El Beh, Lizzie Olesker, and Amara Granderson in Triplicity. Photo: Maria Baranova

Triplicity is a show of moments, of musicality, and of mood, full of a bone-deep affection for New York and New Yorkers–extending even to grudging respect for its rodent population. One of the things I often enjoy about the shows of Talking Band is how human, and humane, they are: they’re one of the OG avant-garde theater groups (along with Mabou Mines, in whose space at 122CC Triplicity is performed) but far from being opaque and challenging, their work is always filled with wonder and with compassionate affection for the characters who populate it. As the company’s website says, they “illuminat[e] the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary life.” Talking Band has been run for more than fifty years by a team of three: Tina Shepard and husband and wife team Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet, the creators here. Maddow and Zimet have often performed their work as well, but here Maddow is the writer and composer of the music, Zimet the director. 

The structure is simple: overlapping monologues that take us through a season in the life of three New Yorkers who have little in common and present different threads in the city’s tapestry: a young artist, new to town and full of enthusiasm; a blue-collar lifer, running a family business in the outer boroughs; and a retiree whose life grows smaller by the year but who clings to her urban routine. A fourth character, who turns their stories into lyrics and underscores their actions with song, is a singular street musician, whose abundant genius goes just to the edge of crazy. (Olivera Gajic dresses the musician in such a profusion of color and coats bedecked with random object that they’re almost too bright to look at.) The narratives shine in the small, precise details Maddow fills them with: A kitchen clock where the light falls at a certain moment at a certain time of year. The papery smell of a beehive. A roommate’s deceased parrot in a ziplock bag in the freezer. The three stories intertwine in a musical way more than a narrative one–three strands of melody–presenting these three people with simplicity and clarity, ornamented with Maddow’s music and dance breaks choreographed by Sean Donovan and Brandon Washington.

Norma Linda Box (Amara Granderson) is a twenty-something aspiring writer, working four jobs and living with five roommates, in some part of Brooklyn that’s probably painfully hip yet radically inconvenient, and seeking life’s adventures to turn into essays. Danny Dardoni (Steven Rattazzi) is an exterminator sharing a two-family in Bay Ridge with multiple generations of his own family, reading Virgil in the wee hours and plagued by anxiety. And Frankie Shuffleton (Lizzie Olesker) is a retired, widowed bookkeeper living alone in the West Village in a life of circumscribed routine. There’s no reason for them to meet, and though we see the ways in which their urban lives bump up against each other—Norma accidentally takes in Danny’s lost dog, mistaking it for her roommate’s missing pet; Frankie spies Norma rescuing a snake on Christopher Street; Danny is called in for a mouse situation at Frankie’s place—those intersections really aren’t the point. Nor, even, is the street musician Calliope (El Beh) a strong link between them: she and Norma turn out to have crossed paths elsewhere before, but she’s more counterpoint and commentary than she is pivotal to the action. If Beh’s performance is loose and intentionally a bit over-the-top, the other three are all expertly restrained; they’re all keen observers of their world. There’s more poignancy to Rattazzi’s Danny and Olesker’s Frankie, older people who feel time pressing in on them, more lightheartedness to Granderson’s Norma Linda.

Each is simply living their own life, with its own joys and sorrows, their own moments of mystery and tragedy and revelation. Projected titles assign a musical mood to each scene: adagio, allegretto, passacaglia. And while I didn’t know all the terms, you can feel the shifts in energy, as both the content and Zimet’s direction shift gears. In the end, there’s nothing more to Triplicity than charting the course of these lives as they cycle on. But in the simple richness that Maddow and Zimet have created for them, that’s more than enough.