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Speaking Band appears to me the proper identify for a corporation whose unadorned language and family instrumentation permit the musicality of phrases, spoken and sung, to reverberate. This homespun ensemble alternates leads. Paul and Ellen are each playwrights plus. And whereas the corporate’s canon has a recognizable stamp, as writers they every conjure worlds that each incorporate the opposite’s sensibilities and stay distinctly their very own.
As a performer and director, Paul has honed his work to its essence—completely pure, although by no means “naturalistic” or behavioral in the best way of a lot American appearing. No motion or mannerism wasted. Paul the playwright has created his personal specific type of music-theatre—mythic and up to date, lush and quotidian, literate and accessible. A grasp of theatrical epiphany, he stands in anguished marvel on the world, discovering moments of uncommon magnificence within the on a regular basis—watering a backyard, opening a fridge, sugaring tea. It’s not a sentimental pose; it’s an energetic one, mixing curiosity, affection, and horror, the best way characters in his Fata Morgana, on a pleasure cruise to inevitable catastrophe, intuit the world’s majesty on the on the spot their loss of life looms.
SOPHIA: Look how lovely it’s. So clear and clear. The ocean is reworked—super diamonds refracting rainbows of sunshine. How lovely it’s to be alive right here. How horrible it’s that we are going to die right here. It’s like a diorama of ice floes and sea lions on the Pure Historical past Museum […]And the painted water is transferring throughout us[…]and maybe within the distance there’s the smoke of a ship coming to rescue us.
A tough theatre magician, Paul targets the infinite with uncooked historic supplies: 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. Seeking thriller, 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 “maintain infinity within the palm of your arms…”
The chic, revelatory high quality of his writing feels steady with nineteenth century romanticism and transcendentalism. His language, although, like his appearing type, is that of a late-modern, Beckettian world—concentrated, stripped clear. Even pared down, nonetheless, his phrases yearn towards awe, the fertile paradise encountered by explorers/despoilers Lewis and Clark in Bitterroot:
Some search it within the poppy’s seed
Some within the nectar of the vine
Some in work, some in good deed
Some in our bodies shut entwined
So all search Paradise
As together with his early mentor Joe Chaikin, loss of life has haunted a lot of Paul’s work from the start. He’s a scientist and was coaching at Harvard Medical College earlier than amour de théâtre. In his theatre lab he research the poisons of the world: colonialism, racism, financial enslavement, political betrayal. He’s a political author in a lyric poet’s clothes.
The primary time I noticed Ellen Maddow in a play by Ellen Maddow, circa 1986, she was enjoying music on kitchen home equipment. The play was Betty and the Blenders. Ellen was the aforementioned Betty, an avant-garde hausfrau as Smokey Robinson, backed not by the Miracles, however the Miracle Whips. Discover a fork and a mixing bowl, play the picket spoons, or line up the basic Oster beehive blenders, and also you’ve received your self an orchestra. In her oeuvre, folks make music with mops in buckets or to the 6/8 rhythm of a bus’s windshield wipers. Nevertheless unusual this would possibly sound to, say, your loved ones in Ohio, it really works each time. Einstein on the Hamilton Seaside.
If Paul’s easy prose yearns towards the poetic, Ellen’s finds a poetry that’s exactly prose. She is aware of, for instance, the lyricism of the checklist. Her performs are stuffed with them. Panic! Euphoria! Blackout is structured round lists. Primarily based on a collection of sixteenth-century Belgian work of cash lenders, three clearly Jewish merchants swap items after which pack these items away to make a diasporic escape. One of many merchants, Rubin, prepares for the day’s enterprise by transferring objects as he names them, traversing time as he goes.
Rubin
A pair of footwear for a loaf of bread
Two stitching needles for a bowl of soup
A bail of hay for a gallon of cider
A bottle of beer for a experience into city
5 brown eggs for 3 cigarettes
12 silver cash for per week of labor
A truckload of gravel for a Border Collie
60 goats for a teenage bride
Subsequent yr’s corn crop for a bar of gold
16 bucks for a sweater from Bangladesh
2,000 {dollars} for a Kate Spade purse
As in her loft, the place artwork, love, and household are inseparable, within the topsy-turvy Maddow-lands of Ellen’s performs, colleagues, pals, and household kind a single circle. In Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, she dubs that group “our fuzzy cliquey cluster.” A physician named Walter describes the magic of strolling right into a home belonging to a member of this friend-family:
How we present up like peach pits left on a plate and sprout and unfold and intertwine. How our hair turns to leaves, how our mouths develop into fruit, how the furnishings rumbles, the air turns electrical […] after I come over right here to satisfy my pals […] the roof pops off, the wind blows in, and I tumble and plunge, uncontrolled, head over heels within the candy unknown.
The Sanskrit phrase “sutra” comes from the basis which means to stitch, the road that holds issues collectively. Ellen is a secret sew-er, unspooling the road that ties characters (us) to one another, in methods we don’t even discover. She is a tailor with the magical needle and thread, a Mama Sutra.
One of the vital joyful theatre experiences I had tiptoeing again into theatres as Covid waned in 2022 was TB’s manufacturing of Ellen’s Lemon Women, directed by Paul at La Mama. The present facilities on 5 girls of their seventies, pals from Lemon Elementary college, who get roped right into a efficiency artwork workshop “on the rec middle! Within the basement of the Mazuma Homes! Sponsored by Artwork for the Artless! Underwritten by the mayor! Snacks supplied by town council!” The buddies start cranky and dyspeptic, actually displaced by crowds of younger professionals who’ve overrun their world. Their life collectively infiltrates their artwork till it’s arduous to know the place one ends and the opposite begins. And naturally, this friend-family emerges fabulous—rocking their dances, interlocking tales, and songs. “Artwork for the Artless” (the play’s subtitle) certainly!
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