Talking Band Debuts THE PERIPHERALS, Previewing Tonight, 5/3

By: BWW News Desk May. 03, 2012

The Obie Award winning Talking Band presents the World Premiere of THE PERIPHERALS, a new music theatre work written and composed by Ellen Maddow and directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. Previews begin tonight, May 3 at Dixon Place with opening slated for May 11.

THE PERIPHERALS is a play in the form of a rock concert. Sluice and Suzy Q, well past their youth, perform a subterranean pop music concert, accompanied by back up singers and a rock band, The Peripherals. They sing eclectic, original songs that juxtapose pop music and stories of peripheral people, who slip by unnoticed but whose lives are unexpectedly deep, colorful, complex, subtle and unique.

The production stars Viva DeConcini, Michael Evans, Kim Gambino, Sam Kulik, Ellen Maddow, Kamala Sankaram, and Paul Zimet with sets and video by Sue Rees, costumes by Olivera Gajic, lights by Alan C. Edwards, stage management by Lisa McGinn and additional videos by David Dawkins and Ruth Marantz

Director Ken Rus Schmoll is the recipient of a 2009 Obie Award for The Foundry Theater's Telephone. His credits include Will Eno's Middletown (The Vineyard), Erin Courtney's A Map of Virtue (13P), Ann Marie Healy’s What Once We Felt (The Duke on 42nd Street), Anne Washburn’s The Internationalist (Vineyard Theatre; 13P), Jordan Harrison’s Amazons and Their Men (Clubbed Thumb), Kristen Kosmas’s Hello Failure (PS 122), Kate E. Ryan’s Mark Smith (13P), Anton Dudley’s Honor and the River (NY Stage and Film; SPF), and Kim Kefgen and Loren Noveck’s Girl Blog from Iraq (The Culture Project).

Ellen Maddow, an Obie Award winning playwright, and a founding member of the Talking Band has written, composed, and performed in most of its works. Plays she has written include Panic! Euphoria! Blackout, Flip Side (published in Plays and Playwrights 2010), Delicious Rivers, Painted Snake In A Painted Chair (OBIE Award) and five pieces about the avant-garde housewife, Betty Suffer. She is a recipient of a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, the Frederick Loewe Award in Musical Theatre, a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship, NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights, New York Theatre.com People of the Year Award, member of the Open Theater, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.

Talking Band’s original interdisciplinary performance work has been a cornerstone of New York’s avant-garde theater community for over 35 years. Since its founding in 1974 by Paul Zimet, Ellen Maddow and Tina Shepard—all former members of Joseph Chaikin's seminal Open Theater—the company has collaborated with designers and musicians as well as poets from around the world to create new theater pieces of rich and energetic language underscored by a broad range of musical expression and visual imagery. The company has produced over 40 new works since it’s founding, each marked by a radical diversity of artistic expression and a re-imagining of the creative process. American Theater named Talking Band "one of the most exceptional theater companies in the country," and collectively, the company and founders have earned 15 OBIE awards recognizing their work. Talking Band has performed at nearly all of New York’s celebrated experimental theater venues including La MaMa ETC, Ohio Theater, P.S.122, Dance Theater Workshop, The Flea, and HERE Arts Center. The company boasts an extensive touring history in the U.S., as well in 14 countries internationally. Talking Band productions of note include: The Walk Across America For Mother Earth, Bitterroot, Radnevsky's Real Magic, Painted Snake in a Painted Chair, Black Milk Quartet and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol. For more info visit www.talkingband.org.

Dixon Place is a non-profit organization founded in 1986 to provide a space for literary and performing artists to create and develop new works in front of a live audience. While other venues of its kind have since died off, or now only present established artists, Dixon Place remains at the heart of the New York experimental performance scene. Taking risks is crucial to the life of Dixon Place, its artists and audiences. Dixon Place's primary commitments are to bring artists and audiences together through live performance in order to expand the understanding of the creative process and its final product, and to provide a supportive environment for emerging artists to present new work. Over the last twenty-five years, Dixon Place has successfully maintained its intimate atmosphere and unique environment while increasing its programming to fulfill the need for performance opportunities for the New York community of performing and literary artists.

THE PERIPHERALS runs May 3-19, Thursday & Friday at 7:30pm, Saturday at 7:30pm & 9:30pm. Dixon Place is located at 161A Chrystie Street between Delancey and Rivington -- accessible from the F train at 2nd Avenue or the J train at Bowery. The Dixon Place Lounge is open before, during and after the show. Drinks may be taken into the theater. Tickets are $25, available at 212-352-3101 orwww.dixonplace.org.

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