When they started making theater together fifty years ago – at the same time that they started making love together, and making a life together – they’d already been eating cheap food, drinking sour coffee and putting up with bad plumbing. “This sounds like misery, but this wasn’t misery. This is just what it costs” – what it costs to do downtown theater — Paul Zimet says in “The Following Evening,” a downtown theater piece about what it’s been like to do downtown theater, featuring Talking Band, which is the name of the 50-year-old theater company led by Zimet and his wife Ellen Maddow.
“The Following Evening” is an effort to present this long-time couple’s lives in the theater, through scattershot scenes and songs, reminiscences, reveries, reflection, and re-creation. At times they dance, but slowly, methodically, as if following instructions, movement that usually feels more like a rehearsal, or a theater exercise, than a performance. (One such moment consists of an exercise assigned by Ellen’s physical therapist, an example of their self-deprecating humor.) The title suggests the reaction following a Talking Band performance – the hope for success, the feeling of disappointment and self-doubt. As Ellen says at one point, initiating a long exchange between the two of them: “Here we are. Again again again again, starting again starting again. You work so hard to make it great. And was it great? Who knows.”
“Who knows,” Paul echoes. “Ask me tomorrow.”
But the title also suggests that, for all the sacrifices and doubts, they persist, putting on another show the next evening.
Those of us who have seen Talking Band before – the last show I saw of theirs was their 57th, “City of No Illusions,” almost exactly five years ago – know not to expect something straightforward. This seems especially true this time around, even though it’s about their lives. For starters, the portrait they perform about themselves is written by somebody else – another couple who have made a life in the theater, Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, who call themselves 600 Highwaymen, and join them on stage for the latter half of the 80 minute show. Although a generation younger – in their early 40s – they share similar experiences of sacrifice, and self-doubt, and persistence.
There is also an extra layer of artifice, and irony, because the loft where Paul and Ellen have lived, raised a family and performed in SoHo since the time the area was an outpost of small factories and poor artists, is re-created in “The Following Evening” by a nondescript stage set in one of the venues of PAC NYC, the monumental new performing arts center with glowing marble and soaring ceilings at the site of the World Trade Center. The venue is configured for just 80 seats for this show, just like the Off-Off Broadway theaters where Talking Head (and 600 Highwaymen) usually perform, except of course nothing like those old, often rundown spaces. I don’t imagine they serve sour coffee at Metropolis by Marcus Samuelsson, the gleaming new eatery in the lobby of PACNYC.
Still, Talking Band remains true to their roots, refusing to mainstream their theatrical vision for the sake of clarity, even when those unacquainted with New York City’s avant-garde theater scene might feel lost. Paul recalls how he met and started working with “Joe,” which is where he met Ellen – without explaining that Joe is Joseph Chaikin, founder of The Open Theater, a long-defunct but still influential troupe that explored new techniques for artistic expression. For her part, Ellen makes a passing reference to “Mia” – presumably Mia Yoo, artistic director of La MaMa ETC, where Talking Band is a long-timae resident company and will be performing a new work, “Existentialism” beginning later this month.
Those with the patience to sit attentively through the seeming randomness and occasional weirdness of “The Following Evening” — and I’ll confess my attention flagged towards the end – are rewarded with small, savory moments of a life lived while making theater: the note they receive from a theatergoer that makes their day; their recollection of their next-door neighbor, a painter who grew ill and died; Ellen’s need for spontaneity in her art (“I don’t want feedback. I don’t want notes. I just want to have ideas and follow tmilhem”); Paul’s bike ride through his old neighborhood, which prompts the 81-year-old artist to think both of the past and the future (“I do the math, counting years. Maybe ten more. How many shows can we make in ten years. Don’t plan, can’t plan.”); their half-funny, half-poignant ambivalence towards a lyetter informing them they’ve been nominated for an award intended to “encourage future ambitions and discoveries.”; Ellen recounting the time she was 13 and visiting New York from California with her father, and an actor friend of the family invited them backstage after a show. “And so we go backstage, andst. the actors were sitting around, waiting for the next show. They were in their underwear and eating takeout… out of, you know, takeout containers. And I just thought, THAT. THAT looks fucking great. THAT’S what I’m gonna do.”
The Following Evening
PACNYC through February 18
Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $29-$59
Created by 600 Highwaymen for Talking Band
Written and Directed by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone
Sound Design by Avi Amon and Ryan Gamblin
Original Music by Avi Amon
Scenic & Costume Design by Jian Jung
Lighting Design by Eric Southern
Dramaturgy/Script Development: Andrew Kircher and Lucia Scheckner
Cast: Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet, Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone
Photographs by Maria Baranova
