ABOUT

Ethan Lipton & his Orchestra has been a band since 2005 and features Eben Levy (guitar), Ian Riggs (standup bass) and Vito Dieterle (sax), and Ethan on vocals. Ethan writes the songs and the quartet arranges them via telepathy and Doritos. The band’s music is steeped in 20th-Century American traditions—jazz, folk, country, blues and rock—but tackles modern subjects with urgency, humor, and a well of deep feeling. It all adds up to a cockeyed view of an odd, disjointed age.  The quartet has released four studio albums and created the musicals No Place to Go and The Outer Space, both of which were produced by the Public Theater in Joe’s Pub and have toured the U.S. and Europe.  In 2018, the band debuted The Unlived Life, a musical response to the book Missing Out, by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, at Live From the New York Public Library. The band has been featured on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and played venues including SF Jazz, Celebrate Brooklyn, MASS MoCA, the Flynn Center, The Green Music Center, Arts Emerson, Dublin’s Pavilion, the Gate in London, The Troubadour, Theatre de la Ville, Pitchfork Paris and ATP. 

Ethan’s produced plays include Tumacho, Red-Handed Otter, Luther, Goodbye April Hello May, 100 Aspects of the Moon and Meat.  He wrote the book and songs for the musicals No Place to Go (Obie Award) and The Outer Space (Lortel nom.) Ethan is the 2023 Kleban Prize winner for most promising librettist and a 2023 Creative Capital Grantee for We Are Your Robots. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alpert Prize Fellow at MacDowell, a member of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group and the Working Farm Group at Space on Ryder Farm, a Clubbed Thumb Artist, and the Playwrights Realm’s Page One Fellow. His plays have been published by Concord Theatricals and Theater (Yale/Duke), and he’s been commissioned by the Public Theater, NYFA, Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons, MTC, True Love Productions, Barrington Stage, the Civilians, the New York Public Library, Media Arts Exploration and the Onassis Foundation.