Pawel and Ebola investigates spirituality, mental illness and the female voice in the age of disaster and consumerism. A loose narrative follows a dysfunctional brother and sister team, living in an abandoned clinic in upstate New York with their absentee hysterical mother. Two cult members surreptitiously arrive at the estate, in search of the virginal being. Pawel and Ebola depicts Ebola’s struggles with identity, religion and gender as she overcomes her brother’s narcissism and her mother’s abandonment, while investigating her newly found voice.

Readings in psychoanalysis, Kabbalah and New Age spirituality have influenced the project’s disjunctive structure and its position in upending myths of hysteria as a female characteristic and disease.

CAST

India Salvor Menuez, Maxwell Cosmo Cramer, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, T Ryder Smith, Alexandra Tatarsky, Deidrea Hamid, Angeli Sion, Hanna Novak

Choreographer
Greg Zuccolo

Composer
Paula Matthusen

Producer
Sandra Garner

Assistant Director
Molly Zimmelman

Director
Marianna Ellenberg

Pawel & Ebola is being produced by Sandra Garner and Lingua Franca Arts. https://www.linguafrancaarts.com

Pawel & Ebola will premiere at The Kitchen February 22, 2018.
Purchase tickets here.

BIOGRAPHIES

Tallie Medel is an actor, comedian, writer and choreographer based in New York City. Her work in independent film (The Arbalest, Joy Kevin, the Unspeakable Act, Stinking Heaven) has received recognition in ARTFORUM, Indiewire, and Variety and awards from Sidewalk Film Festival and the Sarasota Film Festival. She’s appeared on Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City. Upcoming films include Omniboat, Fourteen, Notes on an Appearance and Jules of Light and Dark (2017 IFP Narrative Lab, US in Progress Wroclaw 2017). Tallie is from Ketchikan, Alaska.

Tavish Miller is an actor and writer based in Brooklyn NY. Miller has performed with numerous downtown theatre companies, including Sybil Kempson and Object Collection. In addition to acting, he has worked regularly in a technical capacity for local avant garde companies such as Half Straddle, NYC Players and others. Miller has collaborated with Ellenberg on numerous productions, including her latest piece “The Harmers” which premiered at David Lewis Gallery in NYC and JOAN, Los Angeles.

Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised theater director, writer, poet, actor, producer, and educator. ATI & HOLA Award Winner, NY Times and Wall Street Journal profiled, “Flako” is best known for original productions and three signature festivals – Ghetto Hors D’Oeuvres, One Catches Light, and Oye! Avant Garde Night! – produced with his company Brooklyn Gypsies Collective. Recent Productions: Oye For My Dear Brooklyn (The Performing Garage), Samara by Richard Maxwell (SoHo Rep; dir. Sarah Benson). Modesto received the 2016 Princess Grace Award Honorarium in Theater.

Erin Mullin is a theater artist based in New York. She is a company member of The Wooster Group with whom she has worked on Early Shaker Spirituals (2014), Harold Pinter's THE ROOM (2016), The Town Hall Affair (2016), The B-Side (2017) and A PINK CHAIR (in place of a fake antique) (in progress). She has also worked with Big Dance Theater, John Jesurun, and Jess Barbagallo.

Rafael Sánchez is a multimedia artist whose practice spans four decades of drawing, painting, sculpture, photo, video, and performance. Since his first solo exhibition at the Aljira Contemporary in Newark, New Jersey in 1985, SANCHEZ has shown at Foundation Elba, Nijmegan, Holland; The Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ; Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY; WhiteBox, White Columns, and Participant Inc., New York, NY; and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The artist has performed with NYC players and will present a project at Marlborough Contemporary, NY, Spring 2018.

Deirdrea Hamid is a performer and person based in Brooklyn. Favorite performance credits include Edie Sedgwick in Last Night at The Palladium at 3LD and Antigone in Theban Plays, in residence at The Brick in January 2016. She works with Brooklyn based theater company Oye Group and is a teaching artist at Abrons Art Center.

Hanna Novak is a writer and performer living in New York City. She has performed some of her writing at Muddguts Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the Bookclub Performance Series. Recently, she appeared in Julia Jarcho’s The Terrifying (NACL Theater, Abrons Arts Center). Hanna has also worked on numerous projects with Tina Satter and Half Straddle, as well as with Elevator Repair Service, Mike Iveson, Julia May Jonas and Liz Magic Laser. She is currently in the MFA Playwriting program at Hunter College. Look out for her new band "Soft Inserts."

COMPOSER

Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. Her music has been performed by Dither, Mantra Percussion, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs among others. Festivals include the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the MusicNOW Series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Ecstatic Music Festival, among others. She is a 2014 recipient of the Elliot Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen currently teaches sound composition in the music program at Wesleyan University.

CHOREOGRAPHER

Greg Zuccolo: A Bessie Award-recipient for dancing, Greg Zuccolo has appeared in the work of Sarah Michelson, Stanley Love and Tere O'Connor. His collaborations with Michael Laub and Remote Control Productions have toured extensively through Europe and the Universe. Sometimes Greg Zuccolo is asked to speak on the stage and has done so for Sybil Kempson, Tina Satter and most recently for Keith McDermott and Catherine Galasso in Jim Neu's "The Floatones." Zuccolo completed a at YADDO and presented a new version of his series Too Much Too Soon at JACK in Brooklyn, NY.