Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet in Existentialism. Photo: Maria Baranova

Avant garde performance is such a subtle thing, shifting from the sublime to the abject or ridiculous at a breath. You never know when the artists are going to be too greedy for the audience’s attention, or too dismissive of it. But when you combine the forces of La Mama (founded in 1961), Talking Band (founded in 1974 by former members of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater)–both still going strong–and Anne Bogart, founder of the recently shuttered SITI Company (founded in 1992), you are in the hands of true masters of the form. You’re in one of the spaces and among some of the people who created Off-Off-Broadway, and it’s such a joy simply to see them all work. There’s a comfort and a confidence in their craft that anchors everything that happens in this show–every design choice, every word spoken by either Ellen Maddow or Paul Zimet, every piece of collaged text and precise step that creator/director Bogart has staged. It sounds a little silly to say that a piece called Existentialism, which is actually about the eponymous philosophy as much as it’s about anything–inspired by and assembled from the works of philosophers including Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maggie Nelson, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, and more–fills the room with warmth and a lightness of touch, but it’s true. 

Talking Band’s work illuminates “the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary life,” and that’s a perfect description here. On the one hand, this play involves nothing but the quotidian activities of daily life: grocery shopping, watering plants, reading on the porch, listening to the radio; doing a little writing, a little sweeping, a little dancing; watching the sun go down and the snow fall; feeling time pass. And on the other, it’s about the largest of ideas: Why do we exist? What is the meaning of free will? Of gender? Of time? What impact does any individual have upon the world, or upon other people?

On a platform island set in the center of the Ellen Stewart theater’s playing space sit two tiny houses, reached by a set of symmetrical rectangular paths. In one, there is a woman (Maddow); she has planter boxes in front. In the other, there is a man (Zimet); he has a rocking chair.

Zimet and Maddow (two-thirds of the core Talking Band ensemble) have been partners in life and in art for many years now, and their trust in each other anchors the piece: they’re two aging, crotchety, set-in-their-ways people living in adjacent spaces of body and mind. They’re separate, but inseparable; they annoy each other and adore each other. They rarely speak directly to each other–sometimes they share groceries; sometimes they have sex; sometimes they dance. (One of my favorite moments, in fact, is a dance break, where a jazz number “appropriate” for a couple their age gives way to “People Who Died,” a New Wave tune from 1980 reminding us that these are the artists native to that era of the downtown NYC scene.) But they’re constantly in dialogue nonetheless. Their thoughts interweave; they type in syncopation on identical typewriters from opposite sides of a wall. Perhaps he muses more on the nature of things, she on the nature of gender and identity, but both are engaged in the struggle to make meaning of the world, and in the struggle to face one’s own mortality.

The script is mostly collaged from dense written work, and yet Maddow and Zimet imbue it with a sense of discovery, a relish in each thought and in the delight of showing off to each other. Their performances are specific, lived-in, and familiar; they capture the dailiness of these people’s lives even when they’re quoting Sartre.

And what Bogart, a director of physical and imagistic precision, also brings to it is the magic of the theatrically real: The economy of movement and the physical comedy with which Zimet and Maddow sneak back and forth between the tiny square houses of Anna Kiraly’s set, as simplistic and whimsical as a child’s drawing. The carefully chosen physical objects, like the matching typewriters or her shopping cart full of bright, recognizable packaged groceries or his old-fashioned radio. groceries), The giant nature projections that fill the upstage wall and give a sense of place to the intentionally abstracted set (projections also by Kiraly). The layers of Gabriel Berry’s costumes that come on and off to evoke seasons. The rich saturated colors and deep shadows of Brian Scott’s lighting. The layering of music and sound effect to create a full auditory score in Darron L. West’s sound design. All the design elements are on point, in a way that makes it feel, in fact, like the piece is scored not just with sound but with lighting and projections; there’s a fully realized environment in all theatrical dimensions.

There’s only a hit of a narrative here–and it’s as much about the passing of time as anything else. There’s little that passes as conventional character or dialogue, but there’s so much rigor and craft and joy. It’s a pleasure to spend an all-too-short gem of a theatrical evening in the company of such burnished, elegantly accomplished work.