Two Theater-Making Couples Reflect on Mortality and Renewal

Outside the big, tall windows of Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet’s Manhattan loft, in a former garment factory on Mercer Street in SoHo, is a slice of the New York skyline: up close, rooftops of old brick buildings, solid as can be; farther off, glass towers — taller, sleeker, colder, newer.

In a city forever in flux, Maddow, 75, and Zimet, 81, have stayed put for half a century, creating experimental theater in the skylighted boho oasis that cost $7,000 to buy in 1973, and where they raised their family.

Having arrived in the neighborhood when it was scary-scruffy, long before it went way upscale, they have remained stubbornly devoted to each other, and to their venerably niche downtown company, Talking Band, which turns 50 this year.

That kind of history can sound utopian from the outside. But misunderstanding is a risk they’re taking, cautiously, with “The Following Evening,” a new play in which they portray slightly fictionalized versions of themselves, in slightly fictionalized versions of their lives.

“Does this all sound romantic?” Zimet asks rhetorically in the show’s prologue, where he reminisces about the past. “I really hope it doesn’t.”