“Hi. We’re the House Band Remains. We write songs about plays,” says Lloyd King brightly. He’s standing on the stage at Remains Theatre, managing to look not quite out of place. Behind him is the rest of the four-man aggregation, which plays a fluid blend of tarted-up jazz and dressed-down rock. King is the band’s musical director; he plays flute, mostly, but works out on bass and guitar as well. He’s got a thatch of hair that seems perched on his head, a mildly scruffy beard, and he and the rest of the band are dressed to the nines–this is theater, after all. He’s the epitome of bebop cool–when he solos on flute, he perches his cigarette under a key and lets it bounce around as he blows.
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King and the band do write songs about plays–it’s the band’s charter to capture some of the spirit of the two presentations that make up the current “Changing Nightly” program at Remains, which has a new home in the space formerly occupied by Bernie Sahlins’s short-lived Willow Street Carnival at 1800 N. Clybourn. After ten years of wandering from theater to theater, the company decided to try out some new concepts. One is that all the seats are $10. The thinking is that a lower price–most of the city’s major theater companies average about twice that–will bring more people in. The company also has two programs in repertory. One features The Making of Ashenden, Stanley Elkin’s something-less-than-sentimental account of lost virginity. The second program includes two plays: Jack, a sort of modernist rondo elegy on the death of a person with AIDS, and Rameau’s Nephew, an engaging philosophical dialogue by Denis Diderot.
The idea for the House Band Remains came about rather collectively. Remains wanted some music for “Changing Nightly.” King mentioned the idea to pal Mertens, who commented that the thing he hated about seeing music at a play was that you sit and try to make a connection between the music and the play–only to find out that there is none. The way to do it, they decided, was to make the connection. King assembled the band, the foursome sat in on the plays’ rehearsals, and then they went home and started writing.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
