traders, Rubin, prepares for the day’s business by moving objects as he names them, traversing time as he goes.
Rubin
A pair of shoes for a loaf of bread
Two sewing needles for a bowl of soup
A bail of hay for a gallon of cider
A bottle of beer for a ride into town
5 brown eggs for 3 cigarettes
12 silver coins for a week of work
A truckload of gravel for a Border Collie
60 goats for a teenage bride
Next year’s corn crop for a bar of gold
16 bucks for a sweater from Bangladesh
2,000 dollars for a Kate Spade handbag
As in her loft, where art, love, and family are inseparable, in the topsy-turvy Maddow-lands of Ellen’s plays, colleagues, friends, and family form a single circle. In Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, she dubs that group “our fuzzy cliquey cluster.” A doctor named Walter describes the magic of walking into a house belonging to a member of this friend-family:
How we show up like peach pits left on a plate and sprout and spread and intertwine. How our hair turns to leaves, how our mouths become fruit, how the furniture rumbles, the air turns electric […] when I come over here to meet my friends […] the roof pops off, the wind blows in, and I tumble and plunge, out of control, head over heels in the sweet unknown.
The Sanskrit word “sutra” comes from the root that means to sew, the line that holds things together. Ellen is a secret sew-er, unspooling the line that ties characters (us) to each other, in ways we don’t even notice. She is a tailor with the magical needle and thread, a Mama Sutra.
One of the most joyful theatre experiences I had tiptoeing back into theatres as Covid waned in 2022 was TB’s production of Ellen’s Lemon Girls, directed by Paul at La Mama. The show centers on five women in their seventies, friends from Lemon Elementary school, who get roped into a performance art workshop “at the rec center! In the basement of the Mazuma Houses! Sponsored by Art for the Artless! Underwritten by the mayor! Snacks provided by the city council!” The friends begin cranky and dyspeptic, literally displaced by crowds of young professionals who’ve overrun their world. Their life together infiltrates their art until it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins. And of course, this friend-family emerges fabulous—rocking their dances, interlocking stories, and songs. “Art for the Artless” (the play’s subtitle) indeed!
