The Talking Band has been making collaborative, experimental theater for over forty years, with a uniquely heightened theatrical awareness and a deeply musical sensibility.

The idiosyncratic, dream-like plays of Rosemary Moore are not easy to define. They live just at the edge of realism, bordering on the elusive and almost surreal, creating an odd yet familiar vision.

Spring, and it’s been raining in Brooklyn for too many days. A single, exotic-sounding songbird suddenly re-appears, having returned from a winter spent who knows where. Bits of song pierce through the grind of a passing car’s engine.

I am forever under the spell of Neil Gaiman’s exquisitely disturbing Coraline. I’m remembering how I tried reading it aloud to my children and that by Chapter 2, they literally made me close the book as it became too terrifying for them to let me go on.

Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow are the founding members of the Talking Band, an experimental theater company that I’ve known and worked with over the years— as a performer in their 1989 piece New Cities and participant in their ongoing Performance Lab, where a wide variety of theatrical questions are explored without the pressure of a production.