They Feel a Homeland Security Song Coming On

They Feel a Homeland Security Song Coming On
America is at war, its citizens are in dreamland and nothing makes sense anymore. How about a musical?

by Jason Zinoman

NOT many theatrical troupes begin developing a musical by tracking down a former employee of the Department of Homeland Security. But then again, not many theatrical troupes are like the Civilians, a five-year-old collective that has been attracting notice with its inventive and unexpected approach to docudrama.

Indeed, since its creation, the Civilians have carved out their own aesthetic niche in the New York theater scene, attracting a pile of admiring reviews and an all-star lineup of downtown collaborators including the playwright Anne Washburn ("Apparition") and performers like Trey Lyford ("All Wear Bowlers"), Christina Kirk ("[sic]") and Colleen Werthmann ("Miss Witherspoon").

"We're somewhere between 'up and coming' and the Wooster Group," Steve Cosson, the group's artistic director, said with a smile.

Their latest and most political work, "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch," which had its premiere at Performance Space 122 in 2004 and has been revised for its current run uptown at 59E59 Theaters, has already received great reviews. "Snappy, scrappy and performed with deadpan razzmatazz by a young cast of six," Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times last week, "the latest model is a funny, searching, at times plaintive look at the dangerous blurring of fact and myth in American culture."

The show is built on scores of interviews, including those with the disgruntled Homeland Security worker, and Eqyptian student, a former Miss New York, an elderly fan of Fox News and a cult author who thinks George W. Bush is a shape-shifting reptile.

The ensemble piece, which features a cast of game, attractive performers in their 20's and 30's, doesn't have a traditional narrative. Still, it manages to move from idea to idea with the logic and momentum of a classic Broadway musical. And like traditional musicals, it is about love--even though the subject is the Bush administration, the war on terror and the sexuality of Tom Cruise.

"What I found was that when people talked about issues, they always used the language of relationships," said Michael Friedman, the show's composer. "They would say 'I trusted Newsweek until it betrayed me.'"

Mr. Friedman drew a parallel between the public's belief in the Bush administration and a clover's blind faith in his partner. Accordingly, the first number in the show is a love song, and the chorus sings, "I've been thinking a lot about people in love,/ Why they tend to believe things they know can't be real."

Mr. Cosson expanded on the theme: "In the run-up to war, there was all this talk of W.M.D.'s, aluminum tubes and yellow cake, and it seemed plain to me that they were making it up."

With his beard and calm, cerebral manner, Mr. Cosson looks more like a restless graduate student than a theater director. "I wondered: why doesn't everyone believe that they are making it up? And more broadly, how do people know what they know?"

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, where the Civilians had a residence in 2003, praised the troupe's "unique sensibility."

"The Civilians are very interesting because it combines a historian's interest in the world and accumulating facts with a postmodern sensibility that is deeply distrustful of facts," he said.

The troupe's origins can be traced back to the University of California, San Diego, where many of the original 25 company members, including Mr. Cosson, studied under the director Les Waters, who taught the techniques of the British company Joint Stock, including the process of creating collagelike scripts out of interviews conducted without notebook or tape recorder.

It departs from Joint Stock, though, in its embrace of cabaret. The skeleton of most of its shows is formed by a series of tuneful and deceptively revealing songs by Mr. Friedman, whose clever style is as likely to resemble that of Burt Bacharach as of the Beach Boys. While the music in a show by Les Freres Corbusier--another chic young theater company that mixes philosophical subject matter with playful performance methods--adds a layer of distancing irony, Mr. Friedman's songs are heartfelt, sung by the disciplined cast (Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Matt Dellapina, Brad Heberlee, Daoud Heidami, Caitlin Miller and Jennifer R. Morris) with the conviction of musical theater stars.

"The songs inject the logic of fiction and interpretation into the show," Mr. Friedman said, adding that they have been used differently in each of the company's shows. "Canard, Canard Goose?" was a book musical, while "Gone Missing" was more like a song cycle. In this one, "The songs interact with the text more," he said, explaining that he used quotes from the interviews as lyrics.

Less than a week before opening night, the actors and production staff, dressed in corduroys and T-shirts, were stuffed into a boxy West Side rehearsal room. Mr. Dellapina, in his socks, practiced sliding across the third floor space, coming dangerously close to a wall of glass, prompting someone to crack a joke about him plummeting to his death.

The cast dashed around the stage, going through the choreography of the number "Song of Progressive Disenchantment." At one point, Ms. Morris, a statuesque brunette with an agile voice, leapt onto a table, holding a large sleeping bag open, adding to the summer camp feel of the room. Mr. Cosson interjected some advice on how to best hold the bag to make it look like a certain female body part.

"Nobody's Lunch" can seem like a mess of contradictions--cynical and sentimental, deadly serious and frivolously silly, accessible and obscure. To some degree, it's a result of its collaborative process. The original cast (of which only two, Mr. Heidami and Ms. Miller, remain) conducted all the interviews and transcribed them by memory, before Mr. Cosson edited the stack of material. But it's also because of the unusual diversity of voices packed into one show.

Despite its contradictions, it ultimately makes a straightforward argument for the virtue of caring about more than whom Tom Cruise is sleeping with. "We are saying that there is in fact no absolute truth, but at the same time, you must commit to the truth," Mr. Cosson said. "If citizens don't actively push to know what the real story is, what the facts are, then the truth will be determined by whoever has the most power."

Photograph: Leslie Lyons
From left, Matt Dellapina, Daoud Heidami and Brad Heberlee in "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch" at the 59E59 Theaters.