Theater: La MaMa E.T.C. / 74A East Fourth Street, New York, NY, 10003
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.
March 8, 2012: The bravery-in-theater award this year goes to ... no, not one of those flying masked men from “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” The winners are Tina Shepard and Jack Wetherall for fearlessly recreating their 1983 performances in the Talking Band’s “Hot Lunch Apostles” at La MaMa.
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