Directed by Paul Zimet
Music by Ellen Maddow, Harry Mann, and Sybille Hayn
Costume Design by Kiki Smith
Set Design by Nic Ularu
Lighting Design by Lenore Doxsee
Stage Manager Lisa McGinn
Assistant Director Toby Bercovici
With: Will Badgett, NicHi Douglas, Ellen Maddow, Ed RosenBerg, Tina Shepard, Loudon Wainwright, and Jack Wetherall. Also Michael Greehan and Linda Tardif
2012: Revival, March 1–18, La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, NYC
“One of the boldest and most venerable politically minded companies in New York experimental theater.”
– The New York Times
A featured production in La MaMa’s 50th anniversary season, Talking Band transforms the Ellen Stewart Theatre into a fairground, complete with game booths, food stands, and geek shows, where sex and religion bash up against each other with perfect theatrical panache. First produced at La MaMa in 1983, Hot Lunch Apostles imagined a near future with fifty million unemployed in an economically devastated America.
To survive in a time of desperate competition and fervent religion, a traveling troupe of carnival strippers switches to performing stories from the Bible. In its first remounting in 28 years, the play proves to be as prophetic as it is provocative. [/one_third]
“The Talking Band’s Hot Lunch Apostles did for me what art is supposed to do: it shook me up, made me question fundamental assumptions, and launched a dialogue (sometimes internal, sometimes with others) about some core issues of humanity …Goldfarb conjures here a time and place similar to yet distant from our own. The economy is rotten and people have become desperate … Zimet and his cast are unsparing in their presentation of the carnival’s baseness, and the show features several burlesque numbers with full nudity that bring to question the very nature and purpose of such public exhibition …