The Civilians / Press

Equals among firsts

2009-12-23T20:10:00.000-08:00

by Andrew Eaton

TODAY we are delighted to announce six winners of The Scotsman's Fringe First awards for 2006. The long-established prizes, which recognise outstanding new writing premiered on the Fringe, are given out by the newspaper every week during the festival. We will announce more winners on Friday 18 August and Thursday 24 August. In the meantime we can recommend all of these shows highly - but book now if you want to see them, because they are likely to sell out fast.

Post 9/11 global politics loom large in the first week's list. Particularly in the Heartland and (I am) Nobody's Lunch both see US liberals attempting to make sense of George W Bush's America, while Black Watch is based on the true stories of Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq. Two other shows deal with modern middle-class insecurities - Food explores the dark side of success and celebrity, and The Receipt sees a man thrown into a bureaucratic nightmare by the simple act of picking up an old receipt. The Adventures of Tom Thumb, a meditation on dementia disguised as a children's story, is more timeless, but just as effective.

All today's winners will be VIP guests at the Scotsman Fringe Awards, at the Assembly Music Hall on 25 August. We will be asking two Fringe First winners from this year to perform an extract from their show at the ceremony.

Today we can reveal more about the line-up of the awards show. The cast of spectacular streetdance show Into the Hoods, at the E4 UdderBELLY, will perform, as will the African Children's Choir, above, who are at St Andrew's & St George's Church all this month. We recommend both shows highly. The final week's Fringe First awards will be presented at the ceremony by our special guests, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden of The Goodies, whose show The Goodies Still Rule OK! is at the Assembly Rooms.

As we go to press there are still limited tickets available for the event. If you would like to go, cut out the form opposite and take it to the Assembly Rooms box office on George Street. But be quick!

We would like to thank our media partner, the Assembly Rooms, for staging the awards, and Coppercraft of Edinburgh for making our distinctive Fringe First plaques.

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB
Pleasance Dome. Final performance today, noon.
SADLY, this funny and surprisingly moving children's show finishes its run today, so we can only hope we've not seen the last of it. It's based on the Grimm brothers' familiar tale, but Blue Scream Theatre make free with the plot. Their Tom Thumb is an 80-year-old retreating into dementia, and dreaming of escaping his nursing home with Mab, the fairy queen.

FOOD
Traverse, until 27 August, various times
THE new show by theimaginarybody theatre company is the tale of Frank, a high-powered chef who has shot from obscurity to three Michelin stars in only four years - and becomes so terrified of losing his new-found status that he suffers a kind of paranoid episode, in which he comes close to wrecking his career, his family life and his precious relationships with his colleagues and the media.

(I AM) NOBODY'S LUNCH
Assembly @ George Street, 3.15pm, until 28 August
GOVERNMENTS have been lying to their citizens for centuries, but the George W Bush administration has managed to raise state mendacity to a whole new level, eroding public faith in anything and anyone.

That, broadly, is the premise behind this compelling show by New York's Civilians, based on vox-pop interviews conducted in 2003 exploring what Americans actually believe about their government. Told cabaret-style, the re-enacted interviews are interspersed with witty, beautifully played songs.

THE RECEIPT
Assembly @ George Street, until 28 August, 11.30am
WILL ADAMSDALE, who appeared out of nowhere to win the 2004 Perrier comedy award for Jackson's Way, returns to the Fringe with a very different but equally superb show, created and performed with musician Chris Branch. The Receipt is an almost Gogol-like meditation on the fate of the little man in the big, modern city, following a day in the life of a man who works for a faceless corporation and hasn't a clue what he is doing.

BLACK WATCH
Traverse 4 Drill Hall, until 27 August, 8.30pm
GREGORY BURKE'S new play, the first show on the Fringe by the new National Theatre of Scotland, is generating more buzz than almost anything else at the festival this year. Spectacularly staged, it's based on the true stories of Scots soldiers serving in Iraq.

PARTICULARLY IN THE HEARTLAND
Traverse, until 27 August, various times
COVER stars of today's magazine, the TEAM took the Fringe by storm last year, and now they're doing it again. Particularly in the Heartland is a vivid, surreal vision of the apocalypse, set in Kansas and full of iconic American imagery.

Play's version of Springs is not all 'Beautiful'

2009-06-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

By Brandon Fibbs
Special to the Gazette

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Colorado Springs, or one version of it, took the national stage this week, as a documentary-style musical about the city's evangelical movement premiered in the Studio Theatre.

Turns out, for many Washington theatergoers, "This Beautiful City" was a comedy and a horror show.

Chloe West, whose unabashed laughter filled the theater throughout the night, summed up many people's feelings.

"I knew Colorado Springs was a gorgeous place, but that's pretty much all I knew," she said. "After seeing the show, yeah, I am a little scared. Would I ever want to live there? Probably not."

That version of Colorado Springs came compliments of The Civilians, a New York City-based theater company that attempted to take a snapshot of American evangelicalism, using Colorado Springs as a microcosm of the nation.

"The Civilians specialize in doing work about real-life subjects, and I wanted to do a play about evangelical Christianity," said Steven Cosson, the show's director and co-writer. "I thought our method and the subject matter would be a good match. We were interested in Colorado Springs in particular because the story there is so unique. The city has changed so much over a period of 25 years with the influx of so many churches and evangelical organizations."

In 2006, the cast and crew spent seven months in the Springs interviewing more than 100 residents.

"We were trying to listen to the voices that were most alien to us - the evangelicals," co-writer Jim Lewis said. "We knew we could pull off (the liberals). We know them. We get that sensibility. So we really made an effort to get the evangelical argument out there and see if we could capture their point of view. The biggest challenge is juggling that balance."

While they were in Colorado Springs, New Life Church's senior pastor, Ted Haggard, became embroiled in a sex scandal involving methamphetamines and a male prostitute. Little did the company know at the time, but that incident would set the tone for its production.

"By reflecting on what happened with Ted, we are trying to get back to the larger questions of how a community heals and finds a way to get along," Lewis said.

The current rendition of the play - cast and crew say that the production is in a constant state of flux - draws nearly every word of its dialogue from interviews, media reports and local texts. There is no traditional plot to speak of, but rather a narrative represented by a series of talking heads sharing historical and cultural snapshots.

Embedded within the documentary form is music. One might be tempted to think this fusion of documentary sensibilities and cabaret gives the play a bad Broadway musical vibe. But the musical element is crucial, as its use is essential in the praise and worship services of the churches the production highlights.

The first half of "This Beautiful City" elicited the loudest guffaws as the D.C. audience was exposed to Colorado Springs' religious subculture.

They experienced a New Life church service in which the line between church and state was almost nonexistent, met local religious leaders, were serenaded by the Flying W Wranglers, chatted with Air Force Academy cadets and were introduced to prayer warriors who saw demonic forces around every corner. The principally liberal audience found the people and situations ripe for mockery.

Later, when asked of their impressions, audience members were happy to share. While some admitted to having never heard of Colorado Springs, a surprising number revealed connections to the Centennial State.

The smorgasbord of opinions represented a startling and insightful glimpse into how the city is viewed from afar.

Joyce Prashar, whose son lives in Colorado Springs, didn't realize the scope of the evangelical movement in the city.

"That was a complete mystery," she said. "The whole Christian right thing is slightly frightening to me. It reminded me of Jim Jones and Guyana."

Elizabeth Kramer found the play "truthful and terrifying at the same time." She was offended by what she saw as an evangelical invasion. "If they want to do what they want to do, that's fine. But stay out of politics."

"Before the play, I always thought of Colorado Springs as a pretty place - healthy, you know, with no religious connotations," Susan Janney said. "Now, I'm like, whoa. I think I'd research the place before I'd ever even visit. It sounds like a scary place to be."

Janney's comments caught the ear of Ben Weitz. "What's scary?" he asked, incredulously. "Colorado Springs? It's the nicest place in the United States that I have ever visited."

"I wouldn't want to judge Colorado Springs from this one show," said West, adamantly insisting that a play was not a fair snapshot of the makeup of any city. "I'd definitely want to visit, check it out. It's not as if there aren't churches just like that out here, too."

Elaine Chan has a unique perspective given that both of her sons attended Colorado College. "The play was very amusing for me because so many things were exactly as my sons have told me," she said.

However, she was also quick to point out that she thought the play was "a caricature of what people on the outside would think of Colorado Springs."

Some of the characters may border on caricature, others concurred, but the stereotypes were hardly unfounded.

"It's hard to get offended when they use the people's real words and points of view," Ezra Kauffman said. "I think people actually listen to what they say more."

Writer Lewis said when those interviewed during The Civilians' research saw an early performance, the reaction was overwhelmingly favorable. The religious audience thought it had been accurately portrayed.

After the play's revelation of Haggard's fall from grace, laughter seemed to catch in the audiences' throat. Those once so easy to denounce are shown to be wounded, confused and all too human.

Lori Kauffman insists she will never set foot in Colorado Springs. Still, she hardly sees the Springs as unique.

"I think if we look deeper, Colorado Springs is a microcosm of many places," she said. "(Evangelicalism) is just more concentrated, more overt, more exaggerated there."

"The key to the play was one line: ‘This is America,'" Sandra Weiswasser said. "Colorado Springs is the microcosm."

Weiswasser, who calls herself an avid atheist, found herself moved by the story, particularly the zeal with which the Christians lived their lives.

"When you listen to believers, there are still kernels of truth which resonate - the need for redemption and the need for forgiveness and that we're not perfect," she said.

"I don't want other people telling me how to believe. But on the other hand, if you're a true believer, how can you not tell others?"

At first, actress Emily Ackerman was not excited about the project.

"I was scared to go there. It was the Hate State. Jesus Springs. I thought, ‘Whoa, this place is crawling with hateful, hurtful people,'" she said.

"And then I got there and found out that was not necessarily true. There certainly are elements that I, as a liberal, disagree with very strongly, but for the most part they were really welcoming and open and loving."

Many audience members believed the play did a fabulous job interpreting one group of people, but nonetheless plucked only the low-hanging evangelical fruit. Some of those interviewed said they yearned for a more balanced view.

Although the play features opposing voices - a gay man fighting discrimination, a transgendered city planner and a disgruntled native who hates how the city has changed around him - Lewis said that "if we get complaints, it's always that we bent over too far to give the evangelicals a voice at expense of other liberal, secular voices."

Ackerman was moved by those in Colorado Springs who consider themselves part of the liberal, secular resistance.

"The liberal community in Colorado Springs is very, very strong. They feel like they are fighting a war. They are a whole lot more liberal than we are. We have the luxury of being liberal New Yorkers where everyone agrees with us."

Audience member Kauffman said she sees "This Beautiful City" as an "important play for a jaded, political place like D.C., where we basically make fun of everyone."

Despite differences with the evangelicals who make up the play's subject matter, she said she feels that only good can come of the dialogue.

"There will be very few evangelicals who come to see this show and that is wrong; they really should come," she said.

This Beautiful City

2008-10-03T21:57:00.000-07:00

by Evan Henerson, Theater Critic

A city - and a movement - in transition, presented with vibrancy and theatricality

When a New York-based theater company came into town asking questions about church life, the citizenry of Colorado Springs must have had a sense that their city wasn't being prepped for a roast job.

Either that or the interviewers from The Civilians asked the right questions. Or the Coloradans - church-goers, in particular - were extremely trusting.

Whatever. "This Beautiful City," a far-ranging theatrical examination of evangelical Christianity, is as even-handed as it is vibrant. Created from hundreds of interviews by Civilians writers and ensemble members, the musical play is part revival meeting, part journalistic expose and sociological mediation - and fully a rich evening.

The production, at Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre - a co-venture with New York's Vineyard Theatre, where "City" heads next - takes audiences deeply and satisfyingly into a city of paradoxes. That would be Colorado Springs, population about 370,000, and voted the No. 1 Best Big City to Live In by Money magazine in 2006.

Churches both small and super-size dominate the landscape. Love and fraternity are preached, as well as intolerance. Believers, skeptics and watchdogs - besides the visiting Civilians, that is - share the same breathtaking mountain scenery.

It may be a sometimes uneasy peace. In his alternative rag, the Toilet Paper, the publisher (played by Brandon Miller) publishes a series of photos showing people kicking churches. We get his story, too.

The six members of the Civilians also play pastors, choir members, activists, forest rangers, military personnel and ordinary folks. We see many of these people answering questions or recounting a story, but we never hear the specific question being asked. The citizens, thus, seem largely ungraded.

For dramatic purposes, the Civilians clearly did their research at the right time. Set amid a 2006 midterm election that included a referendum for same sex couples' rights, "This Beautiful City" also charts the downfall of New Life Church founder the Rev. Ted Haggard. Haggard, who had White House ties, left the mega-church in 2007 amid charges of homosexuality and methamphetamine use.

Haggard appears in the play only briefly, and primarily through e-mails, and "This Beautiful City" offers an associate New Life pastor (played by Brad Heberlee) who seems just as dangerous, if less of a hypocrite.

The music, by "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson's" Michael Friedman, mixes country, Christian pop and soaring gospel. Neither Friedman nor writers Steven Cosson - who also directs - and Jim Lewis go for satire. Good, bad, possessed of a heart full of faith or of intolerance, these people are unapologetically who they are.

Notable among the largely excellent cast is Emily Ackerman, who plays a young leader of a God's Grace tolerance sect and a transvestite Christian T-Girl offering a unique perspective over the Haggard developments.

Stephen Plunkett rouses the crowd during a youth ministry sermon and silences them when he arrives later as the Rev. Ted's son, Marcus Haggard. Alison Weller, Marsha Stephanie Blake and Brandon Miller round out the cast.

The Civilians' This Beautiful City

2008-10-01T20:47:00.000-07:00

A Center Theater Group presentation co-produced with the Vineyard Theater, New York, of a play with music in two acts by Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis, based on interviews conducted by Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Stephen Plunkett, Alison Weller and the authors. Music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. Directed by Cosson.

With: Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Brandon Miller, Stephen Plunkett, Alison Weller.

Musical Numbers: "Cowboys," "This Beautiful City," "An Email From Ted," "End Times," "Doubting Thomas," "Demons and Angels," "Freedom," "Take Me There," "The Order of Things," "Another Email From Ted," "Urban Planning," "Pikes Peak."

Evangelism and investigative journalism share a passion to open other people's eyes to "the truth." As such, "This Beautiful City" impresses as a work of religious inquiry and engaged reportage. Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis weave first-person interviews in Christian boomtown Colorado Springs, conducted by theatrical community activists the Civilians, into a fascinating crazy quilt on faith's role in American life. Each side gets intel on its opponents, and some may be moved to question their own assumptions en route.

All agree this is a damn beautiful place, the Rockies' purple majesty ever-present in a relief-map frontcloth and rear projection. After that, secularists and believers part company in a range of opinions the six Civilian witnesses elicited and now perform -- and it's a far broader range than many will anticipate.

"Is there a particular slant you would like to put on?" asks an early born-again interviewee fearing her portrayal as a right-wing whacko. Troupe certainly revels in instances of fundamentalist creepiness, such as an Air Force cadet trio boasting of their officially condoned evangelizing.

Call of a young pastor (Brad Heberlee) to register and vote in Jesus' name is rendered as sleazily seductive, while an alternative newsman (Brandon Miller) gloating over Pastor Ted Haggard's celebrated fall is taken in businesslike stride. Caricature is always applied to the right, whereas the arguments of atheists get a straightforward treatment (and usually the last word).

Yet it would be catastrophically incorrect to paint "This Beautiful City" as a one-sided diatribe, for the respect it shows to evangelists' core beliefs -- or, at least, to the human needs underlying those beliefs -- is downright sublime.

"God is definitely doing something in this city," asserts one radiant resident. As often as not, the play withholds judgment on a young mother (Emily Ackerman) blessing God for ending her meth addiction, or Haggard's pastor son (Stephen Plunkett) explaining the heartfelt lessons to be learned from his father's misdeeds. Those who profess to see a possible accommodation between warring camps are given the most sympathetic hearing.

Michael Friedman's excellent score contributes to the evenhandedness. Wholly capturing the appeal of hard-driving Christian pop ("Take Me There" could become a genre standard), he even more skillfully translates prose emails and spoken monologues into fully shaped songs with build and balance.

It's impossible to imagine Christian revival without its music, and thanks to Friedman, it's easy to understand how music pulls people into pews.

"This Beautiful City" seems to have lost running time since its Louisville and D.C. engagements, but trimming may still help as it travels East to co-producer Vineyard Theater. Though it's nominally structured around the rise and fall of Haggard (purchaser of males and meth), meandering side trips lend an unwelcome stop-and-start quality to act two.

But the visual variety afforded by Jason H. Thompson's projections and David Weiner's shimmering lighting maintains interest, and Neil Patel's 3-D wall of geometric shapes plays host to photos, video clips and ever-shifting color in sync with show's shifting moods.

The key to the Civilians' strategy can be spotted in the morally complex story of Emmanuel Baptist Church, whose pastor outed himself to the congregation's consternation.

Single-handedly, Marsha Stephanie Blake personalizes every side of the show's larger debate: a traditionalist choir member who rejects this "gay stuff"; the disgraced pastor, secure in his new-found pride; and his soft-spoken replacement turning fire-and-brimstone while spouting solid common sense: "Stop looking at other folk to validate you ... If don't nobody lay hands on you, put your hands on your own head. Bless yo'self! Lose some weight! Wash your face! And get movin'!"

As troubled as the Civilians are about faith's incursions on civil liberties, they also admire religion's capacity to get folks to validate themselves and get movin'. Troupe has clearly thought long and hard about these issues, and so will any visitor to "This Beautiful City."

Sets, Neil Patel; costumes, Alix Hester; lighting, David Weiner; projections, Jason H. Thompson; choreographer, John Carrafa; music director, Erik James; production stage manager, Hannah Cohen. Opened, reviewed Sept. 28, 2008. Runs through Oct. 26. Running time: 2 HOURS.

'This Beautiful City' at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

2008-09-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

by Charles McNulty, Times Theater Critic

The Civilians' docudrama-with-music is an eye-opener, even if it doesn't entirely deliver on its premise.

When a trendy young theater company announces that its next subject is going to be the explosion of the evangelical Christian movement, snarky parody is a natural expectation. What's surprising about "This Beautiful City," a diverting if curiously earnest performance piece by the New York-based company the Civilians, is how it keeps its satiric powder dry.

Some things, such as the blurring of church and state, may be too important to horse around with (though please don't tell Bill Maher). In any case, the Civilians approach the show, which opened Sunday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, like anthropologists out to understand a culture that for many urban theater types is as alien as some lost Amazon tribe.

Directed by Steven Cosson, who co-wrote the piece with Jim Lewis, and featuring music and lyrics by Michael Friedman, the production is part documentary drama, part musical revue. It doesn't really go far enough in either direction, but as a hybrid collage it's got charm, and a few scary developments are coolly reported.

As is customary for the Civilians ("Gone Missing," "Paris Commune"), "This Beautiful City" began as a research project. In 2006, Cosson and ensemble members descended on Colorado Springs, Colo., to investigate the community in which such evangelical powerhouses asNew Life Church and Focus on the Family make their sizable homes.

This Rocky Mountain locale is a geological wonder. "America the Beautiful" was written here by Katherine Lee Bates, gazing back on the Great Plains from the top of Pikes Peak. This information comes courtesy of a militant writer for a local alternative rag (Brandon Miller), who refuses to be cowed by the zealot crowd, which has carpeted the area with places of worship. "This town could have been like Santa Fe," he says. "And now it's like I'm living in Middle-earth."

New Life, you may recall, was in the papers a while back after a scandal erupted involving the mega-church's pastor, Ted Haggard, a male prostitute and methamphetamines. As it happened, the Civilians were there when the media storm hit, though the saga isn't handled with vituperative glee. Instead, we're allowed to experience the aftermath from the perspective of Haggard's family and congregants, and in this respect, the company faithfully serves theater's ca- pacity to widen understand- ing by presenting situations from competing points of view.

But don't get the impression that the show is as dull as catechism. The liveliness of the ensemble and the pick-me-up beat of the Christian rock numbers make even the church scenes pulse with vitality. And then, of course, there's the clash of ideologies, an ongoing source of melodrama, especially when the issue of gay marriage blows up.

For coastal denizens who think Sundays are made for golf and Chardonnay, the reach of evangelical ambition may prove startling. A Fairness and Equality leader (Alison Weller) tells us about the Christian right's goals of "dismantling social programs" to render its services all the more indispensable. And a "military religious freedom activist" (Miller again) fills us in on developments at the local Air Force Academy, in which the official policy is to "evangelize anyone who comes into the service who is unchurched."

The scenic backdrop, designed by Neil Patel, is a model of a city with cube-like buildings turned on their side and shot through with David Weiner's mod lighting. When a youth pastor (Stephen Plunkett) starts busting some moves to excite his teenage crowd about the glory of God, the effect vaguely suggests "American Bandstand," but behind the cheery facade lies the homogenous dream of a religious kingdom, in which everyone is keeping an eye on everyone else's salvation.

Obviously indebted to "The Laramie Project," the docudrama about the murder of Matthew Shepard, by Moisés Kaufman and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project, "This Beautiful City" tries to produce a similar balanced snapshot of a community with an intolerant reputation. We're invited into evangelical meetings, and we hear from the ex-debauched about receiving the redemptive call, but there's disappointingly little about a spiritually arid American landscape in which organized religion is the only approved goodness game in town.

Dramatically, the piece doesn't effectively build, though there are a couple of spikes, most notably when Marsha Stephanie Blake assumes the pulpit as a fire-and-brimstone preacher sent to replace a pastor who has just come out of the closet. And Friedman, who musicalizes e-mails, chat room gossip and hot-dog religious ceremonies, keeps the action aloft on his incidental folk-pop, performed by a small band perched in partial view on the set.

A more courageously critical point of view might have galvanized "This Beautiful City," but Cosson and company clearly didn't see the need for any more preaching to the choir.

"This Beautiful City," Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 26. $20 to $45. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

This Beautiful City

2008-09-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

by Laurence Vittes

Bottom Line: A moderately entertaining take on the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs

The West Coast premiere of a New York troop's take on the rise and fall of one of the nation's most powerful Evangelical churches plays to the current public appetite for scandalous revelation about highly visible public leaders.

The Civilians' production of "This Beautiful City," however, turns out to be a surprisingly pastoral, sympathetic elegy on the rise and fall of the New Life Church and its charismatic leader Ted Haggard. During the occasionally tedious two-hour show, an enthusiastic cast and crew explore the city of Colorado Springs, Colo., which continues to be the home of James Dobson's nationally prominent Focus on the Family.

Supporters and detractors of the Evangelical movement are more likely to enjoy than be offended by this play with music, based on interviews conducted by cast members. The initial thrust combines muted criticism of the movement with a stream of gently sardonic recreations of sermons, meetings and political machinations that amuse the audience with one liners like "Colorado Springs could have been like Santa Fe. Now, I feel like I'm living in Middle Earth."

Although the talented ensemble covers a lot of ground, they make their stand on a number of key points: the pushback of the Colorado College student population and longtime residents of the community against the conforming pressures of the churches, symbolized by a young newspaper editor (earnestly explained Brandon Miller) and a burned-out political activist (sympathetically portrayed by Alison Weller); the outcasting of the gay population, symbolized by the adventures of a Christian T-girl (extravagantly if humorlessly re-created by Emily Ackerman); the dilemma of minority groups, symbolized by various members of a black congregation (Marsha Stephanie Blake).

The documentary style of the presentation provides a nicely fluid structure to the proceedings, setting the stage for a series of reports, discussions, interviews and the occasional song, most of which are written in a folksy cowboy vein, though some driving rock and a hymn of two pop up now and then. The songs are set refreshingly to a variety of often unconventional sung and spoken texts, which creates an unpredictable rhythmic sense to the story while lessening the need for strong voices and perfect intonation.

All of the main members of the cast are called on to perform yeoman duty, and all of them find at least one character that works particularly well for them and the audience. Brad Heberlee's borderline smarmy pastor unifies the evening with his consistently strong shtick and attractive crooning. Stephen Plunkett gives really great religion as one of the church's more outspoken leaders. Ackerman, Weller and Miller show off some amazing feats of versatility, and Blake brings down the house toward the end with a sermon aimed at comforting fallen angels.

The production is attractive, with an unusual backdrop fashioned from an aerial view of Colorado Springs, in front of which furniture and props move unobtrusively in and out with astonishing speed, and a panoramic shot of the Rocky Mountains. A backlit projection screen is used sparingly but to good effect. The title of the play refers to the fact that Katharine Lee Bates' lyrics for "America the Beautiful" were inspired in part by the view from Pike's Peak.

Cast: Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Brandon Miller, Stephen Plunkett, and Alison Weller.
Playwrights: Steven Cosson, Jim Lewis; Music-lyrics: Michael Friedman.
Director: Stephen Cosson.
Set design by Neil Patel.
Costumes by Alix Hester.
Lighting by David Weiner.
Sound design by Ken Travis.
Projection design by Jason H. Thompson.
Music direction by Erik James.
Choreography by John Carrafa.
Casting by Bonnie Grisan.
Musicians: Tom Corbett, Erik James, Mike Schadel and Brian Duke Song.

Showbiz, Religion & Politix

2008-09-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

by Army Archerd

It is a treat to watch theater in the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. It is more of a treat to watch it with Kirk and Anne Douglas--seated in the front row. That's where they always sit. And that's where they applaud generously and visibly. So it was again Sunday night at the bow of ”The Civilians' 'This Beautiful City." We were their guests and seated alongside the appreciative Douglases. And there was much to discuss afterwards at supper since the play reflects the troupe's reflections and reactions to their time spent with the "people of Colorado Springs who participated in the creation of this play. In addition to the various dialogs with the locals from church leader to Park rangers and the flawless electronic stage settings identified the New Life Church and other local (Colorado Springs) locations in timely (and supervigorous) challenges to the legality of church and state. The troupe involved the audience with (invited) audible reactions regularly.

Douglas' pride in the theater was further enjoyed by us as we later talked about yet another presentation on these boards. Kirk told of the success of "13." It was readied for its bow at the Mark Taper after valuable workshop at the Kirk Douglas. It officially opened at the other CTG stage, the Taper) on Jan.7, 2007. The reviews were ecstatic, Variety's Bob Verini called it ”sheer bliss." And now it makes its bow on B'way at the Bernard B. Jacobs, Sunday, Oct.5.

THIS BEAUTIFUL CITY

2008-09-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

by Steven Leigh Morris

A few years ago, reflecting on The Trial of the Catonsville Nine presented early at his then new Mark Taper Forum, Gordon Davidson remarked on the death of the docudrama, that theater couldn't compete with the ability of the video camera to capture the microscopic physical detail and subtext of people being interviewed, and what they reveal behind and beneath their words and gestures.

Co-writers Steve Cosson and Jim Lewis, working with song-writer-lyricist Michael Friedman and New York-based The Civilians theatre company, demonstrate that one creative solution to this puzzle is to use musical theater to inflate the scale of the presentation, rather than try to put it under the microscope of videocam naturalism. This Beautiful City is an ode to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and follows multiple views from all sides of the local political and theological equations, as pastor Ted Haggard rolls into town, sets up his mega-church and takes a dive when he's outed and finally confesses to using meth.

The six-actor company (Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Herberlee, Stephen Plunkett, Alison Weller, Cosson and Lewis) depicts a range of residents whom the actors interviewed for this piece, from resident atheists to religious zealots to one trans-gender “girl”. Mercifully, these are not parodies that load the argument to spoon feed what a lefty audience in Culver City wants to hear, but interpretations reaching for the deepest and most sincere comprehension of the characters, of how life's agonies turn into religious conversions, how God and Jesus become substitutes for a kind of unqualified love and compassion that simply don't exist in Colorado, or anywhere else on Earth. Some of the interviews are sung – a four-piece band sits perched high stage left, while sermons by evangelists and baptist preachers have their own, innate brand of musicality and choreography. The piece is too long -- the rise and fall of Haggard defines its rhythm, but it keeps going for another 20 minutes, as though it's caught between its commitment to be a musical, docu-dramatic portrait of a city, and the almost classical-Greek study in the hubris of one mega-church leader. Right now, it's trying to be both. Still, if you want to understand this country, and why the good citizens of Silver Lake and Soho are so perplexed by the way things unfold here, Colorado Springs is a pretty good place to start.

Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m.; thru Oct. 26. (213) 628-2772.
Presented by Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles, and the Vineyard Theatre, New York City

Where liberals, evangelicals meet

2008-09-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

By Patrick Pacheco

The gulf between evangelical Christians and liberals is examined at Kirk Douglas Theatre.

After John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee last month, Steve Cosson, the 40-year-old artistic director of the New York-based theatrical troupe the Civilians, was intrigued by some of the explosive commentary revolving around her membership in an evangelical congregation in her Alaska hometown of Wasilla.

“Palin was quoted as saying, ‘Pray for the pipeline, pray that it’s God’s plan to send soldiers into Iraq,’ ” Cosson says. “And there were all these questions in the mainstream media: ‘Well, what does that mean? What is she talking about?’ And I thought, ‘Well, you know what – you should know what that means, and it’s actually pretty easy to find out.’ But we are willfully ignorant, and so people get a little hysterical when these questions enter the public sphere. You can’t even have a dialogue when you don’t know what the other side is talking about.”

Cosson and his group of professional actors already had tried to bridge that gulf, spending seven months in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 2006 investigating the religious beliefs and political agenda of evangelical Americans and what makes liberals in particular respond with fear, suspicion and even loathing. The result is “This Beautiful City,” a work of documentary theater directed and co-written by Cosson (with Jim Lewis), which opens Sunday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre before heading to New York.

The subject matter was a natural for the experimental company, which since its founding by Cosson in 2001 has created an impressionistic oeuvre that includes “Gone Missing,” which explored the nature of losing things; “I (Am) Nobody’s Lunch,” an attempt to determine how we know what we know; and “Paris Commune,” which brought to life a 19th century French revolution. Later this month, the group will launch its next project, “Brooklyn at Eye Level,” an examination of the debates over the surge of development in the diverse and vibrant borough.

Misunderstanding-prone

The goal of “This Beautiful City” was to plumb some of the “unknowables” in a movement prone to misunderstanding, says Cosson, who grew up in a largely secular and politically moderate household in Potomac, Md., and became fascinated early on with the political power of the religious right. Taking a lunch break from a rehearsal of the play in one of the Douglas’ studios, Cosson says that it was only when he attended Dartmouth College that he realized there were people his age who embraced conservatism.

“Whenever an election comes up, we are suddenly confronted with these divisive issues – abortion, gay rights, separation of church and state – that otherwise remain dormant,” the director says. “And it seems to throw us into a tizzy because we can’t understand how we got there. For many people, the evangelical movement is very much a mystery. As a company, we are interested in going outside ourselves to discover the human stories at a more nuanced level, so it seemed a good match for us.”

To that end, members of the Civilians fanned out across the unofficial capital of the right-wing Christian movement to spend time with more than 100 residents. Reflecting the city’s diversity, the interviews, conducted by Cosson, Lewis and the company, included a writer from a leftist alternative newspaper; a transgendered secretary; cadets at the Air Force Academy; a gay political activist and an African American Baptist minister whose coming out led to his expulsion from the church.

Punctuated with songs by Michael Friedman, the storytelling unfolds through a mix of travel guide copy, e-mails, news reports and interview excerpts. In a largely positive review written during a workshop production of “This Beautiful City” at Washington, D.C.’s, Studio Theatre in July, Washington Post critic Peter Marks described the show’s style as “a lyrical piece of journalism … a ticket to ‘Frontline: The Musical.’ ”

During the group’s residency at liberal Colorado College, Cosson also sought and received the cooperation of the city’s powerful and influential New Life Church. Indeed, he says, the “first pleasant surprise” was that the church welcomed them with a surprising generosity and trust. “It’s genuine; it’s not phony.”

Complicated truths

Midway through the company’s sojourn, Ted Haggard, the mega-church’s senior pastor and head of the 40-million strong National Assn. of Evangelicals, was ensnared in a scandal involving methamphetamines and the services of a male prostitute. After admitting to “sexual immorality,” Haggard resigned from his powerful posts. Such a sensationalistic turn of events presented both opportunities and perils for the project, Cosson says. To dismiss Haggard’s downfall simply as a glaring case of hypocrisy would have missed a larger, more complicated truth.

“Haggard’s congregation understood that he had to resign but, unlike the outside world, they never saw it as hypocrisy because he never claimed to be without sin or humanity,” he says. “They were shocked, hurt, confused and angry, but they don’t necessarily see sin as the truth of the person. They see Haggard’s struggle, like their own, as a fight between good and evil.”

In fact, he adds, “It’s possible to be both evangelical and open-minded. It may be a contradiction, but liberal secular Americans also live with several contradictions. When we hear some people are saved while others are not, I think we’re more freaked out by it than they are. We feel that we’re being judged and we accuse them of being hateful. But they don’t feel hateful at all. Certainly there are some places where you will hear hate, but it’s not an emotional truth for the majority.”

Such nuances are lost, however, when religious beliefs enter the political and legislative realm. “This Beautiful City” features characters vociferously militating against the agenda of some of Colorado Springs’ conservative church groups. The company was conducting interviews there in the fall 2006 when there were two state initiatives on the ballot – Referendum 1, which would extend benefits to domestic partnerships, and Amendment 43, which would define marriage as a union between a man and woman. The former was defeated while the latter passed. Cosson, who is gay, says the play does not shy away from those bitter flash points. “It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt when they are fighting to impinge on your freedoms,” he says.

But according to Cosson and the play itself, the beauty of Colorado Springs lies in the many collisions that are taking place. The Air Force Academy lies within the same city limits as Colorado College, known for openly challenging the laws against pot-smoking; the radical alternative paper hosts a column written by a New Life pastor, while its editor is invited to speak at the church; Marcus Haggard, son of the disgraced Ted Haggard and a new generational leader, attended both hyper-conservative Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and Colorado College. The distance between Manhattan and Salt Lake City is vast; here it’s measured in blocks.

Cosson says that at the end of the Civilians’ residency, the company hosted a workshop production, talk-back with the audience and cast party, and invited several individuals represented in the play. The response from the invitees, he says, was positive to both the production and the party. At the talk-back, however, the first audience member to speak accused the company of white-washing problems created by the evangelical community. The second said he thought the Christian right was unfairly represented. “Sounds like we got the right balance,” Cosson says.

“This Beautiful City,” Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Opens Sunday. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. $20 to $45. (213) 628-2772

In 'This Beautiful City,' Musical Storytelling Is Born Again

2008-06-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

By Peter Marks

To get to "This Beautiful City," proceed to the junction of PBS and Broadway. The storytelling style of the Civilians, a savvy young troupe of New York actors, is to immerse themselves in a subject, interview a lot of people, compose a few songs and edit all the material into what amounts to a lyrical piece of journalism.

Think of yourself as holding a ticket to "Frontline: The Musical."

On the occasion of "This Beautiful City," a brand-new piece getting up on its feet at Studio Theatre, the company is tackling the subject of evangelical Christianity. The city in question, temporally speaking, is Colorado Springs, headquarters of New Life mega-church, a 14,000-member congregation that until two years ago was under the spiritual management of the Rev. Ted Haggard.

Fortunately for the Civilians, the Haggard sexual scandal broke -- for those of you keeping track of faith-based peccadilloes, this one involved allegations of drug use and homosexual infidelity -- while they were out in the Rockies researching the work. As a result, the sharp, invigorating "Beautiful City" has some of the heat it might otherwise have lacked, tackling a topic so vast and prone to easy stereotype.

The production's six excellent performers -- four of whom were among those conducting the interviews in Colorado -- assume the identities of various members of New Life and other churches, as well as pastors, apostates and cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, which is also based there. These encounters, knitted into a script by Jim Lewis and Steven Cosson (who also directs it), are supposed to offer insight into the permutations of fundamentalist Christianity. A lot of time is spent inside the churches themselves, examining, for instance, the melding of revival-meeting fervor and rock-concert fever during a New Life youth ministry.

The Civilians want to appear to be fair-minded reporters, at least up to a point. Audiences, no doubt, will hear what they want to hear. At my performance, spectators had their antennae up for any telltale sign of hypocrisy in the statements of church leaders. And by virtue of the self-serving posturing that "This Beautiful City" dramatizes, you are in fact steered to the sense of an institution desperate to sanitize and protect itself. After the scandal comes to light, Haggard is reported to have been "called away on a pastoral emergency."

Later, a New Lifer is quoted as praising the disgraced minister for pitch-perfect humility. "Even in repentance," he declares, "Ted modeled how to do it right."

The production sets to original songs (by Michael Friedman) moments of both reverence and irreverence: Purported explanatory e-mails from Haggard to his flock are put to music and sung as recitative by Brad Heberlee. In other interludes, the actors wander among us with their arms held toward heaven, singing piously.

All the while, a mural-size photograph of a snow-capped mountain (Pikes Peak, near Colorado Springs) looms over Debra Booth's clean, simple set; a pair of flat TV screens hang, akin to the video screens in a sprawling church, at stage left and right. Intermittently, the testimony shifts to that other key ingredient of Colorado Springs life, the outdoors: The actors now wear park-ranger gear and recite to us from guidebooks to the Rockies.

Exposure to this other facet of God's country seems altogether apt, for instruction about keeping to the right path is a preoccupation all through the show.

The actors speak directly to the audience, as if we were the ones behind the microphone. Although this device is an attempt to integrate us into the troupe's playmaking process, there are times that this egalitarian, information-gathering style leaves a vacuum. When a play's main character is a concept rather than a person, a production's emotional content can feel underdone. Some characters do recur in "This Beautiful City." But it would have been useful if some of the interviews had dug more deeply, had fleshed out stories that could have given the piece more of an emotional anchor.

Even so, the Civilians reveal, often in vibrant detail, the life of a city in which the evangelical community has become such a force. Emily Ackerman, a vital link in Arena Stage's presentation last fall of "Well," again does impressive work here, as, among others, a woman of formerly wild impulses who has found God.

Matthew Dellapina provides crackling portraits of a local muckraker and the irate father of a Jewish Air Force Academy cadet. Heberlee masters the placidity of a practiced church mouthpiece, and Marsha Stephanie Blake, Stephen Plunkett and Aysan Celik round out a very smooth ensemble.

Under Cosson's direction, the 2 1/2 -hour evangelical travelogue occasionally succumbs to bloat: Attempting to be fairly evenhanded, the troupe disgorges too many of its notebooks. By and large, however, the show unfolds as a smart, evocative set of impressions of the born-again revolution, its followers and naysayers, its folkways, beliefs and pieties.

This Beautiful City, by Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. Directed by Cosson. Musical staging, Chase Brock; sets and projections, Debra Booth; lighting, Michael Giannitti; costumes, Lorraine Venberg; sound, Erik Trester; music direction, Gabriel Mangiante; drums, Anders Eliasson; bass, Robin Rhodes. About 2 hours 30 minutes. Through June 29 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Call 202-332-3300 or visit http://www.studiotheatre.org.

The Civilians' Reality Theater Gets Religion: With 'This Beautiful City,' Church Meets Cabaret

2008-06-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

By Nelson Pressley

"Let me tell you something," says an actor while playing a real-life pastor at the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs. "God made representative government. It's His idea. We talked about that in Samuel."

As the sermon goes on, the documentary-style show "This Beautiful City" tightens the link between church and politics. A New York troupe called the Civilians is rehearsing this production at Studio Theatre -- the same weekend that Barack Obama has resigned his longtime membership in his Chicago church -- and the company is using verbatim dialogue culled from its interviews in Colorado.

The Civilians' months of meticulous research also yielded another element: songs. "You want your freedom," sings the six-member cast, playing the choir at New Life. "You don't know freedom. It's not the ability to do what you want . . . "

This quirky blend of fact and melody has made the Civilians a bit of a downtown phenomenon in New York, and their profile is about to widen dramatically with "This Beautiful City." The show was a hit this spring at Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays, and it's already booked for Los Angeles's Center Theatre Group and New York's Vineyard Theatre. Slimmed and revised since Louisville, it begins previews today at Studio.

"The point," says writer, director and company founder Steven Cosson, "is to throw ourselves into something totally different that we may not know much about."

"I tend to get pleasure out of putting my nose in everyone's business," Civilians composer-lyricist Michael Friedman says with a puckish grin.

This singular format was a happy accident that crossed their unexpectedly harmonious talents. Cosson, who grew up in Potomac, studied research-based theater as a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego. When he started the Civilians in 2001, he knew he wanted to draw from real life. ("The creative investigation of actual experience" is how the company's mission statement reads.) But he didn't know what shape he wanted the shows to take.

Cabaret emerged as an option when he teamed with Friedman, and that first year they created "Gone Missing," a piece about, um, things gone missing -- shoes, pets, Atlantis. A company of actors interviewed people on the theme; Cosson wrote and directed, and Friedman added songs. The show has toured widely and never really left the repertoire, popping up again last year in New York.

"In a sense, cabaret was the door that opened the possibility to create a different kind of theater," Cosson says. Subsequent projects have dealt with the fallibility of public information ("Nobody's Lunch"); the 1871 revolution in France ("Paris Commune," which used songs from the period); and even their own early incompetence in "Canard, Canard, Goose?" -- their no-go exposé of the mistreatment of fowl in the movie "Fly Away Home."

You'd think all that reality would tie a composer's hands, but Friedman doesn't see it that way. The Philadelphia native describes himself variously as a musical anthropologist and a magpie, raiding styles to see what fits.

"I'm a big throw-it-at-the-wall guy," says Friedman, whose intermittent "Beautiful City" songs sample a range from cowboy vaudeville to New Age gospel. "I'm not interested in a Michael Friedman style."

It's a coincidence, he says, that he is involved with another religion-themed musical: the just-opened "Saved" at Playwrights Horizons, a show based on the 2004 movie set in a Christian high school. Friedman thinks it's less fluky, though, that he and Cosson were in Colorado when Ted Haggard, founder and leader of the New Life Church, resigned on the eve of the 2006 election during his sex-and-drugs scandal. After all, evangelism and electoral politics had captured Cosson's imagination during the 2004 campaign, when President Bush's ties to the religious community suggested a subject Cosson wanted to explore.

So, in 2006, several members of the Civilians spent extended time in Colorado Springs, chosen for its reputation as "the Vatican of the evangelical right," as one resident puts it. (Another reason it apparently appealed was because competing ballot initiatives on same-sex couples -- a fight chronicled in the show -- were in the political wind; intolerance is a through-line of the kaleidoscopic piece.) By design, the voyage was culture shock.

"That world was terra incognita for me," Cosson says.

"I was definitely scared to go there," says company member Emily Ackerman, one of five singer-actors who conducted interviews with Cosson, Friedman and writer Jim Lewis. "I'm liberal, I live in liberal cities. And everything we hear is that they are hateful people, legislating against friends of mine."

Cosson and Friedman didn't know what they'd find; Friedman said the running joke was, "I hope there's a show there." And then the Haggard scandal broke.

"It was like a freight train ran into our show," Friedman recalls.

Ackerman, who spent seven months in "Gone Missing," thinks this is the most accurate Civilians show yet, with less of what she calls the troupe's usual stylistic "filtering" and more straightforward presentation. The people she plays in the show include a young Christian mother and a transsexual identified as TGirl Christian -- both of whom saw the show during a presentation in Colorado Springs, and who asked her to broker an introduction.

"It would be easy to send these people up," Ackerman says. "It would be mean, it wouldn't be good art and it wouldn't be interesting."

She adds: "If our show can get people talking who would never talk except on opposite sides of a picket line, that's good preachin'."

Cosson, who says sitting in a megachurch service with 3,000 congregants was "revelatory," figures that's an upside of the Civilians' method.

"Their world becomes linked to your world," he says. "We could not have created this show by commissioning a writer to write a play on this subject."

Friedman repeatedly champions the collaborative nature of what the company does, but notes that it can make the work hard to categorize. Paradoxically, that could box the Civilians into a self-created niche.

"We're not letting outside expectations define what we do," Friedman says. "Because then we're screwed."

The Moving Power Of Faith and Music

2008-06-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

By Christina Talcott

What's the best way to document the rise of the evangelical Christian megachurch? For Michael Friedman, the answer was clear: a musical.

Of course, that's what you'd expect from a guy who makes his living writing musicals. Starting Wednesday, audiences can judge for themselves when Friedman's show, "This Beautiful City," has its world premiere at the Studio Theatre.

The latest project by the New York theater group the Civilians is the product of dozens of interviews with people with diverse opinions about the evangelical church movement. Friedman, along with troupe founder Steve Cosson and fellow writer Jim Lewis, spent almost nine months in Colorado Springs, Colo., which in the past two decades has been transformed into a home for more than 100 Christian organizations, including the 10,000-plus-member New Life Church, which figures prominently in the show.

Sound like a stretch? "Music is a big part of the evangelical churches and exists there very naturally, which is quite wonderful," Friedman says. "But I also believe that music allows different emotional responses and different ways into the lives of the people speaking."

While Cosson and Lewis worked on the script, Friedman was tasked with writing the score. Friedman, who says he comes from "many generations of nonbelievers," wasn't prepared for the power of the music he heard at some churches. "It's incredible. The bands are unbelievable, the lights and the sound and just the size of some of the bands. It's like going to an amazing rock concert."

As for his lyrics, many of them "are based directly on interview material," which Friedman calls "a nice way to get inside a character's head." After all, the show is about people in Colorado Springs, from preachers to nonbelievers, and explores issues as specific as evangelicals' influence on the nearby U.S. Air Force Academy and as general as the separation of church and state.

Friedman and the Civilians were in Colorado Springs when New Life founder Ted Haggard left the church in 2006 after a nationally publicized sex and drugs scandal.

Although the show addresses that incident and includes characters who have broken from their faith, Friedman says "This Beautiful City" is more about "the connections that people who aren't in evangelical churches can make to people who are and what that means. Once you have made that connection, what have you learned? And, more importantly, what do you leave behind?"

This Beautiful City Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. 202-332-3300.http://www.studiotheatre.org. Wednesday-June 29. $39 to $57. This Beautiful City Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. 202-332-3300.http://www.studiotheatre.org. Wednesday-June 29. $39 to $57.

A turn toward history we need: Paris Commune at the Public Theater in New York

2008-06-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

By Sandy English

Paris Commune, written by Steven Cosson and J. Michael Friedman, directed by Steven Cosson, and performed by The Civilians at the Public Lab Series Workshop at the Public Theater in New York City, April 4 to 20

Paris Commune, staged recently at the Public Theater in New York, is a musical about the first government established by the working class, which ruled the French capital from March 18 until May 28, 1871, when bourgeois troops crushed it and massacred thousands.

The artistic quality of the work and the seriousness with which the creators treat the material make this theatrical piece unusual in the current cultural environment, especially in the US. It suggests that the general restiveness and discontent in artistic circles is beginning to find a more focused expression.

Plays and other works of art about the lives of ordinary people are not entirely lacking, but a consideration of those moments when daily life becomes charged with great historical purpose has been more or less off the map for most artists.

In Paris Commune, we are presented with a thoroughgoing and lively presentation of precisely one of those moments in history.

Writers Steven Cosson and J. Michael Friedman uncovered new material from primary sources for this work. They present facets of French life often missing from accounts of the Commune—in particular, with the Public Theater production’s 14 songs and dance numbers, the popular culture of Paris in the 1870s.

The play lets the workers of Paris speak for themselves, but it fills in many of the gaps in historical knowledge that a contemporary American audience might have. (For that matter, the Commune is not widely taught in French schools, either.) At one point, for example, the play combines a lesson in French revolutions from 1789 to 1871 with a dance number that simultaneously teaches the history of the famous dance, the can-can. This scene, literally breathless, puts the Commune in context as the final and greatest revolutionary struggle of the nineteenth century.

The writers, of course, can’t fill in all the blanks in 90 minutes. A sense of the French Second Empire (1852-1870) and its Napoleon III is largely missing. That is a shame, too, since the period resembles our own in many ways: the frantic greed of the ruling classes, the social polarization, the stifling political atmosphere, the constant military adventures and provocations, a vulgar and dimwitted ruler.

The link between defeat in war and social revolution, whose close relationship the next century was to demonstrate so vividly, is also understated. The immediate cause of the Commune was a major setback for the French military in the Franco-Prussian War.

German armies routed the Emperor Napoleon III on September 2, 1870, at the Battle of Sedan and captured him along with over 100,000 of his soldiers. A day after news of this debacle reached Paris, the masses of the city revolted and a new Republic was established.

German troops soon besieged Paris. A new government under the veteran political operator Adolf Thiers negotiated peace terms, but the working population of Paris began to flood into the militia and the National Guard to help defend the city.

In working-class neighborhoods, the Guards began to elect officers from the various socialist parties to a Central Committee, which shortly afterward became the political leadership of the Parisian working class.

Thiers attempted to disarm the National Guard by removing heavy cannon from Paris on March 18, but the Guard, supported by civilians, including many women, confronted the regular army on a hill called Butte Montmartre.

When the actors recreate the events of March 18 on Montmartre, they throw themselves in pantomime in front the cannon and appeal to the soldiers. We hear a narration of events from the journals of participants and other eyewitness accounts.

The commander ordered his troops to fire into the crowd, but his soldiers refused (and later shot him). Soldiers defected to the insurgents, and the entire city was under the control of the Central Committee of the National Guard within a day. Thiers and his government fled to Versailles, 12 miles away. On March 28, the workers of Paris elected a representative body called the Commune.

The play begins not with the insurrection of March 18, but toward the end of the Commune, as a female narrator (Aysan Celik) stands alone on a sparsely furnished stage and asks the audience to imagine the Tuileries in Paris, the old palace of the French kings next to the Louvre, now the legendary art museum.

She conjures up a concert that took place there on May 21, 1871. She invites us to visualize the audience at the show, the canaille, which, she tells us, can be translated as “the scum,” and refers to the Parisian working class.

This is perhaps one of the most effective strategies of the play’s creators. The New York audience is pulled into the song and popular culture of the day, hearing something that the people of Paris heard. The audience goes to concerts, too, and it can attend the same concert, in its imagination, as the Paris audience of 137 years ago. The result is both distant and familiar.

A popular performer of the day, Rosa Bordas (Kate Buddeke), sings her outraged La Canaille to the imaginary audience, in which she identifies herself with the revolution: “They are the lowest scum/but so am I.” After this, she sings the melodious Le Temps des Cerises (Cherry Time).

The irony of this second song remains unclear until the piece is nearly over and one learns that a few hours after the concert took place, troops from the bourgeois government in Versailles entered the city and drowned the Commune in blood, killing many who were in the audience that day. The Tuileries itself burned down, never to be rebuilt.

The play shows a baker and his tailor wife (Jeremy Shamos and Aysan Celik), who embody the Parisian masses, the real hero of this work, and the audience encounters the foul-mouthed Le Père Duchêne (Sam Breslin Wright), the personification of a satirical left-wing newspaper of the day. The tone of the dialogue is humorous and sometimes hilarious.

Adolf Thiers (Brian Sgambati), in frock coat and top hat, demands bourgeois order and promises clemency to the Parisians in an electronically modified voice. It is not hard to image what the double-crosser is really planning.

The international orientation of the Commune, which declared its solidarity with a “world republic” is brought across by an explanation and singing of the Internationale, written by Eugene Pottier, a participant in the Commune. The song remains the best-known anthem of the international socialist movement.

The renowned painter Gustave Courbet appears, demanding that rich artists support poor ones. He represents another side of the cultural framework of the Commune. A significant artistic figure of his age, his work was recently the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Courbet was in charge of protecting the Paris museums during the Commune, and he was known as an advocate of its great symbolic act—the pulling down of the Vendôme Column. The painter argued that the column, erected by the first Napoleon and refurbished by Napoleon III, tended to perpetuate “the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation’s sentiment,” and was devoid of artistic merit.

The play also highlights the differences within the new revolutionary government. An anarchist tendency asserts that Paris should be an autonomous city in a federation along with other autonomous municipalities. Others, on the other hand, seek to extend the revolution to the rest of France, where, indeed, workers in various cities were beginning to set up their own Communes.

The taking and holding of power by the working class was a new historical problem. Socialism, furthermore, had not fully emerged from its utopian phase, and there was a generally a strong influence of sectional interests representing older handicraft methods of production that tended to find an expression in ideas of local autonomy, political dilettantism and hostility to centralized military action.

Many leaders of the Commune were followers of such figures as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (who was arrested by Thiers shortly before the Commune), known for his advocacy of revolutionary conspiracy, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (whom Courbet admired), the ideological representative of small shop owners and one of the founders of anarchism.

The play shows us the Communards debating whether the National Guard should march on Versailles. Louise Michel (Jeanine Serralles), the anarchist schoolteacher, says, “No, the revolution means an end to aggression of all sorts.” Elisabeth Dmtrieff (Nina Hellman), a supporter of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), is for open civil war with Versailles.

Dmtrieff reads out Karl Marx’s letter to the German socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht: “It seems the Parisians are succumbing. It is their own fault, but a fault which really was due to their too great decency. The Central Committee and later the Commune gave that mischievous degenerate, Thiers, time to consolidate hostile forces...they should immediately have advanced on Versailles.”

By early April, Communards and Versailles troops were skirmishing on the outskirts of the city. The Prussians released French prisoners of war to supply troops to Thiers, and by the final week of May, street fighting began in which both sides used arson as a weapon of war. The Communards were outmatched by the discipline of the Versailles troops, who were already used to guerilla warfare from their experiences against the Germans.

The government forces were merciless. The week of May 21 is known as La Semaine sanglante, the bloody week. Unarmed men, women, and children were summarily shot by the Versailles troops. The Commune had executed seven hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris (who blamed Thiers for his fate before he died), in response to the shooting of prisoners by Thiers, but in the last week of May 1871, by best estimates, the Versailles troops, under the command of General Patrice Mac-Mahon, shot between 20,000 and 30,000 Parisian workers and members of their families.

The production at the Public Theater depicts these massacres on a dimly lit stage. The actors contort their bodies as imaginary bullets enter them. The execution of one group of prisoners represents the shooting of 147 Communards against a wall at the Pére Lachaise cemetery, known today as the Mur des Fédérés (Wall of the Communards). Among the survivors, 13,000 were jailed and more than 4,000 were sent into exile to New Caledonia in the south Pacific, including Louise Michel.

The play brings forward a great social struggle that involved immense thought, energy and sacrifice. It is an imperishable part of the history of the international working class and socialist movement. Those who came to the Public Theater knowing little about the Commune had the opportunity to have a critical event illuminated for them. One wonders how anyone who has seen the piece could ever again read about a major protest or a strike in France without thinking of the 1871 uprising.

The acting was solid and energetic. Most performers played more than one character. Sometimes it was hard for them to keep up: not every cast could have simultaneously danced and narrated a portion of French history at the same time as they offered the history of the can-can. The singing in the play was remarkably good, in particular that of Iva who played the Soprano, representing the bourgeois in Versailles, and sang, among other pieces, Offenbach’s Ah, Comme J’Aime les Militaires! (Oh, I how I love men in uniforms!).

The costumes projected a feel for the nineteenth century, but were somewhat slapdash, and the production overall had a little more of an unfinished feel than it needed to. Asking the audience to use its imagination was fine, but the choice of props might have been a little more selective. Adolf Thiers, for example, did not need a microphone.

Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, Paris Commune was the weakest when it tried to describe the reverberations of the Commune in later periods of history.

In an epilogue, we hear that the Commune lived on in moments like the French student and worker revolts of 1968 or the singing of the Internationale by students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 before the brutal crackdown by the Stalinist regime.

But the writers eclectically mix these events, moments when the issues of political power that were first posed in the Commune were deeply relevant, with other incidents, such as the minting of a commemorative medal by the German Democratic Republic in 1971 and the anti-World Trade Organization protests of the late 1990s.

The East German Stalinist regime observed the Commune to mask its own suppression of the socialist aspirations of the working class, including the 1953 uprising by Berlin workers. One must strain to find the echoes of the Commune in the anti-WTO protests as well, which was a protest and reform movement, not an uprising of the working class.

Most of all, the incarnation of the Commune at a higher level in the Russian Revolution of 1917 is missing. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in 2001 in a discussion of Peter Watkins’s film La Commune:

“Wars and revolutions, and similar earthshaking events, continue to gain significance in human consciousness as subsequent developments shed light retroactively on them. History adds truth to them, so to speak. It is almost impossible to consider certain events in isolation, they have so obviously been ‘completed’ by others that come after them.”

Paris Commune might have considered other moments in history when the Commune—and its problems—truly lived again, such as the 1956 uprising of the Hungarian workers (who established their own councils) against the Stalinist regime, when the Soviet forces played the role of repressor.

This is not primarily the fault of the writers, who did a serious and thorough job of researching this piece and present the Commune honestly and on its own terms. The epilogue simply reveals the production of Paris Commune as an expression of the current cultural environment. The question—What happened to the titanic struggle for socialism?—has yet to receive a serious response from or even be seriously posed in the minds of most contemporary playwrights and other artists.

It is also worth noting that it was the Public Theater’s Lab Series that featured Paris Commune. The Public Theater is one of the most prominent venues in the off-Broadway theater world, and its Lab Series has recently produced other works with themes that look to larger historical contexts, such as The Good Negro by Tracey Scott Wilson, which concerns civil rights activists, the KKK, and the FBI; the late playwright John Belluso’s The Poor Itch, about a disabled veteran returning from Iraq; and Naomi Wallace’s The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East.

Those interested in learning more about the Paris Commune itself will find Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France indispensable. Northwestern University’s McCormack Library has a digital collection of photographs and other images from the Commune at its The Siege and Commune of Paris, 1870-1871 website.

Playwrights enter Kentucky derby 'Becky,' 'City' shine as Humana fest blossoms

2008-04-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

by Godon Cox

A blind date gone awry and a town full of evangelical Christians had auds buzzing in Kentucky.

Gina Gionfriddo's "Becky Shaw" and the Civilians' "This Beautiful City" emerged as the productions to watch at the Humana Fest of New American Plays, the annual event at Actors Theater of Louisville that draws legiters from around the country to check out the lineup.

"Becky," which revolves around an attempt to matchmake a merciless money manager and the needy young woman of the title, and "Beautiful City," a docu-play about Colorado Springs, were two of a six-play slate that, unlike the topically minded 2007 fest, skewed heavily toward family drama. Both shows are already headed toward Gotham berths, while others in the lineup are mapping out future lives with varying degrees of certainty.

Fest marks the second time Gionfriddo has been one of Humana's hot properties, following the buzzed-about 2004 preem of her play "After Ashley" (which landed in a starry production at the Vineyard the following year).

In "Becky Shaw," that blind date wreaks havoc in the lives of both the potential couple and the married couple who set them up. The play proves a big, wittily articulate show whose sprawling thematic reach encompasses everything from class and race to the emotional cost of compassion.

Both seriously ambitious and smoothly entertaining, Gionfriddo's sharp and funny script is peopled with full-bodied characters the thesps at Humana palpably enjoyed tackling. David Wilson Barnes, achieving a nuanced brand of ruthlessness as finance guy Max, nabbed the most attention in Peter DuBois' well-acted production.

As the show moves compellingly along, it becomes clear Gionfriddo isn't sure precisely which story she's telling, a flaw that renders the play's final scene unsatisfying. But even if that problem isn't solved in the future by judicious honing, "Becky Shaw" remains a hearty piece of theater. So it's no surprise that producers, both of the commercial and nonprofit variety, are said to be already circling, with a stint in Gotham seemingly assured.

The New York appearance of "This Beautiful City," the latest reality-based offering from the Civilians, is already set: The show will play the Vineyard in early 2009 after a run at Center Theater Group in L.A. Downtown troupe the Civilians already has an Off Broadway following -- their show "Gone Missing" recently ended a commercial run, while another, "Paris Commune," just began perfs at the Public.

After Humana, "Beautiful City" moves to D.C.'s Studio Theater, which co-produced.

With text culled from interviews (shaped into a script by helmer Steve Cosson and Jim Lewis) and mock-Christian rock songs by Michael Friedman, "Beautiful City" looks at the devout populace of Colorado Springs and how they coped with the 2006 scandal involving New Life Church founder Ted Haggard, who exited his post after former hustler Mike Jones charged him with a longstanding sex-and-drugs relationship.

Clocking in at 2½ hours, the production could use some trimming and focusing. But the material is fascinating and the excellent cast, many of whom conducted the original interviews, effortlessly transforms into a persuasive array of Colorado Springs inhabitants.

Best title of the fest goes to "Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom," Jennifer Haley's tale of a survival horror vidgame that gradually takes over the lives of the families in a well-off subdivision. Playing like a nifty episode of "The Twilight Zone," the story builds to an affectingly gruesome finale, and director Kip Fagan creates a clever stage language for the moments when two realities, virtual and actual, overlap.

With its small-scale tech demands and four-person ensemble, "Neighborhood" seems a likely candidate for legit troupes hoping to benefit from the play's youthful, tech-savvy appeal.

Also tapping Humana's familial drama vein were Lee Blessing's "Great Falls" and Carly Mensch's "All Hail Hurricane Gordo."

"Great Falls," about a man's attempts to connect with his teen stepdaughter during a road trip, has its irritating fillips -- the two-hander's characters are named Monkey Man and Bitch -- but is enough of a traditional character-driven drama that the show could easily get some regional play. No future productions have been set, although another Blessing play, "Body of Water," will bow Off Broadway at Primary Stages in September.

Many legiters were turned off by "Gordo," a manic depiction of a mentally unstable young man and the uptight brother who cares for him. But Mensch, a young scribe still in Juilliard's graduate playwriting program, has some momentum going: Her play "Len, Asleep in Vinyl" gets a run at Second Stage Uptown this summer.

Of all the Humana shows, Marc Bamuthi Joseph's "the break/s" has its future most clearly laid out for it. Dynamically performed by Joseph, the legit-dance-spoken word piece about hip-hop, racial identity and a breakup has more than a year of arthouse appearances ahead of it, including stints at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis this month, the Spoleto Fest in May and the Kennedy Center and Gotham's Skirball Center in September.

This Beautiful City

2008-04-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

by Paul Harris

A Studio Theater presentation, in association with Actors Theater of Louisville and the Civilians, of a musical in two acts by Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. Directed by Cosson. Musical staging, Chase Brock.

With: Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Aysan Celik, Matthew Dellapina, Brad Heberlee, Stephen Plunkett.

The latest docu-theater project to emerge from the inventive minds of the Off Broadway company the Civilians is a treatment of the evangelical Christian movement headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo. Following initial exposure earlier this year at the Actors Theater of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays, "This Beautiful City" officially premieres at D.C.'s Studio Theater in a lively production that gently skewers the religious right.

Part of a Studio Theater initiative to help develop and produce new works, the play with music follows the April debut, in a developmental production at the Public Theater, of "Paris Commune" and last year's Off Broadway hit "Gone Missing." "This Beautiful City" is scheduled to play the Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles this fall and New York's Vineyard Theater next year.

Given the evangelical movement's much-publicized penchant for preaching forgiveness while practicing hardball politics, along with the personal failings of prominent movement leaders, the company could easily have delivered a partisan broadside about hypocrisy. The Civilians instead took a higher road that addresses the transgressions within a more balanced context.

Following the method of past productions, director Steven Cosson and the six-person troupe traveled to Colorado Springs in 2006 to conduct interviews and pursue research. They met with numerous members of the flock, from the die-hard to the disillusioned, along with church leaders and others.

The exercise occurred during a particularly calamitous period for evangelicals and the "beautiful city" of Colorado Springs. The Air Force Academy had previously erupted with scandals involving sexual harassment and religious discrimination, while Ted Haggard, the powerful founder of the New Life mega-church, had just been "outed" for improprieties involving prostitution and drug use. Meanwhile, area churches had become embroiled in political causes involving gay marriage, blurring the lines between church and state.

Perspectives on these and other issues are earnestly revealed from interview transcripts woven into a seamless collage interspersed with a blend of cowboy and religious rock tunes by Michael Friedman -- highlighted by act two's rousing "Take Me There" and the irreverent "E-mail From Ted Haggard." The sincerely performed and unrelated monologues collectively depict a powerful social and political force.

They include a revival meeting at the Revolution House of Prayer, personal reflections from a New Life Church parishioner, criticism from a self-appointed "church kicker" opponent, as well as insight into the movement's vast social networks. "We hope that righteousness reigns in this city," moralizes one stalwart.

Brad Heberlee is enjoyable as a charismatic New Life preacher who sidesteps the media's barbs and exhorts the congregation to vote against same-sex marriage. Marsha Stephanie Blake portrays a devout member of the troubled Emmanuel Baptist Church who assumes the pulpit following its own pastor's wayward behavior. Stephen Plunkett is effective as the energetic youth group leader as well as Haggard's much-troubled son.

The show is performed on a bare stage in front of a screen depicting an aerial view of Colorado Springs at the feet of the snow-capped Rockies. Two smaller screens left and right capture other video clips and slides.

It's safe to say evangelicals won't be terribly amused by the portrayal. But it all adds up to a generally humorous peek into the powerful church movement, although not an especially enlightening or compelling one. Running at two hours-plus, the show would benefit from some editing to strike some redundant perspectives.

Set and projections, Debra Booth; costumes, Lorraine Venberg; lighting, Michael Giannitti; sound, Erik Trester. Opened, reviewed, June 15, 2008. Runs through July 6. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.

Culture report: gatekeepers Causing a scene Can anyone save us from the aging subscribers and rank commercialism that has paralyzed our city’s stages?

2008-04-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

By David Cote

After years of private bitching and public grumbling about our nonprofit theaters’ toothless seasons, homogeneous production designs and timid, old-man marketing, I’ve finally found a person with the taste and courage to be the ideal artistic director of the 21st century: me.

You heard right; I’ve sat through enough shit (and genius) and I want some power. Give me an annual budget of $5 million, all my downtown contacts and see if I don’t make a splash. I’d program a season of Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker and Will Eno. Plus—eventually—younger, unproduced playwrights who landed on my desk. (The more violent and obscene, the better.) Foreign writers, too, in fresh translations. Every first Monday I’d throw a free play reading with an open bar. In the summer, I’d open the doors for a two-month workshop by a favored company—Radiohole, the Debate Society or Nature Theater of Oklahoma—ending in a massive celebration. The advertising would be slick and bold, the tickets cheap, the parties raucous and the shows calculated to enrage, excite and astound. For the first five years, I would not accept any subscriber over the age of 35. I’d have blogs, press conferences, preshow talks and fat souvenir programs. I’d constantly bombard the media with video and op-ed pieces tied to our shows—when I wasn’t hosting a kick-ass party.

The next morning, hungover and broke, I realize that it was all a drunken dream.

Running a daring, high-quality theater in this town is nearly impossible. Whether you head the tiny Vineyard Theatre on East 15th Street (120 seats and an annual budget of $2 million) or the elephantine Roundabout Theatre Company (two Broadway spaces, an Off Broadway house, an Off-Off studio, 44,000 subscribers and $43 million to burn), you’ve got divided loyalties. Are the artists happy? Are the funders happy? Is the board happy? Natalie Portman is interested in Director A? Great, um, let’s find a project. What? Will Smith really wants you to read his friend’s play; it stinks, but the friend writes for HBO. Can you put Jada’s brother in the show? He’ll donate! The subscribers are pissed! The critics hate your guts!

I’m sure our artistic directors would like to do the right thing. I’m sure that the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes would love to hire Jack Cummings III to direct an American classic. Or that Lynne Meadow of Manhattan Theatre Club knows that Qui Nguyen needs her support. Or that Carole Rothman would be thrilled to turn Second Stage Theatre over to the Civilians, a downtown docu-theatrical troupe that could use a high-profile platform.

Actually, Oskar Eustis is already on that—he’s hosting the Civilians’ Paris Commune later this month. Eustis, who took over the Public Theater in 2004, has been rebuilding its downtown and political credibility. Only the third person to walk in Joe Papp’s shoes (after George C. Wolfe’s solid but commercial-minded rule of 1993 to 2004 and JoAnne Akalaitis’s aborted 20-month tenure), Eustis has made good moves: inviting the Wooster Group, hosting the Under the Radar Festival and spearheading an Off-Off series, the Public Lab. But can he truly revitalize the Public, get younger butts in seats, and make plays seem exciting and dangerous the way Papp (1921–1991) did?

Can there even be another Joe Papp? The legendary showman who started Shakespeare in the Park and recolonized the Astor Library was an impossible, controlling figure. He baited the critics, strong-armed the city and did all he could to make himself irreplaceable at the theater he created. His democratizing mission: Bring the classics to the people and foster a spirit of aesthetic adventure. But today, do “the people” want classics? It’s hard enough getting seasoned playgoers to embrace garden-variety postmodernism.

Robert Brustein, who founded and ran the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 2002, sees a bleak picture. “Critics, the subscription audience, the high cost of tickets, the collapse of the NEA as a predictable funding source…all of these things contribute to a general atmosphere of blandness and timidity,” he says via e-mail. “I think Jim Nicola at New York Theatre Workshop is maintaining high standards.… But never say never in the theater. Someone will come along with a burst of energy that will explode the general torpor.”

Gregory Mosher also has hopes for an artistic-director messiah. Mosher led Lincoln Center Theater from 1985 to 1991, and isn’t afraid to suggest radical solutions—like dumping pesky old subscribers. “The ‘next Papp’ is right here, wherever here is—could be Newark, for all we know,” Mosher says. “Joe’s successor is a young person, very likely a woman and a first- or second-generation American, with a startling idea and the determination to bring it to life. Joe had many wonderful qualities, but above all he had a compelling idea. His idea, however, was deeply strange at the time, and threatening to the status quo. And the next great idea will seem equally strange to us. We have to be alert for it and embrace it. And we have to remember that it probably won’t lead to something that looks like the Public, or LCT or any other 50-year-old company, but will be a new form.”

Well, whoever this revolutionary art leader is, I hope to be around to complain about their seasons. And to covet their job.

New Plays Exploring Difficult Relations

2008-04-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

by CHARLES ISHERWOOD

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The schisms in American society, both macro and micro, were on vivid display at this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theater of Louisville. The divisions between the religious right and the secular left, the tech-fueled widening of the generation gap and the ever-relevant question of what makes a modern marriage function smoothly were among the themes explored by playwrights at the festival.

Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw,” an absorbing comedy-drama about a blind date that threatens to become a marriage-devouring black hole, was the festival’s heat-generating event, surely destined for New York and beyond. Ms. Gionfriddo’s “After Ashley” had its debut at the festival in 2004 and was later seen in New York, while her lively if contrived black comedy “U.S. Drag” just concluded a run Off Broadway. The new play marks an impressive stride for a writer with a saw-toothed wit and a seductive interest in exploring the rewards and responsibilities of emotional interdependence.

Devoted yentas and their grateful customers beware: “Becky Shaw” depicts an innocuous set-up gone spectacularly awry. We do not meet the toxic title character until midway through the first act, which begins in a New York hotel room where Suzanna (Mia Barron) listlessly mourns her father’s death, while Max (David Wilson Barnes), more or less adopted by Suzanna’s parents when he was 10, tries to shake her out of it.

He is also trying to plug the holes in the family’s financial affairs, left in disarray by Suzanna’s father, possibly because his business manager was also his lover. Suzanna’s mother, Susan (Janis Dardaris), an imperious woman whose multiple sclerosis has not stopped her from taking up with a much younger and disreputable man, remains as impervious to Max’s warnings of dire economic straits as Suzanna is to his tough-love approach to healing her grief.

Max’s role as the family fixer takes an unexpected turn at the end of this crackling first scene. Ms. Gionfriddo, a writer for “Law and Order,” has acquired a savvy aptitude for the deftly sprung plot twist. Firecrackers of revelation explode every few minutes in “Becky Shaw,” which is almost as quotably funny as Broadway’s scabrous “August: Osage County” — and that’s saying plenty.

Most of the choicest aperçus come from the superciliously pursed lips of Max, played with chilly, magnetic allure by Mr. Barnes in the festival’s standout performance. (It would be a shame if he were not allowed to reprise it should the play have a future life; Mr. Barnes was also in “The Scene” by Theresa Rebeck at this festival two years ago, a play in a similar vein that was mostly recast with higher-profile actors — to deleterious effect — when it came to New York.)

Max is cynical about all things romantic, and defines marriage as “two people coming together because each has something the other wants.” Suzanna, who is studying to become a therapist, at least likes to believe that she’s a true believer in love. By the second scene she is happily married to Andrew (Davis Duffield), a good-hearted would-be novelist scraping a living by working at a law firm. There he meets the lovely but lonely title character (Annie Parisse), whom they hope to pair off with the likewise single Max.

This is a bit like suggesting that a snake mate with a mouse, or so it first appears when the nervous Becky arrives for their first date glaringly overdressed and emotionally naked. But Ms. Gionfriddo keeps us guessing about the character (ditsy or wily? victim, manipulator or a little of both?) as divided allegiances — Suzanna’s to Max, Andrew’s to Becky — put a strain on the marriage and expose unexpected vulnerabilities.

Intricately plotted and studded with scathing one-liners, “Becky Shaw” also burrows into the ideas it engages about moral, intellectual and financial compatibility in romance, as well as the level of emotional commitment various relationships require. On the down side, virtually every scene would benefit from some pruning, and the title character is the least convincing in the play, at this point more a plot device than a credible woman. (It does not help that the director, Peter DuBois, and Ms. Parisse, who may simply be too gorgeous for the role, don’t seem to have settled on a consistent style for the performance.)

Still, “Becky Shaw” is a thoroughly enjoyable play, suspenseful, witty and infused with an unsettling sense of the potential for psychic disaster inherent in almost any close relationship.

The other significant show at the festival this year was “This Beautiful City,” an ambitious, talent-stretching production from the New York troupe the Civilians. Written by Steven Cosson and Jim Lewis, directed by Mr. Cosson, and with songs by Michael Friedman, this collagelike revue addresses the rise of the evangelical Christian movement.

Fans of this gifted troupe may be surprised at the sincerity — and generosity — of the company’s approach to material that a hip New York theater company might be expected to put across with a wink and a wry smile. The production is close kin to “The Laramie Project,” the affecting documentary drama from Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Company about the cultural repercussions of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student in Wyoming.

As in their previous shows “Gone Missing” and “(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch,” the text is largely drawn from interviews conducted by the company. The timing of the Civilians’ visit to Colorado Springs, where mega-churches are as numerous as McDonald’s franchises, was propitious. They were apparently on the scene when Ted Haggard, pastor of the New Life Church and a leader in the movement, was forced to step down after he was linked to a male prostitute.

But “This Beautiful City” is not a polemical exposé in the Michael Moore mold. It is a thoughtful, exploratory foray into a world that, as the interviews make clear, was alien territory to the show’s creators. Voices of faithful believers are juxtaposed with those of critics of the movement’s power and its prerogatives. The history of the evangelical explosion in Colorado Springs is presented from various perspectives, as is the controversy over the powerful sway evangelicals supposedly came to wield at the Air Force Academy there.

Playing several roles each, the half-dozen leading performers — some Civilians regulars, some not — are all superb. None stoop to caricature, even when portraying characters on the far side of religious fanaticism. The fresh-faced Stephen Plunkett is a natural as a New Life pastor leading a youth group, and later as Mr. Haggard’s son Marcus, who addresses his father’s troubles in a speech that is surprisingly moving and eloquent. Marsha Stephanie Blake brings down the house as a fiery preacher who takes over a major black church when its pastor is forced out after he discloses his homosexuality.

“This Beautiful City” could use some editing too. The scenes set at a small church called the Revolutionary House of Prayer consume excessive stage time, and the ending is seriously flat. Mr. Friedman’s pleasant but unexceptional songs don’t add as much as they usually do to Civilians shows, perhaps because most of them are straightforward imitations of bland, folk-inflected Christian pop. You naturally miss the Cole Porteresque wordplay and sardonic humor of his best compositions.

The rest of the work at the festival varied from respectable to — well, to quote an irresistible assessment from a man I overheard fleeing one show at intermission, “not good is much too generous.”

On the respectable front Lee Blessing, the elder statesman among the participating playwrights, provided a solid if sleepy two-hander in “Great Falls.” Directed by Lucie Tiberghien and starring Tom Nelis and Halley Wegryn Gross as a stepfather and his stepdaughter on a road trip, the play is a well-observed but unspectacular voyage into familiar territory, perhaps fixated a little too exclusively on the sexuality of the young woman, a glib wiseacre in the “Juno” mold (and facing a similar problem).

If the title “Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom” sounds like something you’d fire up on a PlayStation, that is entirely intentional. This play by Jennifer Haley uses a kill-the-zombies video game as a template for a thriller about the growing distance between distracted, self-absorbed parents and indulged, alienated teenagers in suburban America.

Ms. Haley writes credible dialogue for her younger characters — a delicate mission often bungled — but this material ill suits the stage. When worlds virtual and real eventually must collide, the result is a dramatic fizzle, although the production, directed by Kip Fagan, was convincingly acted and sleekly if simply designed.

The divided soul of a black man is exposed in “the break/s,” written and performed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and directed by Michael John Garcés. Mr. Joseph is a naturally captivating dancer, moving with transfixing grace at any number of speeds. The performance is gloriously eloquent in its physicality, but less engaging when Mr. Joseph stops shredding the air with his limbs and simply delivers the opaque and meandering text about his various cultural travels.

I have been casting about for something charitable to say about “All Hail Hurricane Gordo,” a comedy by Carly Mensch (still a playwriting fellow at Juilliard) about two kooky, emotionally stunted brothers (Matthew Dellapina and Patrick James Lynch); one kooky, emotionally stunted young woman (Tracee Chimo); and a refreshingly well-adjusted white rabbit (name unavailable).

Perhaps I’ll just say that I loved the rabbit, and leave it at that.

An Overview of the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays

2008-04-01T20:54:00.000-07:00

A CurtainUp Feature

By Charles Whaley

It has been a very good year indeed for the just ended 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. All six full-length plays turned out to be strong offerings--with first rate acting in every one--but four of them seemed exceptional.

My vote for top honors is split between This Beautiful City, a mesmerizing, fiercely intelligent portrait of Colorado Springs, the Evangelical Capital of America, based on interviews and visits conducted by the group of New York artists called The Civilians, and Jennifer Haley's dark and dangerously fascinating Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, the name given to a violent online video game that intersects with real suburban life.

Also outstanding were Lee Blessing's Great Falls in which an unhappily divorced man (the excellent Tom Nelis) gets his defiant teenage stepdaughter (marvelous Halley Wegryn Gross) into his car and takes off on a road trip through the Great Northwest so they can "talk," and Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, a subtly scathing look at a supposedly helpless female manipulator (think Eve Harrington in All About Eve) who relishes her own victimization as she wrecks the lives of others.

Annie Parisse expertly played Becky, the type of woman who on a casual blind date overdresses in a backless satin outfit. Max (the superb David Wilson Barnes), the rich money manager whose friends arranged the date, is suitably appalled. But Becky's menacing Fatal Attraction stance at play's end bodes ill for Max's determination to erase her from his life. Blessing's works have often been produced at ATL, including previous Humana festivals, and Gionfriddo's After Ashley was the major hit at the 2004 festival. ATL artistic director Marc Masterson noted at a panel disccussion on "Curating New Work Festivals" that three of this year's festival plays, all co-productions, will be seen soon at other venues.

This Beautiful City, co-produced with The Studio Theatre in Washington, D. C., will stop there before moving to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Writer and performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph's hip hop piece, the break/s, which I found to be of little interest beyond Joseph's incredible dance movements, was co-produced with Living Word Project and will be at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Spoleto Festival plus half a dozen other places.

Carly Mensch's hyperkinetic All Hail Hurricane Gordo, produced with the Cleveland Play House, is set for a run there. This crisply written tale of two young brothers--one of them a mentally unstable constantly-in-motion force of nature (an incredibly convincing Patrick James Lynch)--left to fend for themselves in the family home after their parents abandoned them in a parking lot and drove away will test anyone's capacity to suspend disbelief. Even so it makes for engrossing watching.

Kudos to the four cast members of Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom who brilliantly portray both real and video characters (John Leonard Thompson and Kate Hampton as fathers and mothers; Robin Lord Taylor and Reyna de Courcy as sons and daughters) and to Kip Fagan for masterful direction.

This Beautiful City, commissioned and developed by The Civilians, was written by Steven Cosson, who also directed, and Jim Lewis from interviews conducted by them and most Civilians company members. Michael Friedman's pitch perfect music and lyrics amplify the memorably performed monologues and the church and outdoor scenes. The play, especially in its overly long second act, could benefit from cuts. It puts into powerful perspective the New Life megachurch, whose charismatic pastor Ted Haggard was exposed for his hypocritical relationship with crystal meth and a male prostitute, and Focus on the Family, "the biggest conservative Christian media empire in the world", both headquartered in Colorado Springs among 4000 Christian organizations. It's a probing examination of a cancerous threat to the U. S. Constitution. As a community activist says of the Christian right, "They've got a big picture and it has to do with big things like dismantling government programs and privatizing public education cause the more thay can dismantle the more people need the church to provide those services. Faith based initiatives, all that. Right. And what do you think that means for the Christian leaders? Power and money."

Also in the festival mix were four 10-minute plays and Game On, an athletic anthology satirizing sports madness contributed by seven writers as a showcase for ATL's 2007-08 Acting Apprentice Company. Jose Urbino was hilarious in a pantomime tennis routine. Most of the sketches featured monotonously shouted four letter words. There was an appalling "eating contest" for which parents trained children to gorge on food in preparation for winning prizes and acclaim. And Andy Lutz, Christopher Scheer, and Nicholas Combs were wild and crazy in an extreme sports episode heavy on homoeroticism. Best of the 10-minute plays was Elaine Jarvis's Dead Right with Dori Legg and William McNulty as an older couple reading newspaper obituaries at their kitchen table and thinking and talking about what they wanted put in their own.

Civilians take unique approach

2008-03-28T21:59:00.000-07:00

Auds find Off Broadway company's 'Missing'

by Sam Thielman

NEW YORK -- Steve Cosson likes to be surprised, especially when he's working on a show.

"It's what makes it exciting," says the artistic director of rising Off Broadway theater company the Civilians. "I want to find out what we don't know already, and a great way to do that is to go out into the world and just sit down and listen."

As Cosson describes it, the Civilians' approach to making theater sounds an awful lot like journalism: The entire troupe travels far and wide researching a piece around a given subject, conducting interviews and comparing notes along the way, sometimes for years. It may sound like an arduous process for director Cosson and writer-composer Michael Friedman (Cosson admits that a single show can run "a couple hundred thousand dollars" to research and produce), but it's paid off in spades for the company.

The Civilians have been around since 2001, but it wasn't until last year's "Gone Missing" that the company landed a breakout hit. The trim 80-minute process-driven show was about lost things, from car keys to Atlantis. After being workshopped and vetted everywhere but Atlantis, the show was originally scheduled for a six-week run from mid-June at Off Broadway's Barrow Street Theater. But it opened to such positive word of mouth and enthusiastic reviews that six weeks turned into six months, extending into January.

The company has always depended heavily on grant money to cover travel costs, and since a critical mass of people checked out "Gone Missing," there are now enough grants and donations for the Civilians to stretch a little, including a three-week stint at the Sundance Theater Lab and $150,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation's prestigious NYC Cultural Innovation Fund.

"They brought together a small panel to choose these," says Cosson, sounding a little thunderstruck. "The other grantees were like, Carnegie Hall, and then us."

Part of the attraction may have been that the Civilians are premiering not one but two shows this season. "This Beautiful City" just bowed at the Humana Festival and is headed to D.C.'s Studio Theater June 11, and "Paris Commune" opens at the Public Theater on April 4. Both shows have been in development for years ("Paris Commune" had its first workshop in 2003), and the coincidence of nearly simultaneous productions has raised the Civilians' profile even further.

Then there is the group's subject matter: Cosson, Friedman and their cast were in Colorado Springs interviewing for "This Beautiful City," which explores evangelical Christianity, just as New Life Church pastor Ted Haggard shocked his congregation by admitting to an affair with a male prostitute. It's hard to imagine a scandal that would allow the group a clearer window into the hidden parts of the community they were investigating -- one of those surprises that so fascinate Cosson.

"When we started our project, Ted Haggard had a lot of stature as an evangelical leader," says Cosson. "The city is about 500,000 people, and it grew a lot over the period of time we spent there. We went in not expecting it to be a story with anything particularly dramatic in it."

"Paris Commune" is a much different story. For one thing, the show takes place in the past, and the company had to radically adjust its methodology in order to create it. For another, it's one of the longest-gestating projects in the Civilians' history.

"We'll leave it alone for a year, year-and-a-half, even, and then we'll get funding to do a two-week workshop at the Public," says Cosson. The show takes place in the then-vacant palace in Paris during the Revolution of 1871. It's a difficult piece according to its director ("one of the hardest things you could write a play about"), but it's finally coming to fruition with the help of the Public's LAB series, which is dedicated to giving full (if basic) productions to raw work.

There's still more from these guys: Friedman is writing the music and co-writing lyrics for Playwrights Horizon's "Saved," a high-profile Off Broadway tuner adaptation of the satirical indie film, while on the overflowing back burner there are two more shows, one musical about urban development in Brooklyn and one retelling of the Gilgamesh epic.

At the end of the day, though, the Civilians are less interested in getting into more and bigger theaters and more interested in changing what goes on inside the theaters they're already inhabiting.

"One of the big ideas I had when I started the Civilians was to break out of all the niches we create for theater to live in," Cosson enthuses. "I like the idea that you won't necessarily know what you're going to get."

Humana Festival discovers "This Beautiful City" The journalistic musical examines Colorado Springs' rise to evangelical capital of America

2008-03-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

By John Moore
Denver Post Theater Critic

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When New York actor Stephen Plunkett first set foot in the New Life mega-church in November 2006, "it was baptism by fire," he said.

It was the Sunday morning when founding pastor Ted Haggard's resignation was read to an overflow crowd of more than 18,000. Everywhere Plunkett looked, he saw national media spilling into the aisles alongside weeping evangelicals.

This was the start of a continuing creative odyssey in which six members of The Civilians theater company would infiltrate and explore Colorado Springs' rise to unofficial evangelical capital of the United States. The actors' interviews with hundreds of Coloradans, from former and fervid New Life parishioners to liberal activists to Air Force Academy cadets to surrounding church leaders, resulted in "This Beautiful City," an original musical in the journalistic tradition of "The Laramie Project."

The goal: "To responsibly explore how faith intersects with public life, and ultimately, how that reflects what's happening in our country," said Civilians actor Brad Heberlee, who also performed in the Denver Center Theatre Company's "The Sweetest Swing in Baseball" last year.

"This Beautiful City" was one of six featured works at this weekend's 32nd Humana Festival of New American Plays, the most prestigious of its kind. Stagings are slated for top theaters in Washington and Los Angeles before an anticipated New York run.

Natural home for evangelism

It tells the explosive and even surprising story of how the confluence of Focus on the Family, the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, NORAD and the anti-gay Amendment 2 movement made this city at the base of Pikes Peak the logical place for evangelism to germinate and grow over the past 25 years.

That's about when a 19-year-old Haggard, fasting at the south base of Pikes Peak, first envisioned what would become the largest church in Colorado. "What is the purpose of New Life Church?" he has asked rhetorically ever since. "To make it hard to go to hell in Colorado Springs."

The Civilians chose Colorado Springs even before Haggard's downfall because co-writer Jim Lewis is a native and Colorado College graduate. But Haggard's lurid sex and drug scandal with a male prostitute was no doubt the catalyst that has propelled their piece into the national dialogue.

And New York actress Emily Ackerman didn't want to come.

"I was scared to go," she says flatly. "All we've ever heard in New York about conservative Christians is that they are mean and hateful and hurtful, and that they legislate against friends of mine."

But instead she found warm and friendly people eager to explain who they are. People who welcomed her to their dinner tables and shared their intimate stories. "I realized that, actually, they have a really strong, incredible community . . . and they wanted us to be a part of that, because it works for them," Ackerman said.

"This Beautiful City" is a lightening-rod piece of theater, to be sure. But while it is agenda-driven, it drives all sorts of agendas, and you hear from all sorts of people.

From those who put the pieces of New Life back together. From homophobes, radical activists and the transgendered. From evangelicals who scraped themselves up from gutters to find new life at New Life. From the Jewish father of an Air Force cadet who cites the general who told The New York Times that "it is the Air Force's official policy to evangelize anyone who comes into the service 'unchurched.' "

And perhaps most refreshingly and unnervingly, from Marcus Haggard, eldest of five siblings. Not many have heard from Marcus, who in 2004 started the Boulder Street Church as a satellite of New Life.

Turns out, not many have asked. Plunkett did.

"We share a bond because we're both preacher's kids," said Plunkett, who took 45 minutes to work up the courage to ask Marcus about his dad.

"He said, 'Of course I'm willing to talk about this,' " Plunkett said. " 'Not talking about this is what got us into this problem in the first place.' "

Plunkett portrays Marcus in the play as a nice and open young man who, when hearing about his father's liaisons, admits to an initial shock that soon dissolved into, "Huh. . . . Yeah, there could be some truth there."

Marcus, who resigned last month to return to school, was most disappointed that his father lied when busted. "It's like when a criminal gets caught, and all of a sudden, they're like, 'Oh, I'm sorry,' " Marcus is quoted as saying. "No, you're not! If you hadn't gotten caught, you'd still be doing it!"

Another gay pastor

Haggard's fall propels but does not define the musical's second act, which is poignant and presciently paralleled with the much quieter resignation by the Rev. Benjamin Reynolds, senior pastor of the nearby Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church. He came out as gay to his Colorado Springs congregation just a week before Haggard was outed.

Actress Marsha Stephanie Blake interviewed an Emmanuel choir member who practically reveled in Haggard's downfall. Part of the reason is race.

"It's black versus white, and the two communities very rarely intersect on any level in Colorado Springs," said Blake, who is black. "A lot of black people I talked to said the economic development of Colorado Springs hasn't included the black population, and now there is a huge divide. A lot of black people feel like the white evangelicals are crazy — and they use that word. They believe the white evangelical view of the world is not equivalent to the black, Baptist Christian view of the world."

Blake portrays the choir singer, whom she describes as "quite a lovely, open and maternal lady," as also extremely homophobic. She also plays the male successor to Reynolds, who delivers an electrifying sermon that makes the pure, soul-stirring and theatrical power of evangelical oratory plain to anyone in the audience, regardless of religious belief.

The purpose of "This Beautiful City" is not to deliver a blistering satire, but to start a dialogue "because we are all sinners, and we all struggle," Ackerman said. To do otherwise would have been a disservice, Blake said.

"When you ask people to tell you their deepest, darkest secrets, then you have a responsibility not to use that to make fun of them," she said. "But we've been attacked and complimented by both groups, and I think that's kind of good."

The Civilians have performed rough readings of their musical at Colorado College, which hosted them in residence for five weeks in 2005, and in New York.

"The things people laughed at in New York were not at all the things that they laughed at in Colorado Springs," Ackerman said. "When I said, 'Every day I pray to Jesus in my car on my way to work,' people in New York laughed at that. But in Colorado, people were like, 'Yeah, I do that, too.' "

While the rise of evangelism isn't new to Coloradans, Blake thinks "This Beautiful City" will deliver a bigger shock to a New York audience.

"That's because I am a New York liberal, and I do think this piece is frightening. Just the idea that this rise in evangelicalism is not contained to Colorado Springs. It's spreading. And it's creeping into various parts of all our lives without our even realizing it. So it is actually quite threatening."

John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com

[Photo Caption: Emily Ackerman, left, with Katie Gold, Elizabeth Gilbert and Ashley Robinson in "This Beautiful City" at the 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays.]

This Beautiful City

2008-03-01T20:59:00.000-08:00

CRITICOPIA REGIONAL

By Charles Whaley

Commissioned and developed by the group of New York theater artists called The Civilians, This Beautiful City, the third of six full-length plays to open at this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is an unsettling, fiercely intelligent dissection of the American Evangelical movement. The city is Colorado Springs, the movement’s unofficial headquarters, with its myriad churches and conservative political organizations such as Focus on the Family that grew up around the 14,000-member New Life Church founded in 1984 by the charismatic Pastor Ted Haggard.

While The Civilians were interviewing local people and visiting churches during their 10-week residency at Colorado College, Haggard’s explosive downfall came when a male prostitute, upset over Haggard’s hypocritical stance against a gay rights referendum, revealed their three-year relationship as well as Haggard’s drug habit. The mega-church minister first denied, then admitted his guilt. With the fallout, the White House denied that President Bush had weekly conference calls with Haggard but conceded that Haggard made a visit or two to the White House.

The Civilians’ brilliantly synthesized findings emerge in the play written by Steven Cosson (whose direction never loses momentum) and Jim Lewis (whose hometown was Colorado Springs) augmented by Michael Friedman’s forceful, all-embracing music and lyrics performed by Scott Anthony (keyboard), Anthony Gantt (drums) and Ben Short (bass).

Cast members (Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Stephen Plunkett) who along with the authors did the interviewing bring their subjects to compelling life. Ian Brennan and Dori Legg also portray people in the time leading up to, and after, the 2004 election.

A writer for alternative newspapers who grew up in the Colorado resort town and returned in 2001 tells how “it was like a zombie movie or something” when the Evangelicals “just sorta invaded” right after he went to college. “Around that time, New Life was getting huge -- Ted Haggard -- and, you know, they built that monstrosity of a building out there…And then there’s Focus on the Family -- ”it’s like the biggest conservative Christian media empire in the world.”

Four military installations -- all dominated by conservative Christian Evangelicals -- are nearby: the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, Ent Air Force Base, and NORAD. Military cadets and faculty talk openly of the heavy-handed crusading they embrace or at least tolerate for fear of recriminations. “This is bigger than Ted,” says a military activist. “And it’s not just the Air Force Academy, it’s the Marine Corps, Navy, Army. This is a story that threatens the fundamental security of this country. All 702 of our U. S. military installations -- all of them -- have an Officers Christian Fellowship on them.”

A non-gay community activist says of the Christian right, “They’ve got a big picture, and it has to do with big things like dismantling government programs and privatizing public education, because the more they can dismantle, the more people need the church to provide those services. Faith-based initiatives, all that. Right. And what do you think that means for the Christian leaders? Power and money. This gay marriage panic is just a means for an end to them.” “We all think there’s simple, easy solutions to everything,” and the Evangelicals make that sound appealing. “I think there’s a piece of it where we are willing to relinquish everything if someone will just tell us there’s a right way to be in the world. But the truth is the world is complex. It’s more complex than ever before.”

This thoughtful, probing examination of what has become a major threat to the U. S. Constitution deserves to be widely seen. Some trims would improve the overly long second act and, hopefully, that will be done before the play moves to The Studio Theater in Washington, D. C., which also produced it in association with ATL and The Civilians, whose earlier Gone Missing won plaudits at ATL and in New York.

Hot or Not 2007: Theater's heroes & villains

2007-12-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

by Joe Dzienmianowicz

Hot: CASTS THAT CLICK Extraordinary ensembles enlivened Broadway in three productions that opened during one week in December, "August: Osage County" (the best and my favorite show of 2007), "The Seafarer" and "Is He Dead?" Earlier in the year "The Coast of Utopia" crackled with its group dynamics.

Not: ADS THAT TRICK The brains behind the Broadway revival of "Grease," whose leads were cast on a reality TV show, ran a newspaper advertisement misrepresenting critics who didn't exactly endorse the show. Brains behind the Off-Broadway musical "Walmartopia" also got a little too creative with the quotes.

Hot: THE SUMMER OF LOVE The Public Theater's superlative productions of "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, along with a staged concert of "Hair" there, meant great theater in the great outdoors.

Not: THE AUTUMN OF DISCONTENT The Broadway stagehands strike that began on Nov. 10 and shut down most of Broadway for the next 19 days cost the city upwards of $40 million. The expense to theatergoers who missed chances to see a show: immeasurable.

Hot: SIZZLING FIRSTS Claire Danes, as the flower girl-turned-proper lady in "Pygmalion," Bobby Cannavale, as a schemer and a dreamer in "Mauritius," and Fantasia, as a woman who finally triumphs in the musical "The Color Purple," all made their Broadway debuts magical and memorable.

Not: FIZZLING SECONDS - AND 13THS Lackluster revivals of the boy-meets-girl mood piece "Prelude to a Kiss" in February, "Old Acquaintance" in June, the gay bathhouse farce "The Ritz" in October and the swashbuckling romance "Cyrano de Bergerac" in November (its 12th Broadway redo) made us wonder why the producers even bothered.

Hot: SMALL MUSICALS, BIG DELIGHTS At $4 million, cheap for Broadway, the flop movie-turned-hit stage musical "Xanadu" is 90 minutes of campy hilarity. Off-Broadway, the Civilians' "Gone Missing," about New Yorkers who've lost personal possessions, found its way into my heart and head.

Not: MASSIVE MUSICALS, PUNY PAYOFFS Massive and misguided shows remind us that bigger isn't always better. "The Pirate Queen" cost $16 million and sank after 85 performances. The even more expensive "Young Frankenstein" is currently running, but it disappoints as often as it dazzles.

Hot: MULTITASKING Of several actors who played a variety of parts on stages this year, two stand out. Boyd Gaines went from playing a reassuring soldier in "Journey's End" to a devoted companion to Patti LuPone's Rose in "Gypsy" to a levelheaded Col. Pickering in "Pygmalion." Meanwhile, Martha Plimpton revved up the stage whenever she was on it in "The Coast of Utopia," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Cymbeline."

Not: COMPOUND FRACTURES James Carpinello dropped out of "Xanadu" when he broke his foot and was permanently replaced. Director Daniel Sullivan busted some ribs when he took a fluke header while rehearsing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Park.

Hot: INGENIOUS PRICING Producers of "August: Osage County," "The Homecoming" and "November," which begins previews Thursday, offer a subscription series in which you can buy orchestra or front mezzanine tickets for all three plays for $199. Thanks.

Not: RAVENOUS PRICING Producers of "Young Frankenstein" offer $450 "premium" seats in the orchestra. No thanks.

The Play's the Thing for 2007

2007-12-17T18:54:00.000-08:00

by Eric Grode

This year was a bleak one for musicals. The only really exciting "new" show has been kicking around off-off-Broadway for several years. But 2007 was wonderful in many other ways. Tough-minded political theater, Shakespeare productions, and (best of all) serious Broadway dramas all made heartening resurgences this year. Note: I left "Voyage," the stirring first third of Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," off my 2006 list on the assumption that the rest of Tom Stoppard's Russian epic would live up to it; while that assumption proved mistaken, "Voyage" in and of itself does warrant mention as among Mr. Stoppard's very finest work.

1. "Black Watch": The closest Broadway came to addressing the dislocating horrors of modern-day war came via a play that's almost 80 years old (see No. 4). St. Ann's Warehouse, however, was happy to step into the bloody breach and address the Iraq war. Author Gregory Burke, director John Tiffany, and a staggeringly versatile company from the National Theatre of Scotland used a blend of you-are-there intensity and you-could-be-anywhere surrealism to create a profane, hypnotic, scorching tribute to Scotland's Black Watch Royal Highland Regiment. Wars have taken so much from so many, but they have also given us Wilfred Owen and "Paths of Glory," Britten's "War Requiem" and Dylan's "Masters of War." The 21st century may have its first worthy addition to that list.

2. "August: Osage County": Foreign wars may have been all but AWOL on Broadway, but the take-no-prisoners intra-familial combat waged by the Westons of Pawhuska, Okla., fueled either the saddest comedy or the funniest tragedy on display in a good long while. Noted genre screw-twister Tracy Letts ("Bug," "Killer Joe") made a quantum leap with this massive — and massively entertaining — conflation of Albee, Shepard, O'Neill, Faulkner, and just about any other author you'd like to see a wonderfully talented playwright conflate. Deanna Dunagan and Amy Morton led a flawless ensemble from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre — yet another implicit rebuke to New York's woeful lack of a repertory company.

3. "The Taming of the Shrew": Edward Hall's all-male Propeller troupe brought a Shakespeare double bill to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March, and while its "Twelfth Night" was elegant and persuasive, "Taming" was a ground-breaking. Unsparing in his examination of the play's brutal sexual dynamics, Mr. Hall nonetheless found a way into the humor that was so instrumental in cementing Shakespeare's greatness but that remains out of reach for nearly all modern-day companies.

4. "Journey's End": The year's most unforgettable image of wartime carnage came not in the mortars-and-porn bedlam of "Black Watch" but at the finale of David Grindley's murky, muted, gorgeously acted revival of R.C. Sherriff's 1929 World War I chestnut — and without a drop of blood. The entire cast (playing a British infantry company in the trenches of St. Quentin, France) stood at attention in front of a devastatingly long list of names — actual British soldiers missing in action during the War to End All Wars. Except for the World War II years, the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, Belgium, has saluted one of these names every evening since 1929. The last one will be honored in 2083.

5. "Gone Missing": This entry is a mild cheat, as several of my colleagues have been singing this musical's praises since 2003. But the "investigative theater" troupe the Civilians finally touched down with a commercial run of this smart, sad, and effortlessly tuneful piece, created through a wide-ranging series of interviews about things people have lost — necklaces, dogs, a beloved sock doll, innocence.

6. "Hokaibo": World theater is often good for the brain (teasing out how and why we Americans do theater the way we do it) and the muscles (stretching our notions of narrative, stagecraft, etc.). But sometimes it does all those things and, as a bonus, can be riotously, almost illicitly entertaining. Such was the case with Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII and his revered Kabuki company at the Lincoln Center Festival this summer. First came the dance-theater spectacle "Renjishi," followed by this pell-mell sex farce, complete with dancing severed limbs, English-language jokes about James Bond and metrosexuals, and the cross-eyed freeze frames known as mie. I left "Hokaibo" feeling depleted, disoriented, and delighted.

7. "The Merchant of Venice": The second Shakespeare to make the list, with Daniel Sullivan's shimmering Central Park "Midsummer Night's Dream" very nearly making the list, too. Theatre for a New Audience examined Elizabethan anti-Semitism by pairing Shakespeare's revenge drama with the Christopher Marlowe melodrama "The Jew of Malta." And while the latter production fizzled, director Darko Tresnjak created a crisply modern, achingly timeless telling of "Merchant." The King Lears of Kevin Kline and Ian McKellen got the headlines, but Mr. Abraham delivered the year's most memorable Shakespeare performance as a cautious, fatalistic Shylock.

8. "Rock 'n' Roll": Now that "Utopia," the Tony-winningest play of all time, has receded into the horizon, has Tom Stoppard fatigue set in? If so, audiences are passing on a much better play — one of those alchemical blends of intellect and emotion that periodically spur people to proclaim that modern theater's greatest mind has finally located his heart. He's done it before, and he'll do it again, but "Rock 'n' Roll" is indeed a rich exploration of music, Marxism, and mortality, with Brian Cox and the splendid Rufus Sewell serving as tour guides. It's got a great beat, and you can think to it.

9. "Dividing the Estate": The authors of "Bug" and "The Trip to Bountiful" are unlikely bedfellows, but Tracy Letts and the imperishable nonagenarian Horton Foote each displayed flinty wit and a palpable compassion for the inevitable failings and frictions of an extended Southern family. Mr. Foote may be painting with a wider brush than usual, but his hard-won detail and capacious wisdom remain a bracing example for any and all writers dipping into these familiar waters.

10. "Gypsy": If reports are to be believed, "Dividing the Estate" will make its way to Broadway in 2008, as will this pairing of Patti LuPone with the role she was born to play in perhaps the ultimate Broadway musical. Her Mama Rose was talkin' loud and lettin' loose at City Center this summer, and she most certainly had the stuff. Note to director Arthur Laurents: Don't forget to bring Boyd Gaines, as Rose's memorably beleaguered suitor, along for what deserves to be a long run.

Honorable mentions: "Blackbird," "The Brig," "The Brothers Size," "The Fever," "Marat/Sade," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Central Park, "Naked in a Fishbowl" at the Fringe Festival, "Oliver Twist," "The Seafarer," and "Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell."

Actors picks six

2007-12-14T21:06:00.000-08:00

by Judith Egerton

After reading hundreds of new plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville has chosen the six new full-length works it will produce for its 2008 Humana Festival of New American Plays, Feb. 24 through March 30.

The 32nd year of the prestigious festival welcomes back an early contributor, prize-winning playwright Lee Blessing, whose previous Humana premieres include "Oldtimers Game" and "War of the Roses."

Blessing returns with "Great Falls," a two-character drama about a father and stepdaughter on a cross-country journey. "It's a fine example of excellent writing; it has maturity and complexity," said Actors' artistic director, Marc Masterson.

The festival also will feature New York theater group The Civilians with a new documentary-style play, "This Beautiful City." The show explores the nature of faith and is based on interviews with evangelical Christians in Colorado Springs, Colo. The group currently is performing "Gone Missing" at an off-Broadway theater. Louisvillians saw that funny, poignant show about loss as part of Actors' Discover Series in September 2006.

For the Humana Festival, Actors commissioned a new play by Gina Gionfriddo, who made a national splash at Actors in 2004 with her first play, "After Ashley," a blistering satire about the public's insatiable appetite for sensational stories and the allure of TV celebrity.

Joining Gionfriddo in the lineup will be three young playwrights: Texas native Jennifer Haley, New York poet-writer Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Carly Mensch, a fellow at the Juilliard School's playwriting program. Their new works concern the blurring of reality and online video games, hip-hop culture and sibling responsibility.

The festival format remains the same this year: The staging of six new full-length works; a production of an anthology created by multiple authors and performed by the apprentice company; and the performance of several 10-minute plays.

All productions will be staged at the theater's complex, 316 W. Main St. Last year, Actors staged "Batch," an experimental Humana play, at Connections, a downtown gay nightclub. In 2004, Naomi Wallace's play about the Butchertown neighborhood, "At the Vanishing Point," was performed in a Butchertown warehouse.

Off-site Humana productions are rare because they put a considerable strain on Actors' production staff during its busiest, most difficult time of the year. "It's a huge investment of time and energy," Masterson said.

The festival -- founded by Jon Jory and supported by funds from the Humana Foundation -- has been a pioneer in new-play development. But now, the competition is more intense. Many regional theaters, city theater alliances and presenters, including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., are producing new-play festivals. And there is less opportunity for commercial success in New York and on Broadway, which is dominated by splashy, expensive musicals, revivals and Disney-related productions.

Actors' mission with the Humana Festival, Masterson said, is to develop new works that will go out into the world and find homes in diverse venues that include regional theaters, touring groups, alternative theaters, art galleries and museums.

A play may go on to New York, where it may win top awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, as three Humana plays have done, but Actors' goal is to "move the work out into the American theater and global theater," Masterson said. "It's about being aware of a spectrum of possibilities."

Here's a closer look at the full-length works:

"Great Falls" (opens Feb. 27 in the Bingham Theatre) -- Lee Blessing, 59, is best-known for his 1986 play, "A Walk in the Woods," about an American and a Russian nuclear-arms negotiator. It was a finalist for a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Blessing's new play isn't about avoiding global apocalypse, but audiences can expect universal themes involving the human condition in this story of a man and his stepdaughter who are trying to rebuild their lives. New York director Lucie Tiberghien, who was involved in the development of the play, will direct.

"This Beautiful City" (opens March 7 in the Pamela Brown Auditorium) -- Written by Steven Cosson, 39, and Jim Lewis, 50, this play with original music examines the difficulty evangelical Christians and non-evangelicals have finding common ground.

The Civilians spent months interviewing residents in Colorado Springs, Colo., the home of the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family. During that time, a scandal arose involving evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, who admitted to having sex with a male prostitute. The play evolved into a work about faith and how a community steers through such a crisis.

The play, which will be directed by Cosson, was developed in a workshop at the Sundance Institute. After its premiere at the Humana Festival, the show will go to The Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C.

"Becky Shaw" (opens March 2 in the Bingham Theatre) -- After her breakout success at the 2004 Humana Festival, Gina Gionfriddo landed a job as a writer-producer on NBC's "Law and Order." Her play "After Ashley" was produced off-Broadway with Kieran Culkin, who won a 2005 Obie Award for his performance.

In her new, dark comedy, a newlywed couple's attempt at matchmaking takes them into strange territory. Masterson said he commissioned Gionfriddo to write a play because "I love her work, and I want to see her continue to write for the theater."

The play will be directed by Peter Dubois, associate artistic director of The Public Theatre in New York.

"Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom" (opens March 20 in the Victor Jory Theatre) -- "This is a comedy, but it is truly scary. The hair on the back of your neck stands up kind of scary," Masterson said of this play by Jennifer Haley, a Los Angeles playwright in her 30s.

In a subdivision with identical houses, teenagers become addicted to an online video game of horror. Their parents are clueless about the children's activities and how blurred the line between reality and virtual existence has become. "It's a really sharp piece of writing," Masterson said.

Kip Fagan, co-founder of Printer's Devil Theatre in Seattle, will direct.

"the breaks" (opens March 11 in the Bingham Theatre) -- Dancer and poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, 32, of New York City, was named one of America's Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences by Smithsonian magazine.

This new work by Joseph, a Stanford University resident artist, tells a personal story about being a multicultural person in a multicultural world. Joseph intertwines film, theater and dance in his narrative about hip-hop culture. Masterson predicts "the breaks" will have a long life after its Humana Festival debut.

The production will be directed by Michael John Garces, who provided imaginative direction to last year's Humana hit, "dark play or stories for boys" by Carlos Murillo.

"All Hail Hurricane Gordo" (opens March 15 in the Pamela Brown Auditorium) -- The lives of two brothers go haywire when they take in a female houseguest in this new work by Dartmouth graduate Carly Mensch, 24, of Harrison, N.Y. Masterson said the play is "smart and interesting" and Mensch "has a real gift" for playwriting.

The play will be directed by Actors' associate director Sean Daniels. After its Louisville premiere, the play will be staged at the Cleveland Playhouse.

"Game On" (opens March 21 in the Bingham Theatre) -- This anthology looks at sports in America and what society's obsessions with sports tell us about ourselves. The contributing playwrights are Yale School of Drama graduate Zakiyyah Alexander; Rolin Jones, a Pulitzer finalist for his play "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" and a writer for the Showtime cable TV show "Weeds"; Alice Tuan, who wrote this year's Humana play "Batch"; Daryl Watson, co-creator of the Disney show "Johnny and the Sprites"; Marisa Wegrzyn, resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists; and Ken Weitzman, whose full-length play "The As If Body Loop" was presented at this year's Humana Festival.

The 10-minute plays will be announced later.

Reporter Judith Egerton can be reached at (502) 582-4503.

A dramatic new approach to the theatrical docudrama

2007-11-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

by Misha Berson
Seattle Times theatre critic

NEW YORK CITY — Scottish military veterans recall the pride of their fabled regiment and their fateful, disillusioning service in Iraq.

New Yorkers reflect on the disappearance of valued objects and the loss of cherished loved ones.

These are shorthand descriptions of two unusual New York hit shows. One is "Black Watch," an exhilarating import from the National Theatre of Scotland, which just finished a run at St. Ann's Warehouse, a Brooklyn theater venue.

"Gone Missing" is a diverting original piece by the inventive young troupe The Civilians, now at Off Broadway's Barrow Street Theatre in an extended run through Jan. 6.

Though dissimilar in some respects, both pieces reflect a theatrical trend that's steadily gathered steam in recent decades: the rise of documentary drama.

However, neither relies solely on the usual "talking heads" format of so many docudramas, like the engrossing recent plays "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," a portrait of an idealistic young Olympia woman in her own words (seen at Seattle Rep earlier this year), and David Hare's "Stuff Happens," an account of the run-up to the current Iraq War (at ACT Theatre a few months ago).

The much-lauded, world-touring "Black Watch" and the more modestly ingratiating "Gone Missing" do use some standard docudrama ploys. They are thematic works, with dialogue largely drawn from interviews, statistics, news reports and other research documents. But that material is creatively enriched by bursts of abstract dance, live song interludes, even flying effects.

"Black Watch"

Lauded in Edinburgh (where it debuted), London, Los Angeles and New York, "Black Watch" is a bracing theatrical boot camp.

Speaking the actual words of men who served in the Black Watch — Scotland's most venerable and elite fighting force — a tireless all-male cast performs the show with drill-team precision.

Playwright Gregory Burke's script is critical of the Iraq War, and the American "bullying" that Black Watch fighters perceived when sent to supplement U.S. forces during a major 2004 assault on Fallujah.

But this isn't a protest play as much as "an unauthorized biography" of the Black Watch battalion. As such, it ruefully, imagistically explores military culture and how warfare has changed in the modern era.

During one exhilarating passage, a vet relates the storied history of the Black Watch, from its 18th-century origins to the present. While doing so, he's held aloft by comrades who swiftly dress and redress his body in the kilts, jackets and tam o'shanters of the different uniforms worn by this battalion through the centuries.

At another point, a crew of soldiers watches from its armored tank, while video footage of the intense U.S. bombing of Iraq's al-Anbar province thunders on eerily.

And when several Black Watch soldiers are blown up by an IED (improvised explosive device), they dangle from the rafters like awkward angels in camouflage.

Memorable also are the ironic songs: traditional Celtic marching tunes extolling bravery, sung heartily a cappella, or with bagpipe and drum.

"Black Watch" has its talking-head moments, when Scottish soldiers bicker in a profanity-laced brogue, spar with a nervous theatrical researcher and endure stretches of tense tedium in Iraq's suffocating heat.

But such startling sights as a recruit slashing his way out of the belly of a pool table with a knife convey nearly as much as the scripted words do.

The sensory bombardment is essential to portraying the brave new world of warfare, in which centuries-old rules of engagement are supplanted by fanatical terrorism, geopolitical "bullying" and the erosion of legendary forces like the Black Watch — which in 2006 lost its special status and was absorbed into the British Army.

"Gone Missing"

A far more modest exercise in docudrama, "Gone Missing" concerns itself with the disappearances of such nonessential objects as a single, high-heeled pump and a beloved stuffed sock toy.

Yet through bittersweet monologues; a minimal but evocative visual design; and smart, jazzy musical bits, this piece also touches deftly on major losses — e.g., loved ones who perished in the Sept. 11 World Trade Center disaster, and murder victims described with grisly humor by a jaded police detective.

The contrasts between the trivial and the profound can be jarring. However, the gray-suited actors, who with writer-director Steven Cosson conducted man-on-the-street interviews to concoct the show, keep "Gone Missing" popping and unpredictable.

And the lively dance routines and thoughtful songs (by Michael Friedman) help turn what might have been a snarky survey into something special: a mundane and metaphysical cabaret of bereavement.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

Bittersweet lemonade of a show

2007-08-30T18:58:00.000-07:00

by Mark Kennedy

(Also published under varying headlines in Deseret Morning News, WSVN Online, Q92 FM, The Ontario Intelligencer, Brandon Sun, CBC, and others)

Gone Missing - Where: Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St., New York. When: Through Jan. 6. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. How much: $50. Call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.thecivilians.org.

NEW YORK -- If you've ever lost something -- say, a cell phone or a favorite ring -- and never gave it a second thought, congrats.

But if it really bums you out -- still stings, even years later -- an edgy off-Broadway theater group feels your pain.

The Civilians offer a thoughtful and sometimes loony show about forgotten wallets, missing childhood sock puppets, the lost island of Atlantis, squandered inheritance and even an absent Gucci pump, size 6.

"I think it challenges people to re-evaluate their relationship to their attachments," says Stephen Plunkett, one of the show's six performers.

With a mix of monologues, dialogues and songs, the actors in "Gone Missing" read missing dog posters, recreate radio interviews and portray a handful of regular folks talking about their missing stuff.

There's a story about a wife's diamond ring stupidly lost down the shower drain and a woman's lament about her still-prized Agnes B scarf which, she fears, is now likely balled up in the back of some dude's SUV.

At various points in the show the actors -- each wearing identical gray suits -- burst into original songs by Michael Friedman, turning the show into a kind of docu-cabaret.

"I think the upshot of the show is that: You lose everything. That's just a reality. And that's not necessarily an answer," Plunkett says. "It just sort of tosses it up to you to be like, 'How do you feel about that?'"

The quirky approach can produce something else lost -- audience members. The company recalls one very drunk woman getting up and leaving during a recent performance at the Barrow Street Theatre. "The music is great, but I don't know what they're talking about," she loudly announced as she stumbled up the aisle, slurring her words.

"You either go with it or you don't," says Robbie Collier Sublett, another performer. "You can't twist somebody's arm about it and sometimes they stop going with it three-fourths of the way through."

The play, born in the months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has been staged in Tennessee, New England, California, London, Kentucky and Colorado. This is its second time in New York

"The running gag is it's the show that won't die. It's been around for a long time," says Sublett.

"It's our 'Fantasticks,'" jokes actress Colleen Werthmann.

The Civilians, who take their name from an old vaudeville term for people not in show biz, is the brainchild of artistic director Steven Cosson. A 38-year-old graduate of the University of California at San Diego, Cosson asks his 28-actor company to conduct interviews themselves and capture their subjects on stage.

"The first thing that hooked me on talking to real people as a way of making theater was just wanting to speak to people in the first place. Making theater was just a secondary bonus," Cosson says.

His philosophy -- based on techniques formulated by Les Waters at London's Joint Stock Theater Group -- encourages portraits of people saying extraordinary and ordinary things.

"It's like an intuitive impression," says Plunkett. "It's hard to articulate, but you just sort of listen to someone and give yourself to them. It does something to the inside of you."

Werthmann, Damian Baldet and Jennifer R. Morris were in the play's debut in 2002, which means they did the original interviews. They estimate audiences are seeing only about 30 percent of the material culled. Actors new to the show have either studied the original performers on DVD or gone back to the subjects in person to learn their inflections and mannerisms firsthand.

"It's like a true oral tradition," Werthmann says.

During interviews, the actors use tools that therapists employ: Ask open-ended questions, never interrupt, stay neutral and plumb for accidental revelations.

"Anybody to be a member of this company has not only to be a capable actor in the traditional sense but also a gifted character actor," Sublett says.

"An empath, in a certain way," Werthmann says.

Sometimes, the actors don't know they've stumbled onto something sublime until they present it to the group. That's what happened to Baldet, who interviewed a hotel security guard.

The guard told a story about losing his Palm Pilot in New York and later getting it back -- a ho-hum story until the day is revealed: Sept. 11, 2001.

"I think people are interesting to other people, even when what they're saying is not that interesting," Baldet says. "There's no great plot point in his story. It's just a little nugget of random humanity."

The Civilians, who previously dealt with the subject of truth in their show "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch," are already hard at work tackling their next topic: evangelism. It promises to be juicy. Members of the company went to Colorado Springs, Colo., just as the Rev. Ted Haggard was ensnared in scandal last year. He was forced to resign his post at New Life Church when a former male prostitute alleged having a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with him.

The Civilians just happened to find themselves in the maw of a still-unraveling storm. They spoke to supporters and critics, atheists and believers.

"I'm always saying with our projects, 'I want to figure out how the personal, how the individual experience, fits into a bigger context,'" Cosson says. "How does it fit into larger political questions or social questions or historical or economic forces that we don't normally perceive in our day-to-day lives?'"

The show that emerged -- "The Beautiful City" -- is still being edited, but Cosson says it doesn't come to a neat conclusion -- just as "Gone Missing" doesn't offer an answer to loss.

"If a play gives an answer, it's a bad play, and it's probably a bad answer," Cosson says. "I want to stir up people's reactions in order to get them to think more deeply."

What? And Leave Show Business?

2007-08-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

by CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

From left, Chet Carlin, Damian Baldet, Joan MacIntosh, David Greenspan and Roslyn Ruff. Photographs by Michael Nagle for The New York Times

I consider myself a worker,” said David Greenspan, who has been an actor, writer and director in New York for nearly 30 years. “I’m facing the same things that workers are facing throughout the country.”

Mr. Greenspan is right of course. It really doesn’t matter whether you write plays or pave highways when you’re buying groceries. But there is a notable, and curious, difference. Every night thousands of theatergoers fill seats in Manhattan to watch theater people at work for a couple of hours, without really thinking of it as work.

But it is work, work that is supposed to pay rent, buy food and sustain people (and in some cases families) for the long periods of anxious unemployment that are an inevitable part of a performer’s life. Given what stage actors make and what New York costs, staying afloat has always required improvisation, shrewdness, discipline, luck and a kind of obstinacy that some people call passion and others call craziness, and is probably a little bit of both.

But these days it is harder than ever. Government support for the arts is meager, leaving nonprofit theaters squeezed and scrambling to cut expenses — and cast sizes — while the cost of living in New York has skyrocketed. What follows (see links above) are five working New York City theater professionals talking about the part of the show business life that happens offstage.

The Earner: Damian Baldet

AGE: 36
YEARS WORKING: 6
MOST MADE IN A YEAR: $140,000
CURRENT INCOME: $506 a week
LAST SEEN IN: “Gone Missing,” now playing at the Barrow Street Theater

During Mr. Baldet’s first few years in New York, days went something like this: a shift as a hotel concierge from 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., a walk up to the theater for a quick nap in the basement, rehearsal from 6:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., a subway ride home, four hours of sleep and all of this all over again.

“By the time I got to rehearsal I was so blind exhausted I thought there was no way I could be creative or enjoy it in any way,” he said. “My performances were just completely about keeping my mind together.” He added that he fell asleep onstage during rehearsals more than once.

Mr. Baldet, over a burger at Sardi’s, talked about that period in the kind of joking way you can talk about something that wasn’t funny at the time.

But he and his wife of six years, Alison Weller, an actress, promised each other this life, even when they were making roughly nothing for acting off Off Broadway, quitting one paying job after another to make room for rehearsals and begging parents for money month after month.

That last part got a little tense, Mr. Baldet said, and led him to question whether this really was something he should be doing. Asked if he’d thought about quitting, he said yes, and then no, and then yes, and then he talked about his fantasy of being the archetypal breadwinner.

“I have said to her,” Mr. Baldet said, referring to his wife, “ ‘If we have children, I’m quitting.’ And she said, ‘If you do that, you will crush your soul.’ The gist of it was: ‘If you do that, you wouldn’t be you, and then what’s the point? Why would you have a family at all?’ ”

So, he concluded, he wouldn’t quit.

He’s much better off than he was in those early years, having toured for two years as Timon in “The Lion King,” earning $140,000 a year.

“It’s more than I’ve made combined since I started working when I was 15 years old,” he said.

He used the money to pay down debt, buy things he had been needing, like a computer, and take his wife on their first real vacation. When those two years were up, Disney offered him a job as an offstage understudy in the Broadway version of “The Lion King.”

It was good money, but the vast majority of the time it would mean not performing. He declined. Besides, Ms. Weller had gotten a job on Broadway in “Coram Boy,” which was sure to bring in good money for the foreseeable future.

Mr. Baldet is now off Broadway again in “Gone Missing,” taking home around $400 a week after taxes (the minimum salary for an actor in an Off Broadway production in a 199-seat theater). His wife, who had been unemployed since “Coram Boy” closed 25 days after opening, joined the cast of “Gone Missing” two weeks ago.

“It’s not enough money even with the two of us,” he said. “I probably should get another job. I really probably should.”

'Gone Missing' finds humor in cop stories

2007-08-15T19:33:00.000-07:00

BY OLIVIA JANE SMITH

August 15th 2007

Turns out that New York's Finest are also New York's Most Theatrical.

The evidence can be found at "Gone Missing," a bittersweet Off-Broadway musical about loss that uses the small and tangible - a mislaid wallet, say, or scarf - as a way to tap into yearning for what's irrevocably left us.

But one of the hit show's most memorable characters doesn't lose things. He finds them. And oh, the things that he uncovers.

Gary Gorman is a retired NYPD cop who worked for years in the Emergency Services Unit, a squad called in to particularly sticky situations, from hostage crises to building collapses.

The theater company The Civilians - which created this show, like all its productions, by interviewing dozens of people - found Gorman through tours he gives about jumpers on the Brooklyn Bridge. Gorman's crime-scene tales of dead bodies and severed heads serve an important purpose: The lost scarf, no matter how beloved, is still a scarf.

Gorman's observations, in contrast, "snap you back into perspective on what's important," says Civilians artistic director Steven Cosson. "The stories Gary's character brings into the play are what make the rest of it work."

Ironically, they also make people laugh. Gorman and Stephen Plunkett, the actor who plays him, tread a fine line in bringing humor to what could be a grim subject.

"Obviously, finding someone's head is not something to make light of," says the amiable Gorman. "But you have to" - he forces a laugh - "to keep yourself going in that type of work."

Gorman loves seeing his experiences burst into life on stage. "I'm a ham," he says. "To see yourself portrayed by other people is flattering."

There's an unexpected payoff as well. "Most police officers desensitize themselves. You really have to," Gorman says. "Seeing this performance made me a little more sensitive. Because sometimes you can get too cold."

As an actor, Plunkett loves sharing Gorman's charm and humor, not just the grisly stuff, with audiences at the Barrow Street Theatre (27 Barrow St.). "There's this great joy that Gary takes in communicating these stories," he says. "It's fun to have that running through your veins every night."

And it's nice to play someone you like, he adds. Looking at Gorman, he says, "How could you jump off a bridge with this guy telling you not to?"

Theater Review (NYC): Gone Missing

2007-08-14T20:58:00.000-07:00

Written by Tullis McCall

Oh - just go see this.

Go see this if you are in love with someone and want an evening that will bind up the little scratchy gaps you are feeling right now. Go see this if there is someone you love as a chum and want to share an evening that will sweep you into an intimate dinner conversation. Go see this with that person you've been meaning to ask out but you are too nervous or you just haven't found the right place or you are afraid of going to something that will put you both off your feed.

Or, if you are like me, go see it alone. Who cares - just go.

When you leave this production you will be thinking about people you miss, people for whom you are grateful, or you may be wishing you had more people in your life that you would miss were they gone. You will be thinking about little items from your past: the time you thought you lost that letter, or the time you left your wallet on the counter at the liquor store, or the time you said goodbye to someone and walked away quickly so they wouldn't see you tear up. You will be thinking about the story of the pet who came back home, or the one who didn't. And you will certainly be thinking of time and the way it slips through you like bran.

Or you might be thinking about world losses as they do here: Atlantis - if it was a continent, how did we lose it? Or universal losses: Romantic revenge - "If you've lost your self-confidence, your direction, your respect for yourself - I have them and I'm not giving them back." Then there are the corporal issues, such as what happens when a body loses some of its parts?

The performances are spot on, with the exception of the women's tendency to do that bent elbow, limp wrist thing that actors do on stage (never off stage) when they don't know what to do with their hands. Each actor plays several parts with the added bonus of women playing men and visa versa.

What has gone missing for you? It's here somewhere in this elegant piece. Compiled from interviews and enhanced with a score that includes harmony, low down swing, soft rock and multi-lingual serenades, Gone Missing zips in and out of lives that are a whisper's length removed from our own.

At the evening's conclusion, the actors leave behind a little of the wrapping that contained them. They leave us a memento, something by which to remember them when they are gone. The mementos remain like the stories we tell, like small stones placed on a grave or on the side of a path. They are proof that we passed this way.

Gone Missing, written and directed by Steven Cosson; music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. With: Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer R. Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Collier Sublett and Colleen Werthmann. Sets by Takeshi Kata; costumes by Sarah Beers; lighting by Thomas Dunn; sound by Ken Travis; choreography by Jim Augustine; production stage manager, Robert Signom III; Andy Boroson, David Purcell and Steve Gilewski, musicians; Mr. Boroson, music director. Presented by Scott Morfee and Tom Wirtshafter; in association with the Civilians, Kyle Gorden, producing director; Mr. Cosson, artistic director.

At the Barrow Street Theater, 27 Barrow Street, West Village, NYC; (212) 239-6200. Extended through January 2008. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.

New plays incubate at Sundance

2007-08-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

Playwrights, directors and actors find a fertile creative environment in a setting far from the Broadway stage at the Sundance incubator

By Ellen Fagg

SUNDANCE - The song lyric is arresting: "God is not interested in your happiness."

On this Wednesday morning, Michael Friedman is at the piano in the barnlike rehearsal room of the Sundance Theatre Lab, teaching six actors his song "Freedom." The composer for the New-York based The Civilians theater company, Friedman is working on the score for "This Beautiful City," a play with music about the explosive power of evangelical Christianity in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Actors are looking over the fourth rewrite of the script, still something of a mess on day nine, the midway point of this exclusive three-week summer camp for playwrights.

"This beautiful pile of crap" is how Friedman jokingly describes the play before getting down to the business of explaining today's changes. "On the first 'God is not interested,' " the young composer tells a vocalist, "sing loud and sing ugly."

God is not interested in your happiness. Voices blend as a godhead of women follow that line with this: "So you have to learn to live without it." And then a trio of men sing: "Freedom is not so you can do what you want. The only freedom is the ability to do what you ought." The song builds until hitting a blunt, unsettling resolution: "It's a paradox."

"This Beautiful City" is one of eight ambitious, quirky projects at this year's lab, selected from more than 700 Sundance submissions. What's unusual about the reality-based work is that the lyrics for "Freedom" - like the play's dialogue and characters - grew out of interviews The Civilians conducted during an 11-week residency in Colorado Springs last fall.

The theater company's interest in exploring the emerging political power of the Christian right sparked the project, which became a partnership with Colorado College. "Our mission as a theater company is to pursue what we don't know," says Steve Cosson, The Civilians' founding artistic director. Friedman describes a moment when he was talking to Colorado Springs residents and realized he was at the crossroads of a sweeping cultural movement. "In New York, we are so unaware of how Colorado Springs is affecting us," the musician says with the insight of an anthropologist.

In a case of cosmic happenstance, the company happened to be attending the New Life megachurch on the November Sunday when minister Ted Haggard resigned amid allegations of a sexual relationship with a male escort. "When Ted Haggard got outed, our play got hit by a truck," says Cosson, one of the play's three writers.

While the play directly addresses the collision between homosexuality and Christianity, its themes are more broadly focused on the paradoxes of living in a place that some people consider God's kingdom.

"For me, not being a religious person," says Friedman, "that's the central question of the show: 'What will your personal freedom bring you?' "

Creative courtship: Listen to The Civilians or other theater artists talking about the Sundance lab, and it's as if they're talking about a creative courtship, where Sundance functions as a matchmaker, setting up emerging and established playwrights with a crew of actors and creative advisers.

Then through a dramatic ménage À trois among playwright, director and dramaturg, the creative aim is as simple as falling in love: You just have to be brave enough to create something new.

That kind of risk can be a challenge for artists in the current economic climate, as arts groups locally and nationally fight for economic survival.

Like a scientific laboratory, the lab hopes to provide a safe place for creative experiments. "Plays are not created in seven days," says Philip Himberg, Sundance's producing director. "Darwinism is the model. There's no such thing as spontaneous combustion. We try to understand the artist's process and establish the right environment."

That concept of nurturing new theatrical works has deep roots locally, thanks to the Utah Arts Council's ambitious launch of the state's first playwriting conference at the Sundance Resort in July 1980. The next year, Robert Redford adopted the fledgling program, which has expanded as the Sundance Institute evolved into an international brand name.

With an annual budget now approaching $1 million, Sundance theater programs have evolved into a year-round support group, with a playwriting retreat at northeastern Wyoming's Ucross foundation, and a lab for new musicals and ensemble works at White Oak, Fla. It's also expanding internationally, with two Nairobi artists attending this year's lab, and plans for a 10-day workshop to support local talent next year in Kampala, Uganda.

Despite the lab's nearly 30-year history, few theatergoers are aware of its national influence because Sundance doesn't produce plays. Recent examples of its graduates are two quirky Broadway musicals - "Spring Awakening" and "Grey Gardens" - that were the talk of this year's Tony Awards. Theater brand names nurtured by Sundance include epics such as Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and Robert Schenkkan's "The Kentucky Cycle."

Sundance also can claim Moisés Kaufman's "The Laramie Project," about the hate crime that took the life of Matthew Shepard, and "I Am My Own Wife," Doug Wright's unusual play about a charming, shape-shifting German transvestite. Both shows have been produced at regional theaters around the country, and drawn audiences when performed at Salt Lake City theater companies.

"What we're proud of is the audacity and independent spirit of those works," Himberg says. "We're not about producing hits. We're about sending work out into the country."

Yet the Sundance official, like nonprofit administrators worldwide, is quick to offer the numbers that quantify the lab's track record. So far, Himberg says, 85 percent of Sundance-incubated plays have gone on to full-scale productions at regional theaters, while 21 have received Tony nominations.

"American theater doesn't treat playwrights well," says Mame Hunt, the lab's lead dramaturg. "This is the place where they are at the center of the world.

A good start: "This Beautiful City's" creators arrived at Sundance with a rough outline, cobbled together from hours of interview transcripts. In that form, the project already had received national attention, thanks to staged readings earlier this year at Colorado College and in New York City, and a commitment for a world-premiere production next June at Washington, D.C.'s Studio Theatre.

During the lab, the writers kicked out six new drafts for every-other-day rehearsals, and Friedman wrote three new songs. The play now features a dozen key characters based on real people. The work blends theatrical styles, including moments from interviews, direct-address monologues and naturalistic scenes. Most of the play's songs are structured with layers of voices and other elements juxtaposed against each other, to create what Casson describes as a "new and synergistic third voice."

In the cliff-hanger that ends the first act, audience members eavesdrop on conflicting witness accounts of Haggard's downfall. A dramatic highlight of the second act is "Take Me There," a song that draws upon the motifs of Christian pop, intercut with snippets of prayers and church speeches, to recount with dramatic urgency what happened inside the New Life Church the day Haggard was exposed.

With "This Beautiful City" and other interview-based works, the theater company aims to tell stories grounded in a particular time and place. They want to create theater, not journalistic reportage, not a didactic documentary or an op-ed piece. "We're trying to balance the story," Casson says. "Various people have their truth to tell, but this is a play being created by a secular theater company. Our actors perform and sing the Christian point of view. This is our show."

A show, that is, shaped at a place where playwrights are at the center of the creative universe. "Everything shifted around and moved and got juxtaposed next to other stuff," Cosson reported this week, after returning to his New York office. "The most helpful thing about Sundance was just having a fresh audience, and then getting responses from Sundance's creative advisers. We came in with a very, very rough draft, and now we have a pretty solid draft."

---
* ELLEN FAGG can be contacted at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

Taking shape at Sundance
Besides "This Beautiful City," other plays in development at this year's Sundance Theatre Lab included:

* WORK: Noah Haidle's "Local Time 11AM-1PM."
Description: Inspired by TV's "24," but "without Kiefer Sutherland or terrorists," the play opens with two simultaneous stories performed on opposite sides of the stage that appear to have little in common.

* WORK: Ann Marie Healy's "Have You Seen Steve Steven?"
Description: Teen protagonist Kathleen's fairy-tale passage into adulthood devolves into "Twilight Zone"-esque terror.

* WORK: Danny Hoch's "A Word Is Born."
Description: "A musical prelude to rap culture, its generation and its word."

* WORK: Naomi Lizuka's "Ghostwritten."
Description: A retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fable, exploring the relationship between America and Southeast Asia and challenging the idea of what's foreign and what's familiar.

* WORK: Rob Grace and Bradford Louryk's "The Untitled Lucrezia Borgia Project."
Description: Multimedia one-man play illuminating "the multiplicity of our complex identities," based on a collection of Borgia's letters.

* WORK: Tarell Alvin McCraney's "Wig Out."
Description: A love story set in "drag ball houses" in contemporary Harlem, considering such concepts as fidelity and loyalty to self and family.

* WORK: Tracey Scott Wilson's "The Good Negro."
Description: Intimate stories offer a look inside the history of the American civil-rights movement.

Gone Missing

2007-08-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

The Civilians is the name of a quirky downtown group that combines earnest docudrama with self-referential musical satire, and chances are you’ve never heard of them.

But I’ve been following this brilliant gang for years, hoping they would get a break. Well good news: The Civilians have revived “Gone Missing,” a 2003 musical meditation about loss, for an extended Off-Broadway run. Now, it’s your chance to discover this superb company.

On paper, even on video, what the group does so well might sound like a college stunt: six performers dressed in matching grey suits, dancing robotically, slip in and out of dozens of characters, who give their thoughts on loss, both material and metaphysical.

Between sound bites, they break into various styles of song: salsa, indie rock and bouncy show tunes. The fragmentary text was generated through interviews with real people, as well as found material from posters, classified ads and interview transcripts from the Public Radio program “Fresh Air.” There are memorable lines from cops, shopkeepers, professors and others about losing shoes, wedding rings, cell phones, as well as segments about nostalgia, grief and even losing one’s mind. We hear from a guy who specializes in helping people get rid of clutter and an Englishman who temporarily loses language.

Keeping all these disparate elements together is a wonderfully witty score by Michael Friedman, while director Steve Cosson displays a pitch-perfect ear for tone, which shifts from goofy triviality to profound drama. The six actors, who play multiple characters with amazing precision, all deserve shout-outs: Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Sublett and Colleen Werthmann. Once you find these guys, you won’t want to let them out of your sight.

While they’ve been a familiar feature on the Off-Off Broadway scene for years, I’m happy to say that more New Yorkers than ever are able to check out The Civilians. I bet you’ll like what you find.

– David Cote

Gone Missing

2007-07-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

People lose things all the time: rings, keys, their minds. Credit the Civilians for crafting a play about such misplacements — and bringing it back to the stage four years after its inception. Gone Missing straddles the documentary and musical genres, succeeding in both via the troupe's wry interpretations of real-life New Yorkers' stories and quirky, contemplative music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. The six actors, all impressive, channel dozens of characters and deliver monologues and songs with equal aplomb. This show misses nothing. (SP)

Uncluttered: Emotionally Attached Why our 'things' mean so much to us

2007-07-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

by Patricia Diesel

I was so thankful when a student of mine from the Learning Annex, Phil Stern, e-mailed me The New York Times Theater Review for "Gone Missing."

Phil wrote, "Here's a snippet that illustrates why I think this may be of interest to you:"

"Other experts heard from include a lecturer from the Learning Annex, who teaches courses on 'how to rid your life of clutter'."

My curiosity was piqued at this point, so I contacted the producing director, Kyle Gorden, to get the details of how "Gone Missing" came to be. Not only was Gorden polite and informative, but he also directed me to his press person, Jon Dimond, who offered two complimentary tickets, which to my good fortune, were next to Steven Cosson, the founding artistic director.

What I love about this theatrical dirge is how it acknowledges our emotional attachment to our "things" by brilliantly illustrating our sense of loss through everyone and anyone's experiences when their most cherished possessions are missing.

From missing jewelry to a Gucci shoe to a sock doll named Sniffle, "Gone Missing" depicts, with a sense of humor, very relatable life stories of how we cling to our memories to fill the void over losing something.

Take for instance the character of "Laura" who believes she lost her black Gucci pump while enjoying herself downtown one evening.

Frantic and anxiety ridden, Laura decides to post flyers, sets herself up with a point of contact e-mail address and continually calls a theater (where she thinks she lost it) with hopes her shoe will be found. After all, what good is one Gucci pump is the premise here.

Laura's story brought an ache to my heart when I thought about the time I lost my first ring. It was my birthstone, ruby red, given to me for my 10th birthday. The effort I put into trying to find that ring -- backtracking every step, over and over. Calling friends, searching high and low, oh the mourning I did over that ring.

The recollection of Sniffle, a sock doll belonging to a little girl named Ingrid that was mistakenly left behind while on vacation, and then thrown out in a dumpster, created a course of drama. Ingrid's mom lovingly tells the tales of woe with so much heart that it made me remember the time my father threw out my childhood Raggedy Anne Doll while cleaning up the basement after I got married.

"Gone Missing" is not only composed of stories, but songs to give you the extra zinger needed to identify with the grieving of loss. They did a great job of capturing the essence of a broken heart in the song, "I Gave It Away." I think anyone who has been jilted in a relationship can identify with these lyrics:

"So if you're missing your clothes you left by the side of the bed, I gave them away."

I mean come on, this is painfully funny! I certainly wasn't leaving that evening without purchasing their CD, "The Civilians -- Objects & Geese."

As a life coach, I believe that in the game of life there are no coincidences. Everything happens for a reason so we can learn something. It's up to us what we do with that information.

I think this awesome and delightful experience with "Gone Missing" was presented to me because of the similarities of how working with my clients is so much about letting go of the things we are attached emotionally to. Whether we willingly release or painstakingly lose our possessions, we always have our memories to remind us of how precious they really are.

Patricia Diesel owns and operates Keep It Simple Now, a professional organizing company that offers a coaching approach and hands-on applications for achieving an organized life. Visit www.keepitsimplenow.com. Her column appears every Sunday in On the Run.

'Gone Missing' Docu-musical finds what is missing

2007-07-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

By Judd Hollander
Special to The Epoch Times

NEW YORK—Everybody loses things, from everyday items to ones with emotional value, and those that make up who you are—even your sight, mind, and life. This is the subject tackled by the theater group, The Civilians, in very enjoyable Gone Missing.

Billed as a "documentary musical" (musical and lyrics by Michael Friedman), the work is drawn from actual interviews with various New Yorkers about things lost and sometimes found. This includes a hilarious story about a lost Gucci shoe and the lengths its owner will go to find it; a cop relating the gruesome things one can find in his line of work; and a group of women describing losing various pieces of jewelry—all of which have strong sentimental attachments.

These sequences are linked together by musical interludes where people sing about losing everything from their virginity to their innocence to their cool. There's also a spoof of radio talk shows with a limelight-hugging doctor talking about the nostalgia loss brings (not to mention the continent of Atlantis).

The action moves swiftly from one section to the next, so if one sketch doesn't appeal to you, more often than not, the next one will. Ultimately, what makes "Gone Missing" so appealing is that everyone in the audience, it's safe to say, has lost something important at one point, so it's very easy to emphasize with many of the situations presented.

A nice touch are the instances of situations when people have actually found things they've lost, such as a father looking for his child's favorite toy, a security guard who lost his palm pilot during 9/11, and the return of a missing pet.

Direction by Steven Cosson (also the writer of the piece, with one sequence written by Peter Morris) is sharp, as is the costume design by Sarah Beers. Featuring Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer R. Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Collier Sublett, and Colleen Werthmann.

Find the Time to Uncover Gone Missing

2007-07-05T21:27:00.000-07:00

Who among us hasn't agonized over that misplaced set of keys or a dimly remember memento, or been stunned by a seemingly random object found on the street or in some other place? Such experiences are at the heart of The Civilians' Gone Missing a richly satisfying tapestry of stories and songs about things that can be both lost and found.

As with many of their previous productions, "Missing" has been developed from interviews, and the six-member company, all clad in nondescript gray suits, does a grand job of shifting between characters of widely varying ages and sexes. Director and writer Steven Cosson, with songwriter Michael Friedman, examines not only things that can be lost (a trio of women describing rings that each of them has lost is, by turns, comic and touching), but also less tangible items. A song sung in Spanish and later in English demonstrates how meaning, but also feeling, can be lost in translation. As "Missing" nears its conclusion, two older women describe items they've lost – as they speak, it's hard not to be pricked by the sense of yet another sort of loss – that of one's youth, particularly when framed by Friedman's song "Etch A Sketch":

I'm an Etch a Sketch (but now I'm all shook up)
I'm a piece of wax (but now the imprint's lost).

The moment is indicative of the duality of tones that "Missing" often navigates with grace under Cosson's careful direction

Shrewdly though, he allows much of the piece to become simply a rollicking rollercoaster where theatergoers ricochet with the stories. A cop who revels in the gory details of DOAs he finds proves to be particularly uproarious with each appearance. Equally funny is a recreated radio call-in show with a self-appointed expert on nostalgia and our yearning for long-lost times. As he waxes eloquent on Atlantis (the – er – "lost continent") and is buffeted by inane interjections from the radio show host – it's nearly impossible to not laugh.

Other monologues in the piece come bizarrely and yet somehow hilariously from a Nazi-like guru who helps people rid themselves of clutter and a self-professed pet psychic, proving that the diversity of stories that the group has uncovered to create "Gone Missing" might be the most interesting "find" in this thoroughly delightful show.

ACTING IN GOOD FAITH What business does an edgy New York company have getting intimate with Colorado Evangelicals?

2007-07-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

BY MARK BLANKENSHIP

It may not have the obvious allure of New York City or Los Angeles, but Colorado Springs, Colo.—an unassuming city that peeks from under the eastern edge of the Rockies—is a perfect subject for the theatre. In fact, it is theatre. From the airplane, for instance, the manmade swaths of swimming pools and parking lots looked like they were battling for space with the natural dominance of the mountains. And down on the ground, the quaint old buildings of the city's historic district were at valiant odds with the chain restaurants and budget motels that bordered every inch of the freeway.

Photo by Tom Kimmell of Emily Ackerman and Alison Weller in The Civilians' This Beautiful City.

But those aren't the conflicts I flew in to see. And they aren't what prompted the New York theatre company the Civilians to spend five weeks discerning the character of a community whose most prominent clash is defining contemporary America. Colorado Springs is theatre-in-the-making because it is the epicenter of the nation's Evangelical Christian movement, and its roughly half-million residents are fiercely divided about the role that particular faith should play in their lives. When I arrived for a four-day stay in February '07, I saw signs of their disagreement everywhere.

Granted, my sensitivity was heightened because I knew that the Civilians—a six-year-old Obie-winning troupe whose specialty is a kind of interview-based documentary cabaret—had been discussing Evangelism with everyone who would meet with them. They were presenting the first draft of their observations at local Colorado College, staging workshop productions of a musical that eventually would be named . (The official production will bow in June '08 at Washington, D.C.'s Studio Theatre, following further development this summer at Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in Utah.) From the moment I arrived, I looked for signs of how the locals might react to having their thoughts turned into theatre.

My first clue came immediately. Waiting in the airport's baggage claim, I overheard two young white men with dark suits and gelled hair. "I just got here. I came to start a church," one said. "Praise the Lord," said the other, "Praise the Lord." If praise could be shouted at the airport, then a musical about Evangelism would surely elicit a response.

Before settling on Colorado Springs, Civilians founder and artistic director Steven Cosson knew he wanted to examine Evangelism by dramatizing a community where believers have a foothold. "It felt like an excellent way to explore how religion and Christianity are impacting the entire country," he says. Most people have an opinion about Evangelism's role in national affairs, and the Civilians's method of shaping real people's words into theatrical events—complete with songs, monologues and the occasional dance routine—seemed like a viable way to let those opinions interact. When This Beautiful City began, Cosson was in talks to collaborate with Actors Theatre of Louisville, whose Kentucky home has an Evangelical megachurch. However, that congregation didn't want to talk.

Fortunately for the company, Jim Lewis, a Civilians-affiliated playwright and dramaturg, grew up in "the Springs." He knew about the influx of Evangelicals in the early '90s that helped create everything from small fringe congregations to multiple megachurches, including the behemoth New Life, whose immaculately clean campus includes an arena-sized chapel, a bookstore and a full-service cafeteria. Lewis also knew about the opposition that was generated when Evangelicals rose to local prominence, essentially making their faith part of the city's everyday routine. Thomas Lindblade, chair of drama and dance at Colorado College, told me there was a time in the city when a political bumper sticker could provoke a fight in the street. And while that type of hostility has waned, the friction over Evangelism still exists. Lewis encouraged Cosson and the Civilians to document it.

Their work was made possible largely because Lindblade wanted them there, too. He sponsored the troupe's residency by having them turn their methods into a class. For five weeks, the Civilians's delegation—five actor-dramaturgs, plus Cosson, Lewis and composer Michael Friedman—trained 13 students to work alongside them, interviewing locals and then performing what they heard (Cosson and a few others also made several visits before the residency began).

Yet despite this support, finding interview subjects wasn't always easy. Focus on the Family, which is based in the Springs, declined to participate, and some parents balked once their children had met with the Civilians, posting messages on local websites about supposedly inappropriate statements made by the artists. Inroads were made, however, when some local pastors began forwarding e-mails about the project to their congregations. Connections at Colorado College and some old-fashioned cold-calling helped, too, and eventually the troupe and the students spoke with hundreds of people. They talked with everyone from New Life members to atheists, from Catholic priests to students fighting for gay rights.

John, a young Evangelical minister who dresses like a Banana Republic ad, told me he was initially hesitant about being interviewed. "You're always told don't participate with this sort of thing because it will be a joke or be scornful," he said, just before heading into a workshop production with his family. However, he said he felt comfortable after the actor-dramaturgs proved they would listen carefully to what he said without telling him he was wrong.

Cosson coaches the Civilians to ask non-judgmental questions—"How did you get to Colorado Springs?"—and then to try not to show a personal reaction. A middle-aged activist whose website sells tchotchkes like a "Born Again Atheist" button, told me this neutrality fosters open discussion. "I never knew that theatre could be used to do something constructive," she said. "I think this is really interesting, to approach something so divisive in a non-confrontational way."

The general enthusiasm before the workshops became an electric energy after the shows were over. I could feel the crowd's eagerness when the Civilians walked on stage, turned on their tape recorders and asked for reactions. Though responses varied, they were never mild, and they were rarely predictable. Few of the artists, for instance, were prepared for why one woman in the first talkback was so angry.

"I am really sick of all the attention being paid to this perversion—this sick version of Christianity," she declared with evident agitation. "I believe we become what we listen to, and I want to know why you spent all this energy focusing on something so destructive."

Civilian actor-dramaturg Marsha Stephanie Blake summed up the company's surprised reaction when, at a pub later that night, she noted, "I was afraid it would be Christian people who came up to the mike and got pissed off, but it wasn't—it was the liberal people."

Of course, there were some unhappy Christians, too. Several people argued at the talkbacks that the facts of their lives had been inaccurately portrayed, including one elderly woman who said a scandal at Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church was misrepresented. The church's former pastor, Benjamin Reynolds, left his pulpit in 2006, and the consensus is that he was banished after coming out of the closet as gay. Though Reynolds's own words about his sexuality appeared in the show, the woman insisted there was a different reason for his dismissal. She didn't clarify what it was.

This is not to suggest that everyone in Colorado Springs was furious. Many people loved what they saw. But the fact that audiences could experience the same production and have such disparate responses only emphasizes what an explosive subject Evangelism can be.

Consider the first-act musical number "Take Me Along." It's modeled after a rock-and-roll worship service at New Life, which made national news (while the Civilians were in town, no less) after founder and pastor Ted Haggard was exposed as having had sex with a male prostitute who allegedly also sold him drugs. While the scandal does impact This Beautiful City, it isn't mentioned in the song. Written by Friedman, the tune features a peppy melody and sing-along chorus about God. That's fairly innocuous, yet "Take Me Along" evoked an intense reaction in the crowd. On the upbeat side, I saw several audience members jump up and sway along as Civilian Stephen Plunkett, guitar slung across his chest, led the cast in song. Those dancing in the crowd seemed genuinely joyful, and a woman named Mimi, whose blonde braid reached the middle of her floor-length skirt, later mentioned the number as a highlight. "I saw more of God in this than I do in most of the churches I go to," she told me.

Conversely, other locals—particularly those less sympathetic to religious conservatism—saw a threat in moments like "Take Me Along," as well as in monologues from Evangelicals describing the power and satisfaction of their faith. "I felt like I was at a church revival," a woman avowed in a talkback. "You didn't show the ugly, and those of us who are not part of that community feel it. You need to make some kind of effort to show the ugly."

Cosson responded that he thought there was plenty of unpleasantness on display. In its current form, This Beautiful City is a series of stand-alone monologues and songs, held together by major characters who emerge to tell their life stories. Of those central figures, two speak specifically about suffering in Colorado Springs. There's Pastor Reynolds, and there's Nancy Jo, a formerly Evangelical civil designer who was previously a man. When she came out as transgender and began living as a woman, she promptly lost her job, her family and her life savings. We also hear from an atheist who is leaving town to escape harassment and a gallery owner who fights to present banned art.

Yet for some, there was "no ugly." For others, there was no doubt too much. Cosson says he's mindful of how tempting it will be for audience members to focus on particular elements of the show at the expense of its other perspectives. For him, the potential for such strong reactions not only challenges the Civilians to develop a more thoughtful piece of theatre, but also proves why This Beautiful City needs to exist. He says, "The social and political questions that are being worked out here in Colorado Springs are of great importance because they're affecting the entire country."

Just what are those questions? "It's very much about American freedom—the separation of church and state, the freedom to practice a religion of your choosing. And there's the idea of the American experiment, that it's possible to create a new life in a new country. But—and this is something we want the show to capture—there's also the paradox that we have the freedom to create ways of life that actually restrict the freedoms of others."

And then there's that other pressing question: How do you encompass such a massive, sensitive issue—not to mention the identities of actual people—into a successful musical? If This Beautiful City is going to evoke all the facets of a national debate, the Civilians will need to move carefully. One step this way, and they could turn complex ideas into reductive entertainment. A lapse in the other direction, and they could seem to be mocking the lives on stage.

Judging by the work at Colorado College and an April reading held at New York City's Public Theater, the show is on track to become (to borrow a phrase) a fair and balanced presentation of the issues. While individual moments roil with opinion and emotion, the overall piece feels strikingly even-handed.

This quest for equanimity also has affected how the Civilians create their work. Previous documentary projects have centered on abstract ideas more than actual places and people, and that gave the group liberty with its data-collection methods. For instance, Gone Missing, which explores various reactions to loss and made its commercial Off-Broadway premiere in June at the Barrow Street Theatre, was built from interviews that the Civilians rewrote from memory. But that method leaves too much room for error to be useful for This Beautiful City. For this process, the Civilians taped and transcribed all of their interviews for the first time.

Kyle Gorden, the troupe's lanky and soft-spoken producing director, says, "In terms of the volatility of the subject, this is the most dangerous work we've done. We want to be able to demonstrate that someone said what we're saying they said, in case something comes up from a P.R. standpoint or there are legal issues."

It's easy to imagine a litigious attack on the show. Among the characters are a Jewish serviceman who says the military in Colorado Springs, which houses NORAD and several U.S. Air Force bases, uses Christian propaganda to promote anti-Semitism. There's also a gay former soldier who protests military homophobia; and Pastor Ted's son is shown supporting his father after the revelation of his homosexual affair. His interview was taped several weeks before the elder Haggard announced he'd been "cured" of his homosexuality.

Along with the protection allowed by transcripts, Gorden says the releases signed by interview subjects now include an addition that the Civilians have rights to use a subject's likeness in perpetuity.

But these new methods aren't all about a fear of lawsuits. Taping conversations meant the Civilians and the students could interview far more people without fear of confusing them in their memories. The process also allowed the troupe to tape and possibly stage audience feedback. Perhaps most important, though, taped conversations allowed the artists to listen more than once to what subjects told them. Most of the actor-dramaturgs were encountering a world that was radically different from their own, and a single pass at an interview might have hindered their ability to put aside their assumptions.

Company member Alison Weller worked on several Civilians pieces before heading to Colorado. She says, "This project felt more complex and intimidating than the others because it's the first time I've had to submerge myself in a community I knew nothing about. As a Catholic who grew up in New Jersey with a very liberal sensibility, I had a very specific and, as I learned, not very accurate view of what Christians with a capital 'C' are like. In listening to people, I realized how little I actually knew—how their views are much more complex than I understood."

Yet for all their new insights, many of the artists remained skeptical about Evangelism, particularly its disapproval of homosexuality and its staunch political conservatism. Several of the Civilians and the students told me they didn't want the piece to be interpreted as just a "pro-church" show.

As strong as they are, you won't see any of these company responses being performed in This Beautiful City. That's another first. Earlier works have let the artists speak for themselves, or have contained fictional segments that suggested the Civilians's take on a subject. For example, the comedy (I am) Nobody's Lunch begins its inquiry into metaphysics by having an actor come on stage and explain why the Civilians are interested in the subject. Cosson says, "Since we're shaping the material into a script, our subjectivity can't entirely disappear, but I never wanted to do a show about what happened to the Civilians in Colorado Springs. I want to make the audience care about the city and the people."

The lessening of the Civilians's presence in This Beautiful City is most obvious in Friedman's songs. "Before," he says, "the songs were always our little commentary on what we were creating, because before we were like the people we interviewed. We were New Yorkers; they were New Yorkers. But this time it felt important not to have a point where we stepped out and said, 'Okay, this is our response to what you see.'"

So for the first time in one of his produced works, Friedman has turned interviews into lyrics. While not every song in This Beautiful City is "found poetry," the bulk of them are, and he says this type of work has been gratifying. Friedman explains, "I find it as complicated as writing a lyric, because you're trying to stay true to a person's voice and turns of phrase while still structuring a song. In setting these songs, I've found a person's natural speech rhythms can be expressive in ways I would never have access to by just sitting down and trying to write an arty song."

An interviewee's own words find their way into "Cowboys," in which a twentysomething Evangelical explains how God made him realize he didn't need boats or women to be happy. The man sings:

I was lying in my bed one morning with my girlfriend
She was hot
She wanted to get married
And she turned to me and said
Is this going anywhere?
And I felt God tugging on my heart
And I said no.
No.
And I left.
Man, she was gorgeous.
What was I thinking?!

The song is a comic highlight, backed by a bouncy piano rhythm that matches the singer's short, slangy sentences. Friedman says he had been toying with a jaunty melody, but he didn't know how to use it until he heard the cadences of the young man's speech.

On the other hand, music has also helped reveal truths about This Beautiful City's interview subjects. Friedman says turning speech into lyrics requires a bit of tweaking—such as dropping pauses or repeating words for emphasis—but those changes can free a person to make a clearer point. "I try to fix the lyric so I can get across the reality of how they seem in an interview," he says.

For this listener, the benefit of Friedman's editing is most obvious in the song "Urban Planning," drawn from an interview with Nancy Jo, the transgender Evangelical. Her story is especially dramatic because even though she lost so much by coming out, she has refused to abandon her faith or leave the city she helped design. I sat next to Nancy Jo during a workshop performance in Colorado, and I was struck by how her Southern accent and elaborate way of speaking are just as charming in real life as they are when Civilian Emily Ackerman portrays her on stage.

But I didn't comprehend the poetry in her language until I heard "Urban Planning." Friedman pares away Nancy Jo's vocal tics and flourishes, leaving a haunting song about a revelation she had. She sings:

So my doctor says draw something.
So I draw a city.
Cause I've always liked cities.
I have since I was a kid.
So he tells me it's beautiful.
But where are the people?

I had never thought of the people.

They move.
They get in the way.
They get in the way.

I'm looking at buildings.
He says, 'That's kind of an issue.
Have people hurt you?
Have people hurt you
a lot?"

But it's paradise.
But it's paradise.
Almost paradise
That I've made.

Crucially, Ackerman doesn't sing the song. She stands by silently as Weller assumes Nancy Jo's voice. As "Urban Planning" transfers to another body, it's as though the show is asking us to look at this woman's soul as it steps out and bares itself. The implication is that people are regularly showing the deepest parts of themselves, and if we learn to listen for the songs in their casual speech, we might have a better appreciation for the communities we pass through every day.

Ultimately, everything in This Beautiful City asks us to listen carefully to who's around us. But as they complete their work, the Civilians's most challenging task may be convincing audiences that all the people on stage—even the ones who aren't like them—deserve serious attention.

Discussing the reading at the Public, Cosson says, "In New York, there were a lot of things that got laughs that weren't funny." For instance, no one in Colorado Springs—whether they were Christian or not—laughed when a character described how she spoke to God in her car, but that detail drew several chuckles from the crowd at the Public. Cosson muses, "I think there was an assumption, especially at the beginning, that this New York theatre company was going to find humor in people's beliefs. I interpret that as an instinctive reaction to put some of this uncomfortable, emotional stuff at arm's length."

Closing that distance is now a major goal. "I'm reminded of how much we're going to need to do to make the religious material accessible on its own terms," Cosson explains, "to make it clear that it's not just an us-them story."

Asked if she thinks her theatre will have trouble convincing Washingtonians to care about a Colorado town, Studio Theatre founding artistic director Joy Zinoman replies, "I find the Civilians's work to be as compassionate as it is political, and I'm hoping the piece will be compassionate about the motivations of people who do things my audience may not do." (The Studio will provide the Civilians with scenic and costume designers and three weeks of rehearsal space before mounting a full production of This Beautiful City.)

I think the show's compassion is partly what caused anger among liberal audiences in the Springs and provoked laughter at the New York reading. But in This Beautiful City, extreme believers sound more complex and human than they do in TV soundbites, and for lefties like me, this makes it harder to dismiss Evangelism as a monolithic opponent to my political views.

And that effect runs both ways. Mimi, the long-braided Evangelical, told me the show not only gave her a religious experience, but also challenged her beliefs. "It brought me to a crossroads and touched my heart about gay life. I just hadn't thought about the pain it must cause to be homosexual and be told you're an outsider all the time," she said.

In other words, along with relatable characters and catchy songs, This Beautiful City could have uncomfortable, necessary revelations for everyone. If the Civilians can maintain that balance when the show premieres, the religious debate in America could gain an important new voice.

Arts reporter Mark Blankenship is a 2005-06 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.

ECLECTIC, TUNEFUL PRODUCTION’S A REAL FIND

2007-06-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

By FRANK SCHECK
THEATER REVIEW

June 29, 2007 -- THE acclaimed downtown theater troupe the Civilians demonstrates its unique melding of documentary and experimental theater with "Gone Missing," a meditation on all things lost and found that makes up for its occasional lapses with lots of sly humor.

Based on interviews conducted by company members, it boasts an eclectic and tuneful score by Obie winner Michael Friedman, whose music can also be heard in the Public Theater's "Romeo and Juliet" in Central Park.

The six-member cast, clad in identical bland gray suits, delivers a series of songs and monologues relating either directly or tangentially to things that have been lost, from a black Gucci pump to the mythical city of Atlantis to one's mind.

The staging is decidedly stylized, with the performers frequently engaging in choreography reminiscent of an old Devo video.

If it sounds a bit precious, well, it occasionally is. But the breeziness of the proceedings and the unexpected emotional force generated by many of the segments more than compensate.

I found myself rather perversely looking forward to the recurring appearances by Stephen Plunkett as a cop who describes in hilariously gory detail the corpses he encounters at work.

Other memorable moments are provided by Colleen Werthmann, as a mother describing the loss of her child's sock doll, and Emily Ackerman, as a psychic who specializes in finding lost pets.

The piece was conceived after the events of 9/11, which is reflected in the haunting final image that follows a historian's account of the calamitous collapse of a banquet hall in ancient Greece.

'GONE MISSING' FINDS MEANING IN LOSS

2007-06-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

By Leonard Jacobs

My sixth-grade graduation photo, which I haven’t seen in years, is easy for me to recall because I was wearing my favorite jacket—a late-’70s checkered-green number that I hated growing out of. For ultra-sentimentalists like me, The Civilians’ Gone Missing makes you wonder why we hold on so tightly to certain objects, why we mourn the objects we lose or must part with. As an affectingly off-kilter sketch-and-song revue, Gone Missing sweeps you up in a tight, clearheaded embrace—one with a cynical view of nostalgia.

As in all of The Civilians’ pieces, Gone Missing is a joint effort; it was first presented in 2001 and seems to have been in a continuous state of revision and revisitation ever since. The writing is credited to chief Civilian Steve Cosson, based on interviews with real New Yorkers talking about things they have lost: an errant Gucci pump tucked into the secret flap of a handbag, a platinum necklace, a PalmPilot emptied out of a man’s hand during the WTC’s collapse. Other stories are considerably grislier, weirder and stranger: the once-rookie cop vividly describing the decomposing human body, the scientist’s theory of the lost continent of Atlantis, the sock doll retrieved from a garbage dump during an Iowa snowstorm, the war stories of a plucky pet psychic.

Six actors—Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer R. Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Collier Sublett and Colleen Werthmann—play all the anonymous interviewees, and there is at times a bit of déjà vu. Yes, you have seen this kind of work before, whether in the United States Theater Project’s Columbinus or the Tectonic Theater Company’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project.

The difference between those shows and Gone Missing, however, is those shows turned colossal events, like hate crimes and mass murder, into electrifying coups de theatre; it’s not the same thing to dramatize the loss of a ring or the loss of a sizable bequest from a dear 98-year-old uncle. Nor is it possible to raise the stakes quite the same way when the loss connects to the ineffable, intangible things we can never replace once lost: our virginity and dignity, our sense of values, self and hope.

This is why, aside from providing a divertissement from all the monologues and vignettes, the nine songs penned by Michael Friedman prove among the most insightful Gone Missing moments. Vocally, the six actors may be unevenly matched, but the overt messages contained in the songs are delivered with brash self-confidence and constant brio; Cosson’s stylized staging is what finally lifts the show fully out of the box. Strongly melodic, lyrically acid, songs like “The Only Thing Missing Is You,” “I Gave It Away,” “Lost Horizon” and “Etch a Sketch” take you out of that grim state of pondering you’ve fallen into, elevating your spirits as you begin to realize that that checkered-green jacket was really just a jacket—that it’s your memories you ought to be holding onto instead.

Gone Missing

2007-06-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

Barrow Street Theatre. Written and directed by Steven Cosson. Music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. With ensemble cast. 1hr 15mins. No intermission.

One is at a loss, at first, to describe exactly what makes Gone Missing so unforgettable. Admittedly, many of the virtues of the Civilians’ philosophical vaudeville—an investigation of nostalgia from the inside out—are immediately apparent. The text of the play, mostly assembled by company demiurge Steven Cosson from interviews conducted by his troupe, is a lavishly suggestive collection of vignettes about misplaced objects and the displaced emotions that rise in their wake. This montage of ever-present absence is brought to sleek life onstage by a protean cast of six, all of whom deserve mention: Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer R. Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Collier Sublett and Colleen Werthmann. And then there are the dazzling pastiche-makes-perfect songs of Michael Friedman, which span styles from German lieder to Tin Pan Alley, Buena Vista Social Club, Burt Bacharach and Suzanne Vega. (The gorgeous, Aimee Mann–ish “Lost Horizons” went straight to my head and the headphones of my iPod.)

Yet no mere catalog of the show’s selling points can do justice to its overall effect. Some of the stories involve the seemingly insignificant disappearance of small objects; others treat the loss of graver things like language, parts of dead bodies and, in Friedman’s songs, romantic attachment. These disparate tales are crafted into a mosaic whose abstract design is visible from afar, yet whose constituent parts retain their particularity. At once erudite and democratic, Gone Missing is not merely a witty, quick-footed and entertaining evening of theater; it is also a finely tuned inquiry into the nature of memory that manages to be forward-looking at the same time. Gone Missing’s links between past and present provide clear evidence of evolution in the world of modern theater. Miss it and weep.

Finding Love and Loss in ‘Gone Missing'

2007-06-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

by Eric Grode

Audiences in search of downtown theater at its most probing and accessible now know where to find it.

With "Gone Missing," a hilarious paean to things lost and (occasionally) recovered, the intrepid theater collective known as the Civilians — making its commercial off-Broadway debut after numerous stints at smaller spaces in New York and worldwide — takes the psychological pulse of America by listing its absences: what it has lost, what it still seeks, what it has somehow learned to live without.

Like Anna Deavere Smith and the Tectonic Theater Project, the Civilians assemble plays by conducting interviews — in this case, asking people about something they've lost. Unlike those other documentary-theatre practitioners, however, the Civilians acknowledge their own role in the assembly. Many interviewees try to expand the parameters of the question and discuss losing a spouse or a job rather than a physical object. This apparently runs afoul of the ground rules, except when it doesn't. The Civilians are not above bending their own rules if the story is good enough. And many of these stories are very good: sad, sweet, goofy, and unapologetically poignant.

Everything from a black Gucci pump to a child's beloved sock puppet to human body parts have gone AWOL for the cross-section of Americans interviewed by the company members, who then converted the anecdotes into the show's revue-style format. (Steven Cosson, who also directed "Gone Missing," is credited with writing the final script, which has been expanded since its original 2003 run at the Belt Theater.) The group also mixes in a series of clever and deceptively low-key pastiche songs by the downtown-darling composer Michael Friedman, sung by all six cast members. (Colleen Werthmann and Robbie Collier Sublett are first among equals in a marvelously balanced cast that also includes Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer R. Morris, and Stephen Plunkett.)

This blend of pathos and semiironic glitz starts out a bit uneasily, as all six suit-clad performers execute ultrastylized, David Byrne-esque dance moves while individuals splinter off with laments to lost dogs, teeth, and Beanie Babies. But the actors soon settle into Mr. Cosson's offkilter cadences and vault into a multilayered exploration of the things we leave behind and the impossibility of recovering them. "Unless it's nailed on you or hanging off of you," warns one elderly woman, "hold on to it because it all goes."

Some characters dream of being lost themselves. Some — a homicide cop, a pet psychic — make a living out of locating things or people. Others, such as a consultant who provides tough love to "disposeaphobics," aids in the act of getting rid of things. Some find whatever it is they're looking for. Most do not. (And on those rare happy instances, don't think for a minute that a band of off-off-Broadway mischief makers can't or won't make you cry.)

With its rapid-fire sketch format and array of foreign accents, "Gone Missing" feels at times like an existential "Laugh-In." Mr. Cosson frequently sets up parallel narratives by interweaving three or four stories in a fuguelike blend, and the performers all take turns stimulating a dialogue between the overeager host of an NPR-style program and a wry academic about the Freudian and mythological underpinnings of nostalgia: "Sometimes we need to lose something before we can enjoy it."

Unsurprisingly, some memories resonate more deeply than others, and some of the more far-flung songs come off as extraneous. (Songs in both Spanish and German?) But Mr. Friedman makes up for it with a ballad sung by Ms. Werthmann about melancholy childhood games of hide-and-seek:

I lost the fourth grade journal
and the sweatshirt that was ruined
when I hid inside the closet
and knocked my mother's perfume from the shelf
and smelled for weeks like I was going somewhere.

In unearthing a collective wellspring of long-submerged memories, along with the attendant remorse, nostalgia, and even relief, the Civilians have created a work to be cherished. "Gone Missing" is tender, joyous, wistful, and wonderful. Now that it has found its way back to New York, do not let it get away.

Losers with winning ways

2007-06-26T21:42:00.000-07:00

by Michael Sommers

NEW YORK STAGE

NEW YORK -- A whimsical docu-show -- enlivened by some witty songs -- "Gone Missing" is all about losing things. Heirlooms. Keys. Pets. Virginity. Even your mind.

Drawn from interviews with actual New Yorkers by members of The Civilians, a company that creates original works based on real-life topics, "Gone Missing" opened on Sunday at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Mostly light in tone, the amusing text written and fleetly staged by Steven Cosson offers an enjoyable collage of conversational ex changes, monologues, anecdotes and musical numbers regarding disappeared people, possessions and what-have-you.

"Could I talk about losing a husband?" wonders one older woman. "Because I would certainly have a lot to say on that subject."

A cop reminiscing about the lost items he's found -- primarily body parts -- and an executive driving her friends nuts as she obsessively hunts for a missing Gucci pump are among the few characters who appear intermittently through the 75-minute proceed ings.

Much of the usually quirky material involves scatter-shot observations by more than two dozen individuals, from a pet psychic to a mom fondly recalling the time her husband unearthed their youngest daughter's sock doll from a dumpster.

Occasionally these matters are arranged by themes, such as a sequence when three women talk about jewelry that went astray.

A chat between a radio talk- show host and a writer about his latest book delves into less everyday matters like the lost continent of Atlantis and the power of nostal gia for long-gone things.

Dressed in virtually identical gray business suits and neckties, a six-member ensemble ably as sumes different accents and atti tudes for the individuals they por tray.

Composer Michael Friedman interlaces the show with nifty songs created in contrasting pop modes. "The Only Thing Missing Is You" is a mocking torch number wailed under a mirror ball. "Hide & Seek" is a Melanie-style ballad. "La Bodega" deals with a missing wallet in mariachi music.

Designer Takeshi Kata's simple backdrop and bubbling effects in Ken Travis' soundscape are no doubt derived from mentions in the text of the Sargasso Sea, where lost objects reportedly pop up among the weeds, driftwood and eels.

Although "Gone Missing" may not venture deeply enough into its fascinating subject, The Civilians' cool, classy interpretation of their findings still packs quite a bit of thoughtful entertainment.

Michael Sommers may be reached at msommers@starled ger.com or at (212) 790-4434.

Gone Missing

2007-06-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

By Summer Banks

I’m an Etch a Sketch (but now I’m all shook up)/ I’m a piece of wax (but now the imprint’s lost) --from the song "Etch a Sketch" on what it’s like to be a person who’s lost his or her memory.

We’re all afraid of loosing things: our keys, our passports, our pets, our spouses, our minds. And so we try desperately to keep track of them, labeling hooks for our keys and drawers for our scissors, and leashing our pets and our spouses. But in spite of our best attempts, our labeling and leashing only cause us to loose them more quickly.

The same is true of the theater. As soon as we try to label or leash it, its value and spirit are lost. This is the philosophy on display in Gone Missing, the Civilians’ play with music, musical play, cabaret, musical experience, experimental small-cast musical. Created in 2003 from interviews conducted by company members, this 70-minute one-act has been massaged into songs, monologues and coordinated trios, making for a vividly entertaining night out.

Avoiding the perils of some non-fictional theater which makes the point of labeling itself "documentary" and treating its material as if it were in a museum, Gone Missing is composed of research distilled into organically connected impressions of its rather broad subject—lost items. The "items" range from jewelry to a shoe; pets to a stuffed sock-animal; war to the lost island of Atlantis. The material initially tries to stick to inanimate objects but as people begin to talk about boyfriends, sanity and religion , it quickly becomes clear that most of our feelings of loss are not really about the items themselves.

Structurally, the play follows an emotional arc through a range of compelling musings on loss and brief interludes with fascinating characters: a French lesbian, a pet psychic, and a brusque technician who works with disposeaphobics™. Don’t expect much of a plot since harnessing this material to a story line would make it seem much less profound and fresh than it actually is. Like the individually flash frozen portions at Trader Joes, the monologues, interwoven speeches and musical numbers each tell their own story, encapsulating a flavor that melds remarkably well with the whole. As this is an organic piece of work, it has spots that are not as polished as the pretty, waxed, and yet flavorless Red Delicious apples sold along Broadway, but that is part of its charm.

The songs are catchy, varying stylistically from standard musical theater to German lieder. They are performed with panache with the small band at the side of the stage creating an intimate jazz club ambiance that's remarkable given the size of the space. Stand out numbers include "Etch a Sketch," "Lost Horizon" and the titular "Gone Missing" which is still stuck in my head.

From the accuracy and charm with which the ensemble plays off the rhythms of the piece it's obvious that they are familiar with the material and one another. The set is basically non-existent and the gray-suit uniforms that serve as costumes evoke Manhattan’s financial district and highlight one of Gone Missing's most affecting monologues by a security guard at the World Trade Center who lost his Palm Pilot. He relates how he was directed to secure the baseball field for the secret service as the towers were coming down. Like many of the other recollections, this story succeeds in resonating with themes much deeper than materialistic loss.

It is the connection to universal ideals that makes Gone Missing feel more real than most naturalistic plays. It is also why any attempt to label it falls short of encapsulating its nature. This is a philosophical play about lost shoes and also a cabaret with love songs. Ultimately it’s just theater, blissfully free from the restrictions of definition.

Gone Missing

2007-06-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

by Dan Bacalzo

Combining elements of performance art, documentary theater, and musicals, the Civilians' Gone Missing is a wildly funny and marvelously inventive meditation on things lost and sometimes found -- from a beloved pet dog, to a treasured ring, to one's mind. The tone of the piece is sometimes whimsical, sometimes ironic, and at times even quite serious and thought-provoking. Certain sections appear to be verbatim transcripts of interviews, while others seem more fictionalized, or at the very least exaggerated for comic effect.

This unusual show features a script by director Steven Cosson, based upon interviews conducted by company members, as well as a terrific score from Michael Friedman. It originally debuted shortly after September 11, 2001 when the theme of loss had a rather pronounced resonance. It played to critical acclaim at the Belt Theater in 2003, and has since toured extensively before coming back to New York to make its summer home at the Barrow Street Theatre.

For this limited engagement, three members of the original cast -- Damian Baldet, Jennifer R. Morris, and Colleen Werthmann -- are joined by Emily Ackerman, Stephen Plunkett, and Robbie Collier Sublett, all of whom have been with the project at least since its 2006 incarnation at the Actor's Theatre of Louisville. While the entire cast makes for a tight ensemble, Ackerman and Plunkett are the clear stand-outs. Ackerman has a mesmerizing presence and ability to bring her characters to vivid life, whether it's a pet psychic or an arthritic old woman identified in the script as "Great Aunt." Plunkett shines as the recurring character of a police officer, who talks about finding dead bodies. His portrayal is genial and grounded, even as the actor brings out the dark humor of the material when describing the most grisly details of the cop's line of work.

The remaining cast members all have terrific moments, as well. Sublett is at his best as an Englishman who talks about a time when he lost language. Werthmann is rather moving as a mother who recalls an instance when one of her daughters lost a tiny sock doll named "Sniffle" and the family's quest to find it. Morris is amusing as a woman named Laura whose attempts to find her misplaced Gucci pump borders on the obsessive (and may actually cross over). Baldet is perhaps the weakest performer, and his attempt to cross gender lines to play an elderly woman is one of the production's few missteps. Still, he functions well in the ensemble sequences, and often provides guitar accompaniment for other cast members.

In addition, a trio of musicians on piano, bass, and drums give life to Friedman's eclectic score under the supervision of music director Andy Boroson. The catchy title song is reminiscent of 80s pop, reinforced by Jim Augustine's choreography that seems lifted out of a Devo video.

The salsa-flavored "La Bodega," with Plunkett on lead vocals, is another highlight, as is the pop ballad "Lost Horizon," sweetly sung by Sublett. None of the actors are vocal powerhouses, but they're all able to sell their songs and the occasional off-pitch note is forgivable.

Friedman's lyrics are frequently hilarious, with lines such as "Think what my nephew Chris/Just lost at his Bris" from Ackerman's solo, "The Only Thing Missing is You." He also keys in ideas from the various scenes and monologues seen throughout the show that reinforce certain thematic concerns of the piece. For example, a recurring motif within Gone Missing is "An interview with Dr. Palinurus" that has various company members taking on the roles of a noted historian and the radio personality he speaks with. They discuss Atlantis, nostalgia, and the Platonian ideal, all of which find their way into Friedman's songs.

The piece concludes with a recording of the Palinurus interview, voiced by guest artists Nina Hellman and T. Ryder Smith. It plays against a striking visual image -- one that dynamically demonstrates how certain objects can have a palpable presence, while at the same time evoking what is no longer there.

Gone Missing

2007-06-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

Off-Broadway Listings
June 14-20, 2007

Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow St at Seventh Ave South (212-239-6200). Subway: 1 to Christopher St-Sheridan Sq. $20-$45. Tue-Fri 7:30pm; Sat 2:30, 7:30pm; Sun 5pm.

The Civilians, one of the city's smartest and most original troupes, leaps Off Broadway with a reprise of this justly acclaimed 2003 collage about loss. The scripts, based on interviews, is by Civilians head honcho Steve Cosson, who also directs a highly promising cast of six; the eclectic songs are by Michael Friedman.

Gone Missing

2007-06-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

Off-Broadway
Opening & In Previews

by Alexis Soloski

When this Civilians' documentary-musical debuted, we remarked, "The art of losing things isn't hard to master. But few could expect a more masterful comedy on the subject of lost-and-found than Gone Missing. Based on copius, half-remembered interviews, the six-member company presents a collage of all that New Yorkers have mislaid or escaped. Missing Missing cannot be endorsed." Happily, Gone Missing has been located and revived for a commercial run at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Tue-Fri 7:30pm, Sat 2:30 & 7:30pm, Sun 5pm. Previews begin Thu, opens June 24, thru Aug 5, $20-$45. Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow, 212-239-6200.

The not-ready-for-Broadway playwrights

2007-06-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

Give the Great White Way a rest and head downtown, where a bevy of brilliant young dramatists are creating the city’s most original theater.

Photographs by Peter Bellamy

The past few months have been hard on American playwrights. In April, the Pulitzer committee decided not to award a prize for drama. The New York Drama Critics’ Circle found no homegrown work worth lauding when it doled out its awards May 23. Lisa Kron’s critically acclaimed but publicly underappreciated Well closed after playing to two-thirds-empty houses. Come June 11, odds are The History Boys—a veddy English school dramedy written by a 72-year-old Yorkshireman—will snag the Tony for Best Play. All this in a season in which three Irish works (Faith Healer, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Shining City) dyed the Great White Way distinctly green. The noble calling of literary giants such as Miller, O’Neill and Williams is dead, right?

Don’t believe it. Just as the Grammys and Oscars aren’t barometers of musical and cinematic taste, the Tonys and Pulitzer won’t necessarily tell you what’s worth following in theater. But we will. The ink-stained talents collected here are young and hungry. None of them is the greatest living American scribe (that plaque goes to Albee, Mamet or Kushner,take your pick). They’re not even among the upstarts who’ve generated the most coverage (sorry, Adam Rapp, Rinne Groff, Will Eno and Lynn Nottage). But they’re producing the most stimulating work in town—and they’re why this is a great time to go and see a downtown show.—David Cote

Mysterious ways
Lose yourself in Washburn if... you swoon for Sofia Coppola’s dreamy filmmaking, wish that Björk would star in more movies and devour Haruki Murakami novels.

Anne Washburn, 38, poster child of both the Civilians and the DIY playwrights collective 13P, can be a tough writer to pin down: One minute she’s confiding ghost stories (Apparition), and the next she’s introducing historical she-monsters to each other (The Ladies), only to follow it all up with a fish-out-of-water fable, half spoken in gibberish (The Internationalist). But what her pieces have in common is the way she captures her characters’ discombobulation, whether due to travel, the supernatural or some dizzying postmodern device. Her plays, steeped in the disorienting techniques of nonnarrative giants like the Wooster Group, nonetheless have strong stories at their core. The resulting juxtapositions are provoking, mysterious and rich with her sense that, as she puts it,“we are surrounded by things we can’t see, can’t control and can’t understand.” Her next work, I Have Loved Strangers, a lyrical investigation of false and true prophets, materializes at the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival (at the Ohio Theatre, Sunday 4–June 10), while The Internationalist will pack its bags for a much-deserved Off Broadway run at the Vineyard this October. —Helen Shaw

Documentary shredder
Cosson is on your brain-wavelength if... you enjoy the referential layering of Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings, the eclectic Readings section of Harper’s and the gently off-center observational wit of NPR’s This American Life.

When explaining the work that he has created for the Civilians, the red-hot theater troupe he founded in 2001, Steven Cosson tends to end his sentences with mild question marks, as if everything might be up for revision. Such contingency is at the core of the playwright-director’s most recent shows, 2003’s Gone Missing and 2004’s (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch: brilliantly suggestive latticeworks of intellectual vaudeville, studded with song and dance. Cosson, 37, resists describing them as documentaries, although they are woven from the texts of real interviews conducted by the company. “A documentary investigates something to know more about it,” he says. “A creative investigative process—which I’m trying to coin—reveals what you don’t know about something.” Cosson is currently working on multiple projects: an interview-based look at conservative Christianity; a revision of a play set in the final days of the Paris Commune; and a piece about time, the research of which involves trips to Panama and Northern Canada. “I want to do experimental theater for the public,” he says. “For an audience that is not composed of professional theater-attending people.”—Adam Feldman

What's on Off Broadway

2007-05-21T22:03:00.000-07:00

Doomsayers aside, there's life in Off Broadway yet

by Mark Blankenship

NEW YORK -- In Gotham, the only legit tradition more universal than predicting Tony winners is trying to pinpoint the date theater will die forever. Since Broadway receipts have been healthy of late, the dire warnings have shifted to Off Broadway, where the current wisdom is that countless stages will soon be dark unless someone replaces recently closed moneymakers like "Jewtopia" and "Slava's Snowshow."

But despite the dread prophecies, salvation may not be hard to find. A sizable number of emerging Off and Off Off Broadway companies are showing signs of serious longevity.

Take the Keen Company, known for sensitively interpreting older work. Group spent six years downtown before landing a permanent home this season at midtown's Theater Row complex. The highly visible digs increased awareness of a well-received revival of 1950s melodrama "Tea and Sympathy" and a lyrical adaptation of Thornton Wilder's novel "Theophilus North." The latter will continue to boost Keen's notoriety when it remounts this summer at Vermont's Dorset Theater Festival, also headed by Keen a.d. Carl Forsman.

The Transport Group has had similar luck with forgotten chestnuts, generating buzz for its innovative spin on sixth season closer, William Inge's "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs." Equally experimental originals, like 2005 musical "The Audience," have nabbed awards-season attention for masterfully using heightened images and movement.

On the other side of town, Classical Theater of Harlem has only been around since 1999, but it has sent several Shakespeare productions on national tours. Plus, the company's aggressively physical aesthetic and ethnically diverse casting have wooed many patrons above 125th Street to see heady classics from Genet, Ionesco and Beckett.

CTH's 2004 revival of tuner "Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death" led to a short commercial run Off-Broadway, pegging them as a company with heavyweight potential.

The Civilians might also become major players. Since 2001, the theater has produced original musicals from historical documents and personal interviews conducted by company members. Their reputation has spread to London -- where Soho Theater mounted philosophical comedy "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch" -- and Washington, D.C., where Studio Theater will preem religious-themed "This Beautiful City" in 2008.

The troupe's major Gotham moment arrives on June 14, when "Gone Missing" makes its commercial bow at Barrow Street Theater. A meditative tuner that features the words of real New Yorkers contemplating loss, the show could push the Civilians to a new professional peak while possibly convincing legiters that there's still life in Off Broadway yet.

Theatre for the people, by the people

2007-05-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

The Civilians do Colorado Springs
By DEBBIE KENNEDY

They call what they do "investigative theatre." They call themselves The Civilians.

"'The Civilians' is an old vaudeville term that was used to refer to people not in the industry," said producing director Kyle Gorden. "Our shows are not about people in the industry. They're about normal people. We do vaudevillian inspired work-it's theatrical and entertaining-to tell stories about real people, stories we hope are relevant to people's lives."

The New York-based company, modeled after London's Joint Stock Theatre Company, was created in 2001 by artistic director Steve Cosson and since then has launched shows on everything from the profound sense of loss associated with September 11 to the media's handling of U.S. Army Private Jessica Lynch's rescue during the early days of the Iraq War. For that play, entitled (I am) Nobody's Lunch, company members interviewed soldiers guarding the New York City subway system with empty guns, a distraught official with the Department of Homeland Security, and every Jessica Lynch in the United States' online phone directory to find out what they knew about the particulars of the rescue. The cabaret-style show highlighted a culture awash in misinformation.

What makes The Civilians' approach to theatre different from that of other companies, according to Cosson, is that every show is an original piece, written with the help of interviews conducted by the company members themselves.

"Our motto is we create original theatre from investigations into real life. All of our projects combine a journalistic and creative approach," he said.

Cosson draws a distinction between the kind of documentary style theatre that gave us The Laramie Project and the shows brought to life by the fifty members of The Civilians.

"I think of our process as being more exploratory than factually oriented. It's different from purely documentary theatre because that tends to focus on a factual event, whereas we tend to start more from a subject or idea and explore it through a lot of different avenues. We sometimes start out thinking we're going to write a certain show, but our interviews and research might take us in a completely different direction," he said.

Eight members of The Civilians recently returned from Colorado Springs, where they were engaged in their most ambitious project to date: a show called Save this City that examines through monologues and musical numbers the often explosive combination of religion and politics as it is acted out daily in the city that has become the de facto headquarters of the Christian right. The Civilians created the show with the help of students from Colorado College who worked with the company as part of the school's annual Topics in Theatre course.

During the three-week course, Civilians members and Colorado College students interviewed hundreds of people, visited churches, took part in prayer services, and worked hard to piece together what is often a very divided town. The show's title comes from a sermon delivered at New Life Church, one of the many influential evangelical churches The Civilians visited, during which a minister said it was the church's mission to make it hard to go to hell in Colorado Springs.

"Issues of church and state, of homosexual rights, abortion, and international politics are important to everyone, but in Colorado Springs, it's like the volume is turned up," said Gorden. "Things are dealt with in a bigger way and on a daily basis by everyone in that town. You get a feeling it's a constant war, that people are at battle every day."

While The Civilians were in Colorado Springs, drama came to them. Two of the city's top clergymen, Ted Haggard and Tim Reynolds, were fired from their posts after it was revealed they were gay. A short time later, two other ministers quit under similar circumstances. Cosson said the scandals, which received national media attention, packed the churches, particularly New Life where Haggard was a founding member.

"At the Sunday service there were thousands of people and truckloads of Kleenex and TV trucks from all over the place," said Cosson.

Such events can obviously be the stuff of high drama. But The Civilians were in Colorado Springs no only to collect a vast amount of material in a short time. They also had to make an entertaining show out of what they gathered. Cosson described the writing process he, other company members, and the show's musical composer, Michael Friedman, went through as a feat of stamina aided by instinct. At the end of each day, actors would return to the class and deliver monologues they had prepared based on interviews they'd conducted. Then they would present a case for that monologue's inclusion in the final product. That product was created over the course of only two days by Cosson, who edited and wove together the actors' wide-ranging monologues, and Friedman, who composed a selection of songs for the show.

Emily Ackerman portrayed several characters in the roughly two-hour show, including an evangelical with a history of drug abuse. She said it was difficult when a few of her monologues ended up on the cutting room floor because of the personal bonds she formed with many of her interview subjects.

"The people I interviewed-I know them now. I know their stories and I sat there as they cried and their kids ran around or they gave me some coffee or made lunch. They're not characters in a script. They're real people," said Ackerman.

The company invited the play's subjects to its three performances, ratcheting up the stakes for actors like Colorado College junior Alex Hesbrook who were charged with portraying people who in all likelihood were sitting in the audience.

"I've never played anyone who actually could watch me be them in a play. That was such a nerve-wracking and intense emotion, but in the end you actually got to see what people thought about how you represented them. We got to have direct contact with people who shared intimate, personal details with you and that was a unique experience in theatre," she said.

The Civilians held talkbacks after each of the show's four Colorado College performances during which people on both sides of the political and religious spectrum voiced their opinions about the company's work.

Ackerman said the post-show discussions were enlightening and often passionate. The comments of Nancy Jo, an evangelical transgendered woman who lost her family and job but not her faith when she came out as a woman, were particularly moving for Ackerman because she had the responsibility of telling Nancy Jo's story on stage.

"I wanted to do her justice. It would be easy to do a caricature of her, but she said after the show that I got it exactly right, that she was very pleased, and on top of that, we had evangelical pastors coming up and telling us that Nancy Jo's story made them think about things they'd never thought of before,' Ackerman said.

Tom Lindblade, the head of Colorado College's theatre department, said working with The Civilians gave his students a new understanding of Colorado Springs and themselves. Bad reviews, most of which came from people who felt the company failed to give and equal voice to the city's secular population, were especially educational.

"People often say they want theatre and art to hold the mirror up to nature, but what they really want is for the mirror to be held up to their own nature, not all of nature. They want to be validated, but validation doesn't necessarily mean reinforcing what you believe to be true. It means realizing that this is the city you live in, warts and all," he said.

Save this City will likely change a great deal as Cosson, Friedman, and other Civilians sift through the hours and hours of the members' interviews and other research in an attempt to write a show they hope will be performed by several regional theatres around the country in the coming year. It already has a new title: This Beautiful City.

No matter how the show takes shape, two things are certain, said Ackerman. She learned during her brief time in Colorado Springs that church makes good theatre. And theatre makes good church.

"Every service we went to started with a rock band. People got up and danced and moved around. They spoke in tongues. If the pastor was good, the service was theatrical. It was theatre. Many people who came to our show said they felt like they were going to church. They felt like God was in the building and through this play people will be reached," she said.

The Civilians' Gone Missing to Play Barrow Street Theatre

2007-04-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

by Brian Scott Lipton

The New York-based experimental theater troupe The Civilians will make their official Off-Broadway debut when their acclaimed show Gone Missing begins a summer run at the Barrow Street Theatre on June 14. The production, to be directed by Steven Cosson, will open officially on June 24.

Featuring a score by Michael Friedman and a text devised by the company based on interviews with real-life New Yorkers, Gone Missing is a collection of personal accounts of things lost, ranging from keys and personal heirlooms to a Gucci pump and a dog. It was first seen in 2001 and has been revised over the past six years.

The show will star Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Jennifer Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Sublett, and Colleen Werthman, who will play more than 30 characters. The creative team includes Takeshi Kata (sets), Sarah Beers (costumes), Thomas Dunn (lighting), and Ken Travis (sound).

The Civilians' other work includes Canard, Canard, Goose, The Ladies, and (I Am) Nobody's Lunch. Their newest project, This Beautiful City, explores the Evangelical movement in America.

For more information, visit www.barrowstreattheatre.com.

Photo of Damian Baldet (© Julia Benyon)

Civilians get commerical run 'Gone Missing' set for Barrow Street Theater

2007-04-19T22:02:00.000-07:00

by Gordon Cox

Downtown docu-legit troupe The Civilians gets its first commercial Off Broadway run with a return of its show "Gone Missing," set for a summer engagement at the Barrow Street Theater.

Company has attracted attention for productions, often with musical numbers, based on research and interviews about a particular topic. Shows include "The Ladies," "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch" and "Canard, Canard, Goose?"

"Missing," whose earliest incarnation was performed in late 2001, tackles the subject of loss by chronicling the stories of lost objects along with those of the people, such as a cop or a pet psychic, who find them. Created collaboratively with the company, the show is directed by Civilians founder Steve Cosson. Composer-lyricist Michael Friedman provides the songs.

Scott Morfee, who programs the Barrow Street, and Tom Wirtshafter produce the show at the theater, where "No Child..." shutters June 3 before launching its tour.

"Missing" begins previews June 14 for a June 24 opening.

Civilians to Present Musical Documentary Gone Missing

2007-04-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

by BWW News Desk

The Civilians, the acclaimed New York-based experimental theater troupe, will play a rare local summer season (and make their commercial Off Broadway debut) with their documentary musical of loss, Gone Missing. Directed by Steven Cosson, and featuring music and lyrics by Michael Friedman, Gone Missing will begin performances on June 14th with an opening night set for Sunday, June 24th, at the Barrow Street Theatre, signaling a Musical Summer along Barrow Street.

"Devised by the company from interviews with real-life New Yorkers, Gone Missing is a collection of very personal accounts of things lost everything from keys, personal identification and a Gucci pump to family heirlooms, your dog and your mind creating a unique tapestry of the ways in which we deal with and relate to loss in our lives. A company of six (Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Sublett, Colleen Werthmann and Jennifer Morris) performs more than 30 characters, intertwining stories of lost objects with those of the 'finders,' from a retired NYPD cop to a pet psychic. Since its initial performance, just after September 11, 2001, Gone Missing has continued to morph into its new incarnation, set against Friedman's score, which incorporates salsa, ballads, operetta and tuneful pop. (Mr. Friedman will also be represented in New York this summer by his score for the Shakespeare in the Park production of Romeo & Juliet, directed by Michael Greif)," according to press notes.

"Since their founding in 2001 by Artistic Director Steven Cosson, The Civilians have created four original shows that have been presented in a range of sites downtown and in theatres, nightclubs, art centers and festivals throughout the United States and in Europe. Using methods that combine documentary and artistic practices, The Civilians works illuminate the interplay between the personal and larger social phenomena and their collaborations take inspiration from the full range of theatrical forms from cabaret to experimental theater."

Gone Missing features set design by Takeshi Kata, costume design by Sarah Beers, lighting design by Thomas Dunn and sound design by Ken Travis and is produced by Scott Morfee and Tom Wirtshafter in association with The Civilians.

The Barrow Street Theatre is located at 27 Barrow Street at 7th Avenue South in the heart of Greenwich Village. Nearby subway stops are the 1 at Christopher Street (walk 1 block South on 7th Avenue to Barrow) and the A, C, E, B, D, F and V at West 4th (walk West on 4th Street, left on Barrow). For more information, visit www.barrowstreettheatre.com.

The performance schedule for Gone Missing is Tuesday Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 5:00 p.m. Tickets are $20.00 - $45.00 and are available through Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or by visiting www.Telecharge.com.

Studio Theatre's New Season

2007-04-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

By JANE HORWITZ

For her company's 30th-anniversary season, Studio Theatre's Joy Zinoman has bagged "The History Boys," Alan Bennett's West End and Broadway success (and also a recent film). And the company's smaller, risk-taking wing, Studio Secondstage, will do the London hit "Jerry Springer: The Opera."

- A revival of South African playwright Athol Fugard's "My Children! My Africa!" (Sept. 5-Oct. 14), about an interracial friendship between two teenagers during apartheid, will be staged by Associate Artistic Director Serge Seiden.

- Conor McPherson's Irish drama "Shining City" (Nov. 7-Dec. 16), about a widower (played by Edward Gero) who seeks counseling after he starts seeing his dead wife, will be directed by Zinoman, who calls it another example of "that two-person, high-acting stuff" she did with Gero in "Skylight" and "Afterplay."

- "The Brothers Size" (Jan. 2-Feb. 10, 2008) by Tarell Alvin McCraney, an MFA candidate in Yale's playwriting program, includes elements of West African myth and culture in a drama about two brothers in the Louisiana bayou country. Tea Alagic directs the New York Public Theater production coming to Studio.

- "The History Boys" (March 2-May 4, 2008) takes place in the 1980s at a working-class British boys' school, where two teachers with opposite philosophies vie for the hearts and minds of the brightest boys. "The conflicts in it about how to teach and what to teach were so brilliantly revealed, and then just the pure theatricality of those eight boys -- who they are," says Zinoman, who fell in love with the show in London and will direct.

- The mainstage season will close with "The Internationalist" (May 14-June 22, 2008), about a businessman abroad who, as Studio's press blurb says, gets "lost in translation." Anne Washburn's play was developed by the 13P company in New York, where she is a resident playwright.

STUDIO SECONDSTAGE

-In Kia Corthron's "Breath, Boom" (Dec. 12, 2007-Jan. 6, 2008), a girl grows into and out of the gang life.

-"All That I Will Ever Be" (Feb. 13-March 9, 2008), by Alan Ball (TV's "Six Feet Under," the film "American Beauty") is about a sexually charged relationship between two men in Los Angeles, one American, the other from the Middle East.

- A television talk show turns violent -- and goes operatic -- in "Jerry Springer: The Opera" (July 16-Aug. 10, 2008), by Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas. Secondstage Artistic Director Keith Alan Baker will direct.

With two special events featuring experimental troupes at Secondstage, "We're really going to use the space as it was intended," Zinoman says, "letting these really hot national companies into the Studio to rehearse and develop the work, and then we'll do the premieres. That's something that we've never, ever done before."

- Rainpan performers Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle will present three works during the Rainpan 43 Festival (March 18-April 6, 2008): their off-Broadway hit "All Wear Bowlers," the newer "Amnesia Curiosa" and the premiere of work-in-progress "machines machines machines machines machines machines."

- The Civilians' premiere work, tentatively titled "This Beautiful City" (June 11-July 6, 2008), uses interviews and other elements to explore the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs.

A month of reckoning The Civilians collaborate with CC students in an inquiry on evangelical faith

2007-02-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

By Christina A. Roller

If diversified religious viewpoints are investigated through documentary theater, according to Tom Lindblade, "it's bound to ruffle some feathers."

The professor and chair of drama and dance at Colorado College hired The Civilians, a professional New York City theater company created in 2001, to work one-on-one with students from his Topics in Drama class and create a show within four weeks. Through performance and music, the production aims to illustrate the myriad of religious viewpoints in Colorado Springs, and the nation.

"Colorado Springs is sort of an intensified microcosm of what is going on in the country as a whole," says Steve Cosson, artistic director for The Civilians, who tour internationally throughout the U.S. and U.K. "The idea for the show goes back to the 2004 election and the increasing profile of the evangelical movement, as well as the idea that there was a great divide in the U.S. between the religious and secular.

The Civilians have immersed themselves in the Springs since June, collecting testimony from a wide variety of sources, ranging from mainline protestant churches to The Freethinkers of Colorado Springs. But only during the past month have five of the visiting troupe's professional actors collaborated with 14 CC students for a final staged production, titled Save This City.

"Our students are excited," Lindblade says. "They're all hittin' the pavement, running around; they're involved with the production."

Lindblade says the project aims to give students the experience of working with members of a professional theater company, to teach them a different way of making theater and involve them with the surrounding community.

The troupe was recently visiting New Life Church gathering testimony for the project when Mike Jones, former male prostitute, attended for the first time since exposing Ted Haggard for "sexual immorality." This topic will not, however, be the basis of the documentary.

"There are a lot of different worlds co-existing in Colorado Springs that are separate from each other and sometimes bump into one another," Cosson says. "The goal of the project is to recreate these experiences within the community on stage.

Though Cosson and Lindblade agree that Colorado Springs is a prime location to delve into the subject of religion, the show itself simply reports observations made.

"That's part of the beauty of it thus far," says Alex Hesbrook, ac CC junior involved with the project. "It's been as unbiased as possible."

The Civilians will later debut a larger show on the topic in New York City.

"Shakespeare said, 'Hold the mirror up to nature,'" Lindblade says, "but people want to see their nature, not somebody else's nature."

"I'm hoping that everyone relates to a part of it and that everyone's enraged by a part of it," Hesbrook adds.

Avant God Troupe bases play on local religious climate

2007-02-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

STORY BY PAUL ASAY THE GAZETTE

It may be hard to picture the Ted Haggard saga as part of an off-Broadway production, or visualize the city’s evangelical power base in a show-stopping song-and-dance number.

But hey, that’s what The Civilians do.

The Civilians, a small, critically acclaimed theater company from New York City, have used the same recipe for success since their inception in 2001. They take a weighty theme, mix in some witty dialogue and toetapping tunes, then plop it onstage like a whimsical Jell-O salad so the audience can sink into the off-kilter delicacy.

Their production “Nobody’s Lunch” riffed on the politics of truthtelling.

"The Ladies" delved into the psyches of historical characters such as Eva Perón and Imelda Marcos. The avant-garde company has developed into a critical darling in New York and London.

Now, the troupe has set its sights on American religiosity.

“We knew that we wanted to spend time in a community with a strong evangelical presence,” said Civilians director Steve Cosson. “And really, why go anywhere else but Colorado Springs?”

The Civilians are working with a dozen students from Colorado College on the production, titled “Save This City.”

They’ve interviewed more than 100 locals so far — the transcripts from which are enough to fill a two-inch-thick binder — and those interviews will form the guts for the show.

The combined Civilians and CC troupe will present a show Thursday-Feb. 10 at CC’s Armstrong Hall — dramatizations of these interviews paired with a few original songs. The real off-Broadway event will probably take about a year to polish, according to Cosson. If they find a producer, they hope to show the finished play in Colorado Springs.

“This is very much how we figure out what the show is,” Cosson said. “We always figure out our subjects by putting material in front of an audience.”

One subject is a given: the public debacle of the Rev. Ted Haggard, who was dismissed from the pulpit of New Life Church in the wake of a sex-and-drugs scandal.

Cosson made his first visit to Colorado Springs in June, months before male escort Mike Jones leveled career-sinking allegations against Haggard.

Cosson and members of the troupe came to town every month or so thereafter to conduct interviews and connect with the drama students at CC.

As fate would have it, they planned one of their visits for the weekend of Nov. 4 — the weekend Haggard was officially fired.

“Just speaking personally, it was an utterly surreal experience,” Cosson said.

“When you’re working really in-depth on a project, it takes over your whole life. For the past few months, all I’d think about was Colorado Springs and the churches here and New Life, and Friday morning I’m listening to the BBC news and it’s all about Ted Haggard.”

Many of the interviews gathered after the fall took on a Haggard-esque tinge.

At a recent rehearsal, actors dramatized several interviews that focused on the pastor: a hurting New Life staff member; a Christian lesbian advocate who worries about Haggard’s family; an atheist who admonishes the audience to “let Ted moo!” (a reference to last year’s mooing dog ads that argued people are born gay).

And on Sunday, they escorted Jones as he attended Haggard’s New Life Church for the first time.

The Haggard saga may give the show a storyline — an unexpected feature for the freeform troupe.

Typically, Civilian shows are a potpourri of thoughts and comments that fit into a theme.

“We weren’t anticipating there would be this sort of internationally important news event in the middle of this,” Cosson said.

“And now there is. We have to take it onboard.”

But there’s more to Colorado Springs’ religious landscape than Haggard, and Cosson says he wants to make sure the final show does justice to the city’s complexities.

In the morning rehearsal, students and Civilians cast members showcased a host of real-life characters.

One actor, playing an Islamic woman, admitted she wore a crucifix and prayed with the rosary.

Another, representing a college student, recounted how she held her friend’s hand as her friend had an abortion — “watching this life come out of her.”

Civilian actor Marsha Stephanie Blake played a lesbian Christian who moved to Colorado Springs in the mid-1990s.

“If you’re going to combat Nazi fundamentalism, at least do it in a scenic place,” she said.

CC student Hugh Johnson channeled a local choir director who hopes to leave Colorado Springs.

“You talk to the people here?” exclaimed Johnson. “They’re crazy!”

Crazy or not, the city is a microcosm of America, according to Cosson. Perhaps a more intense version of America, but the issues are the same everywhere. And Colorado Springs — like the nation, according to Cosson — is deeply divided.

These are tough issues to voice in a relatively short time frame. Condensing nine months worth of work into a 90-minute production will require some deft editing.

“Whenever you’re working with real people and real life, the responsibility of trying to tell the story with accuracy and truth and subtlety and nuance . . . already presents a host of challenges,” he said. “But to address this story in this place at this time this year? I really can’t think of anything that would present a bigger challenge.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0367 or paul.asay@gazette.com

'SAVE THIS CITY'

WHAT: The Civilians and Colorado College students will re-enact faith-themed interviews they’ve gathered from Colorado Springs residents. They also will perform a handful of original songs.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Feb. 10.

WHERE: Armstrong Theatre, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St.

TICKETS: $5, or $2 for CC students. Purchase at the Worner Campus Center Information Desk, 902 N. Cascade Ave.

In search of evangelicals New York actors craft a musical on Springs faithful

2007-02-01T21:59:00.000-08:00

By Jean Torkelson, Rocky Mountain News

COLORADO SPRINGS - Surrounded by rehearsal-room grunge - black walls, scuffed floors, Styrofoam cups and a broken-down piano - a New York acting company is honing its take on what makes evangelical Christians tick.

The company, called The Civilians, is crafting a musical about the Springs' most famous demographic.

"Even if your tongue come notarized, I'm not gonna believe ya!" snaps actor Marsha Stephanie Blake, interpreting a zesty line she got from a worshipper at the city's Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church.

Since April, troupe members have interviewed Christians of all flavors - liberal to conservative - including members of disgraced pastor Ted Haggard's church.

On Wednesday, the troupe gathered in a rehearsal room at Colorado College to massage a musical out of hundreds of conversations. Next week, they will perform an early version at the college's Armstrong Theater for both the public and the folks they've interviewed. The working title is Save This City, but the actors insist they're not trying to be snide.

"We're theater people from New York, so there's an assumption about our motives," says producing director Kyle Gorden. "They think we're doing an exposé or satirizing or somehow beating up on the poor Christians, which is absolutely not the intent of the show."

Past productions have focused on such esoteric topics as the Disney Corp. and existentialism, but no topic has proved as chewy as evangelicals, the biggest production yet.

"There are issues of religion and the question of America as a divided country," says director Steve Cosson.

The concept of real life took a turn in November when the bigger-than-life daddy of evangelicals, Haggard of New Life Church, admitted to "sexual immorality."

"That stirred up everything," says Cosson. In a bit of theater-worthy timing, The Civilians were at New Life the weekend the story broke.

Church members were very willing to talk - "We were stunned," Cosson says - but the troupe doesn't plan to focus on Haggard or on Mike Jones, the male prostitute involved with him.

"We don't want this to be the 'Ted and Mike story,' " says Cosson. "We're interested in the community as a whole."

Indeed, Colorado Springs became something of a character itself: "We want to focus on the town as a microcosm for the country," Gorden says.

So the company branched out to interview politicians, like the current and a former mayor, and even Catholic Bishop Michael Sheridan. The actor who talked with Sheridan, Alison Weller, said he seemed bemused by it all.

"He kind of laughed, 'Oh, does that mean somebody's going to play me?' " she recalled.

The short answer: Yes, but only if he makes the cut among hundreds of competing interviews.

In rehearsal, Weller depicts two of the evangelical extremes: first, a sophisticated liberal pastor who performed a gay marriage - "I lost some members of my congregation over that," sighs the character.

Then Weller switches to a fluttery, wide-eyed lady who chirps, "Oh, I've had visions since I was little...!"

And how does the company think the subjects will react to seeing themselves caricatured?

"That's the big question, really," says Gorden. "We have no desire to satirize or make fun of people. But at the same time, I think almost everyone in the audience will hear something on stage they'll find challenging."

The Civilians

History: Founded 2001. The name is old vaudeville slang for people outside show business.

Based: 1412 Broadway, New York, N.Y.

Web site: www.thecivilians.org

Finances: Supported by box office, grants, foundations

Performing: Feb. 8-10, Armstrong Theater, Colorado College, 14 East Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs. Performances at 8 p.m. each night, plus Saturday matinee at 2 p.m. Discussion with 18-member cast follows.

Cost: $5.00

After Colorado: Will sharpen the show in New York, then take it on the road to regional theaters and special venues.

What critics say about past productions: "Quirkily clever," (Evening Standard, London); "Sharp as a tack," (The London Times).

torkelsonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5055

Colorado Springs Gets What It Deserves: A Musical! An interview with The Civilians.

2007-02-01T21:53:00.000-08:00

By Noel Black

On February 8, 9 and 10, the New York City-based investigative theater troupe The Civilians will give Colorado Springs residents chance to see our local culture in the mirror of a cabaret-style musical theater production based on interviews with over 100 locals. Not surprisingly, it'll be about how evangelical Christianity has affected our lives.

The production is titled Save This City! and all the words and lyrics come verbatim from the interviewees (full disclosure: I was one of the hundred plus) who included everyone from Mike Jones to Will Perkins. Though they hadn't even begun to assemble the interviews into a coherent storyline at the time of this interview, member Stephen Plunkett was able to tell me that, "There's a lot of military stuff, a lot about New Life, and a lot about the queer community."

After the CC "run," which will be preliminary sketches of the future production, they'll take their research back to New York for further development, and it will premier more officially "within the next two years."

We spoke with Steve Cosson (founder), Alison Weller and Stephen Plunkett about their experiences in Colorado Springs over the past several months as they conducted research with a group of students from Colorado College.

Newspeak: So you got to go out to New Life Church with Mike Jones, the man who massaged Ted Haggard. What was that like?

Steve Cosson: It was exactly what I thought it would be. The public message had always been "We pray for Ted, We pray for Mike." I knew that a lot of New Life people had invited him to come to church, so I knew that a lot of people would want to say hello and welcome him. And that's exactly what happen. I'd say about 25 people came up and shook his hand and blessed him. Everyone who came up seemed very heartfelt about it. The one thing that didn't make the AP. I told Mike to meet me by the big Angel. An older man who was an usher came by and said, "Hey, did you pose for that thing?"

NS: So how did you get started with this investigative style of doing theater?

SC: It was always something I was interested in, but the model for The Civilians has a lot to do with Les Waters who had been a member of the Joint Stock Theater, which was an English theater in late 70s. It was a very political theater and interested in the theater of social questions. They developed plays and projects came out of these investigations into real life. Caryl Churchill and David Hare were both Joint Stock writers. So when I was in grad school at UC San Diego, Les would lead the class through JS style process. The thing about the JS process is that a lot of the process had an investigative aspect and a creative aspect. So, for example, they'd go live in a town for a while and work in the fields with people and Caryl Churchhill would write a play based on it. It would still be a play, but it would be very rooted in the social reality of the material. I refer to what we do as investigative theater rather than documentary theater, where documentary theater has more of a journalistic approach. We write songs, for example and Michael Friedman composes them. What we show in February will be excerpts of the interviews we've done and some of the music Michael has composed. We already have 12 songs.

As far as Why? It's really a laborious and expensive way to make theater, but I do it because I want to create theater that's really engaged and important. And I find too much that especially in the theater, you end up seeing plays that reaffirm what you already know. It's sort of the liberal humanistic philosophy of the theater that there's a normative set of ideas. And the whole point of going out into the real world is that you'd get past your ideas and deal with how people actually are. People and social questions are always terribly complex and contradictory. And I think a big reason I work this way … it isn't that I want my audience to come out with a new set of thoughts and information, but I want them to be able to think differently and reevaluate their perceptions and have that experience of thinking differently. So the process is very related to the product. We come here and put a lot of time into really listening to people and learning from them. And we have to let go of what we might think and have to encounter what it really is so that the audiences wherever we take the show will have a parallel experience.

NS: Tell me about what inspired you to do this in Colorado Springs?

SC: When I started the civilians in 2001, one of the things I wanted to do was to go work on a subject that was very different from us in our company and one of the first ideas was to do something about conservative Christianity. After the 2004 election, the subject seemed more and more important and our company had grown and had more resources, so it seemed like the time had come. I had thought about Colorado Springs, but one of our writers, Jim Lewis, had gone to CC and he hooked us up with the college. And there's no better place to do this project than Colorado Springs because of New Life, Ted and his relationship to politics, his presidency of the NAE during the Bush Presidency … Three of us came out in June and went to New Life and I think the first time we really sort of got it, like "Oh! this really seems to be the center of America right now. I mean, you're in the middle of this church with 7,000 people and the minister is talking about his relationship to George Bush and Ariel Sharon and other world leaders. I think the world we come from knows that the evangelical movement is this big influential thing in politics, but they don't really have an understanding of the scope of it or what it means, or what that kind of Christianity really means, or what it is beyond its political effect on the national elections. And other than that they find it kind of scary and freaky.

Allison Weller: I think they don't get how it plays out in people's lives.

SC: It plays out in an extraoridinarily wide variety of things. I think the non-evangelical believes that the evangelicals are monolithic—that they think the same way, behave in the same way and believe in the rapture. But everyone we've talked to is still an individual with their own distinct lives.

NS: Nevertheless, there is a culture.

SC: There is a culture, and there's a few things that we're trying to understand better. Right now, we're trying to understand what it means to have a personal relationship with God. The evangelicals' God is part of everday life, it's a way of life, and you have a relationship in the same way that you have a relationship with your parents or spouse. And I think we're still working to understand what that means and how it plays out in a life. So far it really seems to range from "I know what God would want from me, so I try to live accordingly, " to, "I have visions on a regular basis and I'm hearing the voice of God."

AW: There's a discipline to it and a level of commitment on a daily basis that I wasn't completely aware of. I wasn't aware of how much time and how disciplined every single day a lot of the people would be. I grew up Catholic, and discipline would be going to church on Sunday. But for a lot of evangelicals it's all pervasive.

Stephen Plunkett: I also find that it gives them an extra resolve and power because of that personal relationship and it gives their convictions a strength because they actually believe they are the convictions of God.

NS: What other things have really surprised you while you've been here?

SC: One thing that's been really revelatory to us is just the amount of shit going down in Colorado Springs ALL THE TIME, and on so many fronts. Whenever we do something like this we try to find dynamic and interesting people who are leading dynamic and interesting lives and you have to dig around a bit. But in Colorado Springs you just walk out the door. I think it's because the social environment and that so many things are brought to the the surface and the fronts where these various communities rub up against each other are really heightened and intensified. So everyone, Christian or not, is sort of involved in the question in a way that … like everyone here had to deal personally with the fall of Ted Haggard. So something that we would take for granted, like being a high school student who doesn't believe in God, is a very intense experience here. We've been overwhelmed by the vast amount of material we've collected so far.

AW: I've been surprised at how open everyone has been to talk to us.

[Steve Cosson leaves for an appointment]

NS: How do you feel about the process?

AW: I love it. I always feel like in my alternate life I'd like to be a journalist. So it's great to do something that combines both things.

SP: I look at it mostly as an opportunity to learn about a lot of different people. As an actor, it's good to spend time with people and learn what makes them tick. I like the journalism side, but I mostly feel like it's important to do something topical.

AW: I get a writerly joy out of it from talking to people and finding the golden nuggets that drop out of people's mouths, and everyone has a story of some sort. It's really exciting.

SP: If you ask people the right questions, they'll tell you their best stories that they've told a lot and that they tell really well.

NS: What can you tell me about the production so far?

AW: Literally the entire time we've been here we've been doing interviews and going to services. I'm not bullshitting you: we have no idea.

SP: Part of our process is that we interview people and then get together as a group and present the people we've interviewed as characters. There's a lot of military stuff, a lot about New Life, there's a lot about the queer community. We have some gay military personnel.

Tickets are $5 for the general public, $2 with a Colorado College ID, and $2 for students. Tickets are available at the Worner Campus Center Information Desk, 902 N. Cascade Ave. or you can call 389-6607 for more info.

Haggard’s Accuser, and a Theater Troupe, Visit Megachurch

2007-01-30T22:02:00.000-08:00

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

(Also published under varying headlines in The Colorado Springs Gazette, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and others)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- The former male prostitute whose accusations against New Life Church founder Ted Haggard led to Haggard's dismissal as pastor has paid a visit to the megachurch.

Mike Jones, who has a forthcoming book, told The Denver Post that several people shook his hand during the visit Sunday and told him, ''God bless you.''

''I had read a lot about the church, but there's nothing like seeing it for yourself,'' Jones told the paper. ''It wasn't to rub anyone's face in it by any means. I was wanting to get some perspective, to see where they are coming from, what the magnet is.''

Haggard resigned last year as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after Jones alleged Haggard paid him over a three-year period for sex and sometimes took methamphetamine during the encounters.

Haggard then was fired as pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church. He publicly admitted in November to unspecified ''sexual immorality.''

In an apology to the church, Haggard had urged members to forgive and thank Jones for exposing deceit. Church members invited Jones to the church several times.

Jones visited on Sunday with members of a New York-based theater troupe, The Civilians, who are researching a project on evangelicals. Church leaders knew about the visit beforehand.

Associate pastor Rob Brendle saw Jones in the foyer.

''I told Mike, 'I don't want to impose my religious beliefs on you, but I believe God used you to correct us, and I appreciate that,''' Brendle said. ''The church's response to him was overwhelmingly warm. One of the wonderful and enduring truths of Christianity is to love people the world sets up to be your enemies.''

Haggard and his wife, Gayle, completed a counseling program in Arizona and are back in Colorado Springs, Brendle said.

New Life members welcome Jones Former male prostitute: "I was thanked for exposing the church"

2007-01-28T22:04:00.000-08:00

By Eric Gorski
Denver Post Staff Writer

As soon as the visitor from Denver walked through the church doors Sunday morning, heads turned. Word spread quickly: He was here.

Just about every person who offered him a handshake said the same thing: Welcome, thank you and God bless.

About 14,000 people pour into New Life Church in Colorado Springs each Sunday, so anonymity is not difficult to achieve.

One exception is when you are Mike Jones, the former male prostitute whose allegations of a three-year sexual liaison with church founder Ted Haggard triggered national scandal and led to Haggard's fall.

Jones attended services Sunday at New Life Church on a reconnaissance mission for his forthcoming book and said he was greeted warmly. Haggard, in an apology to the church, had urged members to forgive and thank Jones for exposing deceit.

"I had read a lot about the church, but there's nothing like seeing it for yourself," Jones said. "It wasn't to rub anyone's face in it by any means. I was wanting to get some perspective, to see where they are coming from, what the magnet is."

Jones had been invited to New Life several times by church members since Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired from the church after admitting in November to "sexual immorality."

Jones was accompanied Sunday by members of a New York- based theater troupe, the Civilians, who are in Colorado Springs researching a project on evangelicals. Church leaders were told in advance of the visit.

"A couple of ladies cried when they were touching me," Jones said. "I was thanked for exposing the church, for helping Ted Haggard. A couple of them said they hoped I get God into my life. And they all said 'God bless you,' every one of them."

But Jones - who came forward out of anger toward Haggard's political stances against homosexuality - said he wasn't impressed on the whole. If the Gospel message is enough, he said, why the loud music and MTV-quality production?

"There seems to be something missing, some realism, in my opinion, because it's so vast, like some kind of self-contained city," said Jones, who said he was raised Methodist but is estranged from organized religion.

When associate pastor Rob Brendle encountered Jones in the foyer, he commented, "The last time I saw you was on the other side of a split screen" during TV interviews.

Brendle characterized Jones' presence as a reminder of both grief and God's faithfulness.

"I told Mike, 'I don't want to impose my religious beliefs on you, but I believe God used you to correct us, and I appreciate that,"' Brendle said. "The church's response to him was overwhelmingly warm. One of the wonderful and enduring truths of Christianity is to love people the world sets up to be your enemies."

Haggard and his wife, Gayle, have completed a counseling program at an Arizona treatment center and are back in Colorado Springs awaiting direction from a panel overseeing what has been termed Haggard's "restoration," Brendle said.

Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-954-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com.

[Photo Caption: Mike Jones addressed the Rev. Ted Haggard on the air Monday, saying, "If you're a gay man, you're a gay man." Jones also said he wanted to clarify he is not a drug dealer and that he was merely a go-between when Haggard reportedly expressed a desire to buy methamphetamine. (Post / Cyrus McCrimmon )]

Brave New Year

2007-01-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

Some of Off-Broadway's leading lights offer up resolutions for 2007

by Alexis Soloski

Owing to Mayor Bloomberg's 2003 public ordinance, Off-Broadway theaters have quit smoking. And as stages are converted into bars, clubs, and condos, they've lost plenty of weight. Off-Broadway constantly makes new friends, learns foreign languages, and takes up new hobbies. So on December 31, when the champagne corks pop and "Auld Lang Syne" strikes up, what's left to resolve? We asked playwrights, performers, producers, and directors what resolutions they plan to make for Off-Broadway and themselves as they ring in 2007.

Anne Marie Healy, Playwright (Now That's What I Call a Storm)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: I'd love to see more connections between the New York theater scene and other hotbeds of new work. I keep hearing and seeing all this great work coming out of different regional hubs, but it doesn't seem to be totally connected with what's happening in New York.
Resolutions for Self: I'm studying with Paula Vogel at the moment, and she's introducing me to tons of thrilling new theatrical possibilities. I'm thinking a lot about the muddy brilliance of [Tadeusz] Kantor at the moment. It's very inspiring, so I am resolved to keep my mind open to irrational choices.

Matt Maher, Performer (100 Aspects of the Moon with Clubbed Thumb)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: I want the theater to stop competing with TV and film and just be itself. The more the Internet asserts itself,as more and more people are making their own movies and pilots and websites and interactive sitcoms and the like, the more crucial it is for theater to assert its strengths: richly collaborative, never-to-be-repeated, meticulously planned events that are meant to be shared with people right there in the room with you.

Anne Kauffman, Director (The Thugs)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: I wholeheartedly beg writers to write from a politically conservative point of view. Enough preaching to the converted! Make me love Karl Rove (I already shamefully admire him). Make me understand Bush. Creating work from this angle might actually provoke interesting political discourse.

Rob Handel, Playwright (Aphrodisiac)
Resolutions for Self: In 2007, I resolve to write plays that meet the challenge laid down by the plays I saw in 2006, plays by writers who demand a theater of ideas and language and image—who write characters unafraid to say "Yoi ma i fa ha. d'lal ad na amginck tai" (The Internationalist); who write stage directions unafraid to say "The FIVE SAMS emerge from Samantha" (Dead City); and who demand directors and theaters with the imagination to interpret and execute their scripts.

Young Jean Lee, Playwright/Director (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven)
Resolutions for Self: My resolution is to stop whining so much and be more grateful for what I have. Over the next year, I have to write and direct two new shows, write a show for Big Dance Theater, tour to at least six different venues, form a nonprofit, and teach a bunch of workshops, all while holding down a part-time job. I've been really stressing out over it, but I'm realizing how obnoxious it is to whine about an overabundance of opportunities.

Juliana Francis-Kelly, Playwright/Performer (Saint Latrice)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: More plays with children and animals in them, played by real children and real animals.

Adam Bock, Playwright (The Thugs)
Resolutions for Self: I'm gonna do more yoga and get a dog.

Sheila Callaghan, Playwright (Dead City)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: I'd like to see the term "emerging playwright" blasted with liquid nitrogen, replaced by terms more appropriate to each individual artist given his or her own prior artistic accomplishments.
Resolutions for Self: To stop pretending the hours I spend submerged in my daily YouTube coma is "character research."

Adam Rapp, Playwright (Red Light Winter)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: I would like to see more established theaters take the lead from the Public and Playwrights Horizons, who are both hosting emerging companies. And maybe Stomp will finally leave the Orpheum Theatre? As much as I enjoyed it, it's like 12 years later, and it's about time for a proper play to be running there again.

Steve Cosson, Director/Playwright ([I Am] Nobody's Lunch)
Resolutions for Self: With the Civilians, I'm working on a big project about evangelical Christianity and the line between church and state, and for the Foundry Theatre, I'm writing an interview-based show about environmental and climate changes. So my resolution is to take a bit of a break and create a show about puppies —I'm thinking maybe puppies on a road trip, puppies getting into trouble, maybe a run-in with a mean cow or a feisty goat.

Sarah Benson, Producer/Artistic Director (Soho Rep)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: Quit being so parochial. Banish the formulaic 90-minute play—and all plays with people being nasty to each other in the name of being theatrically radical (or as a substitute for genuinely dangerous theater). Lisa D'Amour, Playwright (Stanley [2006])
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: Continue to chip away at the stigma of downtown "cool" in order to find more audience and make theater that is clear, honest, humble and compassionate. Lure more artists of color into the downtown scene, as well as more artists who grew up outside the northeastern U.S.

Kristin Marting, Producer/Director (Here Arts Center)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: More rigor. More challenge. More surprise. I want more work which doesn't do what you expect, which makes you uncomfortable, which transports you, which moves you.
Resolutions for Self: I hope to spend more time as an artist and less as a real estate maven.

Ken Rus Schmoll, Director (The Internationalist)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: More festivals like the recent BAIT (Buenos Aires in Translation) at P.S.122—offerings of plays from unexpected countries.
Resolutions for Self: To direct a play by a dead person.

David Herskovits, Director (Faust)
Resolutions for Off-Broadway: The resolution I would like to see us make in theaters everywhere is not to operate from a position of fear—fear of artistic failure, of the unknown, of losing audience or funders, of poor press. Fear of employing an untried talent, of being the first to embrace something new (especially when others may have questioned it), of deploying production practices, schedules, staffing and organizational models outside our zone of comfort.

Fear of letting go of what we know—the comfortable narcotic familiar. All this kills the flourishing creative imagination. We know that and pay lip service to it reli giously, but how often do we really, really let go of our established machinery? And how often do we find ourselves saying no—even in the politest possible way—to impulses only because, really, that's just not how we do things? Say yes!

'Gone Missing' offers humor, heartache

2006-09-15T22:14:00.000-07:00

by Judith Egerton

You can lose your cool, your keys, a single size-6 Gucci pump. You can lose your cat, your gold teeth or even your mind.

Why are we attached to certain objects? What makes the loss of a treasured heirloom linger in the memory? And conversely, what would life be like if we lost the ability to remember our favorite things -- and the people and experiences they evoke?

With sanguine humor and original songs and music, The Civilians of New York City go looking for answers in "Gone Missing," a 90-minute show now playing in the snug Victor Jory Theatre at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

The Civilians, led by Steven Cosson, created the theater piece after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Intrigued by thoughts concerning loss and memory, the company interviewed fellow New Yorkers to collect personal accounts of lost items. From those stories, they constructed a series of monologues that they tell with an astounding array of accents reflecting the city's diversity.

Wearing suits and ties of muted colors, the six Civilians perform individually and as an ensemble. They are as polished on stage alone as they are as whole.

In the small, 150-seat Victor Jory, the actors (Emily Ackerman, Matthew Maher, Jennifer R. Morris, Stephen Plunkett, Robbie Collier Sublett and Alison Weller) speak directly to the audience as they tell about losing items, such as a favorite scarf, and more serious things, such as a job, a husband and an inheritance.

One character imagines that a beautiful scarf she left in a cab is now "balled up" in someone's SUV with a cat sitting on it -- no longer hers and no longer appreciated. Three women speak of feeling heartsick over losing rings that symbolize relationships, and the men join together in a rousing and funny "La Bodega" number.

Michael Friedman's songs include ballads, such as "The Only Thing Missing Is You" by Ackerman, and a tough-love tune, "I Gave It Away," about getting rid of an ex's possessions after a breakup. The ensemble was accompanied by able music director John D. Zehnder, who breezily moved through the show's eight songs.

Morris, a former Actors Theatre intern, reveals a winning versatility in her ability to morph from character to character. Particularly amusing was her tough-talking Queens native whose job -- and mission -- was to persuade obsessive-compulsives to let go of found objects.

Although Plato and Freud are mentioned, the production doesn't dig too deep, and that's a shame. It's as if "Gone Missing" is just missing something that would help us more fully understand the nature of loss.

Understandably, The Civilians chose not to focus their piece on the human losses suffered on Sept. 11, 2001, yet they haunt the show. Perhaps, as we learn from a heartbroken character in "Gone Missing," some losses are so painful that even words go missing.

Critic's Choice: Top Five Plays

2006-09-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

by Kieron Quirke

Our reviewers select London's best plays, from Nina Rain's comedy Rabbit, to a clever cabaret from New York, and Brixton Stories' thoughtful snapshot of south-west London life...

Rabbit
Trafalgar Studios, SW1
Just when you thought no more fun could be had from the sex lives of middle class young adults, a play proves again that they are an inexhaustible mine of entertainment. Nina Raine's self-directed comedy has its clunks and dithers, but a knack for truth and dialogue plus some fine performances compensate for the naive moments. Birthday girl Bella (Charlotte Randle) and her chums, including seething ex boyfriend, Richard (Adam James), talk like your friends, but with twice as much eloquence and four times as much emotional honesty. Until 7 October. (0870 060 6632). Kieron Quirke

(I Am) Nobody's Lunch
Soho, W1
Our confused relationship with certainty is the theme of this clever, fun and, in all, rather brilliant cabaret from New York troupe The Civilians. It's based on interviews with ordinary Americans, covering two key modern issues: the war on terror and the sexuality of Tom Cruise. This isn't so much the documentary theatre as a network of lateral thoughts about the way human weakness affects our beliefs and loyalties, with Michael Friedman's excellent songs conjuring an atmosphere of general confusion. Great stuff. Until 23 September (0870 429 6883). Kieron Quirke

Brixton Stories
Lyric Studio, W6
One of the first lines in Biyi Bandele's uplifting look at south-west London life announces that Ossie Jones, immigration lawyer and father to Nehushta, is dead. In the subsequent 75 minutes, however, he is gloriously alive. He and his daughter wander their home streets, as the four-strong cast winningly introduce us to a kaleidoscope of local colour. Perfect fairy-ish Stories for the darkening nights ahead. (08700 500 511). Until 23 September. Fiona Mountford

The Madras House
Orange Tree, Richmond
There are strange, thematic echoes of Ibsen and premonitions of Lorca in Harley Granville Barker's critique of Edwardian society and its exploitation of women. The vital link in the play's episodic scheme is Timothy Watson's bleakly becalmed Philip Madras, a young man with a restless wife, eager to be shot of two family firms. His father, Constantine (Richard Durden) emerges as the embodiment of the sexual hypocrisy, cruelty and marital subterfuge that his son avoids. Granville Barker lacks Shaw's flair for provocation and polemic, yet his dark, Edwardian worldpicture remains worth viewing. (020 8940 3633). Until 14 October. Nicholas de Jongh

LAST CHANCE:
Caucasian Chalk Circle
The Scoop, SE1
Good things do come for free. The Steam Industry's pacy, bold and determinedly accessible revival of Brecht's epic masterpiece is playing for any passer-by outside City Hall. The politicians should be thankful. It isn't pure Brecht - director Phil Wilmott abandons a great deal of the playwright's ideology. But it is a wonderful whirlwind of action, and the energy of the cast and the appeal of a good myth simply told see it through. In rep until 17 September. Kieron Quirke

Finding the truth is fantastic fun

2006-09-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

by Kieron Quirke

"What is truth?" pondered Pontius Pilate, and he had a fair point. Our confused relationship with certainty is the theme of this quirkily clever, edifyingly fun and, in all, rather brilliant collage of cabaret from New York troupe The Civilians.

The piece is based on interviews with a selection of the company's fellow Americans, covering two key modern issues: the war on terror and the sexuality of Tom Cruise. How have these people gone about processing the mass of information presented to them by the media, friends and loved ones into something approaching knowledge?

The primary concern in all of this is the modern dilemma of how much we trust our governments. There are a few scenes that are directly on point - a young government worker tells how the failure of a foreign-student visa scheme was hushed up; a member of the National Guard explains why he doesn't bother loading his gun.

But mostly this isn't so much the politically charged, confessional documentary theatre we are used to as a network of lateral thoughts about the way human weakness affects our beliefs and loyalties.

Schrödinger's cat mewing from a deserted, suspicious bag that no one will open represents the clouding of our curiosity by fear. Romantic love and the unquestioning trust it engenders becomes a metaphor for patriotism.

Michael Friedman's excellent songs conjure atmospheres of confusion in support of these ideas. A tango-like number (Lady Beware), danced to by spies and translated by a scared interpreter, captures that uncertain feeling that the person doing the warning is the one of whom you should be scared.

The final minutes are perhaps less enthralling than the first hour, and there is a song at the end that provides more explanation than we need. But really, this is great stuff.

Photo Credit: Lateral thinking: The Civilians provide a brilliant collage of cabaret
[Photo by Leslie Lyons of (l-r) Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Daoud Heidami, Jennifer R. Morris, Brad Heberlee, and Caitlin Miller.]

The Trouble With Asian Men/(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-09-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Sam Marlowe at Soho, W1

So, an actor asks the audience, what is the trouble with Asian men? “Their mothers,” comes one response. “Lack of a six-pack,” comes another. “They run away at the first sign of trouble,” remarks a woman with quiet seriousness. These and other issues are discussed in this hour-long verbatim piece, created for the Asian company Tamasha by Kristine Landon-Smith, Sudha Bhuchar and Louise Wallinger and first seen in November. A quartet of actors use recorded interviews, which are played into their earpieces and re-spoken to us complete with the vocal idiosyncrasies of the original speaker.

The method has limitations. The non-stop playing of the recording into the actors’ ears means that they cannot pause to accommodate an audience response. Sometimes their faces go blank with concentration; and Landon- Smith’s production is somewhat static. But there’s an undeniable authenticity about the conversations — even if they yield few fresh insights.

We hear about sexism and homophobia, of dictatorial husbands, inflexible fathers and mothers. There are accounts of lives divided between a traditional role at home and a modern Western one outside it. There is a touchingly comic tale of a Sikh who realises he wears a turban for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, and bids farewell to it, and to the hair he has never before cut, at Vidal Sassoon.

The New York cabaret company the Civilians also use a verbatim approach, albeit a more fluid one. (I am) Nobody’s Lunch, winner of a 2006 Edinburgh Fringe First, wittily considers the impossibility of certainty in a world stuffed with lies. Snappy songs and scenes drawn from interviews with various fearful citizens muse on the unknowable realities behind news headlines, tabloid gossip and political spin, underscored by the mewing of Schrödinger’s Cat, which may or may not be imprisoned in a suspect package abandoned on the stage. The show doesn’t have the intensity of the company’s last UK outing, the post-9/11 Gone Missing, but it’s an inventive and provocative exploration of the 21st-century condition.

Box office: 0870 4296883

Theater Review - Gone Missing

2006-09-01T22:18:00.000-07:00

by Sherry Deatrick

Typically, theatrical works take place in the here and now. In “Gone Missing,” characters engage the audience by talking about their past experiences with lost objects. Amazingly, this technique, which flies in the face of traditional theater, doesn’t put the audience to sleep.

More than just stories about lost items, “Gone Missing” explores the loss of human contact. Through a series of intertwined reminiscences, it seems as though we’re sitting in a coffee shop chatting with each character. The topnotch cast deftly switches from one role to another, as they take turns recounting tales of lost objects. At times, a character tries to talk about the loss of husband, a job or a mind, but the others interrupt such abstract talk. By focusing on the mundane, the cast explores the definition of a person, and our place in the universe.

Only through song does the play deal with lost relationships and other painful topics, as in “I Gave It Away,” an aggressive tune about gleefully shedding a rotten ex’s possessions while robbing him of his power. (Admit it, you’ve done it.) Music is the sleight of hand that allows the mind to confront these complex issues.

The monologues were gleaned from interviews The Civilians conducted with ordinary New Yorkers following 9/11, and they’re woven into a crazy human quilt by Steve Cosson, the Civilians’ founder. The New York-based troupe works as a team to create original projects based on real life using both documentary and artistic styles. It’s a bit like David Greenberger’s “Duplex Planet,” a comic book series based on interviews with nursing home residents.

Comedy and tragedy share the stage equally, as the characters run the gamut from a hard-bitten New York cop (Stephen Plunkett) who delights in the gory details of his DOA investigations, to a bitter elderly woman (Emily Ackerman) who warns that you can’t trust anybody, as she describes caretakers who steal her possessions, including a crocheted blanket she made. Ackerman injects humor into pathos when she comments on Afghan design, saying “not one of those ones with circles ... I hate those.” Jennifer R. Morris flawlessly portrays an expert who specializes in teaching obsessive collectors to throw away their junk.

Through the hilarious radio interview about the lost continent of Atlantis with an eminent author (interspersed throughout the play by different actors), we learn that “nostalgia” is a neologism from the Greek words for “returning home” and “pain,” the work’s central theme. In the crescendo, lights descend around the actors as they deliver the philosophical song “Stars,” which posits that we may not exist but as a memory.

In the dramatic and stunning conclusion, the actors shed their suit jackets and, one by one, hang them on an unseen hook as they exit the stage, leaving them suspended in mid-air. It’s a moving tribute to the white-collar workers who were vaporized in the attack on the World Trade Center.

I Am Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

A song-and-dance show in Edinburgh about contemporary cynicism and mistrust? It might sound weird, but it works.

by Tiffany Jenkins

I Am Nobody’s Lunch is a witty song-and-dance show about uncertainty and truth. In the words of the Civilians, the New York theatre company that produced the play, it is ‘a cabaret about how we know what we know when nobody knows if everyone else is lying and when someone or something wants to have you for lunch’. It has just finished its run at the Edinburgh Festival and is now set to travel around the country. It is well worth a look.

I saw it just after 10/8, when police in England apparently smashed an alleged terrorist plot to bring down planes flying between Britain and the US. Almost instantly following those arrests, conspiracy theories began to circulate: Who was really behind the plot? Did the government make it up in order to distract public attention from the Israel-Lebanon war and Britain’s failure to do anything about it? Such paranoid chatter was a fitting backdrop, as I Am Nobody’s Lunch explores how people cope in today’s climate, when old sources of authority – in particular the press and the government – have lost credibility and we seem unsure about whom to listen to and believe.

The Civilians work in a documentary style. They interview members of the public, analyse their comments, and then edit them to produce a play. For I Am Nobody’s Lunch they talked to people about how they know what they know: how can they be sure what is right and true? And before you think to yourself, ‘God, not another play constructed from “authentic voices”’, which so often end up being banal and all over the place, in fact in this instance it works.

Steven Cosson, artistic director of the Civilians, explained that many people they spoke to often seemed willing to see cynical motives behind various events. ‘What became the anthem for the moment, and therefore became a song [in the show], was that almost everyone we talked to said “you know, I wouldn’t be surprised” at some point during any bad tale. And we realised that everyone seemed to disbelieve anything, but they did not necessarily believe anything.’

As a solider says on stage: ‘No, I don’t really believe what they tell us in the news. The trick is to look at what they’re not telling you…. They tell you they’ve got a tape of Osama bin Laden talking but it’s probably a fake. He’s not speaking in English. What’s the voice saying? We don’t know.’ The play brings out a sense of doubt that seems to lurk in all of us.

The show also contains a sparkling sketch about a bag, left behind by someone, which emits strange and disorienting sounds; musings on who really carried out 9/11; thoughts about Tom Cruise and which way he swings; the story of someone who believes his body is inhabited by a celestial being; and various witty and original ditties written by Michael Friedman, including the ‘Song of Progressive Disenchantment’.

Actress Caitlin Miller plays several different women named Jessica Lynch, all of whom are asked to describe their reaction to the tale of their namesake’s experiences in Iraq. ‘Wait, are they saying there was no Jessica Lynch?’ asks one. ‘Or, oh, just that maybe it didn’t happen the way they said it did. I don’t know. I’ve never heard that. But, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised.’

The production speaks to the consequences of uncertainty, which, as Cosson explains, can be detrimental: ‘Doubt is so corrosive. When you lose the fundamental ability to know what you know, that’s what basic core trust is, and then everything can start to fall apart and it contributes to a sense of fear.’ As one character from the Department for Homeland Security says during the show: ‘No, I don’t feel safe. I am not afraid that our building is going to blow up. I’m afraid of the whole world.’

I Am Nobody’s Lunch is quirky and revealing. But it has been criticised for not being definitive enough and for not providing an answer to why people seem so doubtful and mistrustful these days. This is wrong-headed. Theatre and the arts first have to capture a kind of truth, to explore what things are like and what is going on. As Cosson told me: ‘There is no make-or-break moment, working in the way we work. It’s more a landscape painting.’

To demand a polemic would be to turn the show into agitprop, or to make it transmit moral messages that would sit awkwardly next to the lightness and wittiness of this piece of theatre. Even so, there is more direction in the play than some have appreciated. As the wise old alien character states: ‘If you believe completely or if you disbelieve completely then either way you are a leaf in the wind. My boy, yes of course there is no absolute truth but you must insist on the truth. You must participate in the truth. And this is not something you can do by yourself.’

Cosson says he found the experience of interviewing people surprisingly reassuring. ‘Lots of people would interrogate us back, want to know what we were doing and put us on the spot. That was good. In a fundamental way, after listening to people about this, I realised that we work out what is true through being social. That is, even if you hear things through a mad media outlet, you test it out in human relationships. We need to engage more and think more with each other.’

The play may be about spiralling disorientation, but it is not nearly as pessimistic as many other productions on in Edinburgh and elsewhere at the moment; instead, it puts a (little) faith in people to think and work together in order to sort things out. It’s a cute cabaret that exposes the everyday consequences of distrust and anxiety. Check it out if it opens in a theatre near you.

Tiffany Jenkins is a writer and researcher based in Edinburgh. I Am Nobody’s Lunch ran at the Assembly in George Street, Edinburgh, until 28 August. It opens at the Soho Theatre in London in September.

Edinburgh theatre round up

2006-08-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

by Jane Edwardes

Time Out finds more excellent offerings at the Edinburgh Festival

Vicky Featherstone, the National Theatre of Scotland’s artistic director, must be absolutely delighted with the huge impact her company has made at its very first Edinburgh Festival. Last week, my colleague Rachel Halliburton raved about ‘Black Watch’, a joint production between the NTS and the Traverse which must surely come to London. Now it’s my turn to cheer as the NTS collaborates with the International Festival on Anthony Neilson’s semi-improvised play ‘Realism’.

In 1991, Neilson staged ‘Normal: the story of the Düsseldorf Ripper’ on the Edinburgh Fringe, and he’s been shocking audiences ever since. You don’t usually look to him for laughs and the title of his new play suggests a dose of kitchen-sink drama with a splash of Zola. Instead, it’s a fanciful, occasionally blokeish description of a day in the head of Stuart, played by Stuart McQuarrie in his underpants with a mix of belligerence and neediness. As he hangs out in his flat, the only thing we know for sure is that he puts his clothes in the washing machine.

All the rest is strung together from that inner, uncensored dialogue that runs through all our heads and which is, thankfully, usually hidden.

Alongside sexual fantasies, conversations with girlfriends past and present, and imagining his own funeral, he interrupts the panel members on ‘Any Questions’ to make a point that renders them speechless, demolishes a cold caller, and slags off the gas board with a song and dance number that includes the Black and White Minstrels. Miriam Buether’s set is suitably fantastic. Distorted everyday objects sit in a pile of sand, while a man-sized, disdainful cat called Galloway (lest we forget ‘Big Brother’) flounces across the stage. After just over an hour of such intimacy, it’s a shock when the final scene reveals Stuart to be sitting in a realistic kitchen, once again an unknowable human being. Neilson’s ‘The Wonderful World of Dissocia’, a hit at the festival two years ago, never made it to London. Let’s hope that someone is more adventurous this time.

‘Troilus and Cressida’, the International Festival’s other offering last week, made the news for all the wrong reasons when the first night had to be cancelled halfway through because the set had jammed. Director Peter Stein has a bit of a reputation for making huge scenic demands; in this case, the walls of Troy judder backwards and forwards before tipping back (or not tipping back) to create a burnished slope on which the final battle is fought. The Greek tents move across the stage like giant Daleks. For one of Shakespeare’s most bitter plays, Stein provides a graphic portrayal of vanity, lust, betrayal and corruption. The muscles of the Trojan soldiers ripple – the actors must have spent months in the gym – as they walk down a catwalk displaying their skimpy skirts to Pandarus and Cressida. Hector reasonably argues that Helen is not worth sacrificing Trojan lives for, but Troilus counters more romantically on Paris’ side; the latter shows his gratitude by organising the exchange of Cressida for a prisoner of war. The war doesn’t seem real – more like an afternoon outing – until the bisexual Achilles sees red after the death of Patroclus and dishonourably kills Hector.

Henry Pettigrew’s intense Troilus and Annabel Scholey’s knowing Cressida are clearly mismatched from the start but still spurred on by Paul Jesson’s voyeuristic Pandarus, an old roué who appears to be dying of a cough rather than syphilis. Ian Hughes’s Thersites rants dangerously at his superiors. Stein’s production has the great virtue of clarity but sometimes misses out on passion and urgency. The production goes to Stratford at the beginning of September.

Stein avoids overt comparisons with Iraq, but you are never far from the war elsewhere. Two shows deal with information overload and how difficult we find it to discern what is true and what is not. Is the hairdresser to be trusted more than the journalist? The more sophisticated is ‘(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch’, a revue presented by a New York company called The Civilians which will shortly come to the Soho Theatre and is loosely based on interviews with an eclectic mix of Americans, including those who share the name of Jessica Lynch. Everybody has an opinion on Tom Cruise’s love life, but they are less certain when asked about Lynch’s rescue. The actors are hugely talented and sing sweetly – but the connection between the pastiche songs and the material isn’t always clear and the presence of a man who believes he’s an extra-terrestrial feeding our fears is a whimsical step too far. ‘What I Heard About Iraq’ at the Pleasance is far more straightforward, a collection of quotes from the leading politicians, soldiers, and those living in Iraq, stretching back to before September 11. The tone is unnecessarily strident – the quotes speak all too clearly for themselves.

The smell of bad faith is far too rank to be missed.

Realism *****
Troilus and Cressida *****
(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch ****
What I Heard About Iraq ****

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

Robert Dawson Scott at Assembly

There are a lot of Americans in Edinburgh this year wondering what happened to their country. They don’t recognise a land dominated by religious fundamentalists — though, given that the Pilgrim Fathers quit England early in the 17th century because they thought it was a degenerate den of iniquity, perhaps they should not be so surprised.

But from the youthful, confused exuberance of Particularly in the Heartland, by the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment at the Traverse, to the cynical Levelland by the comic turned playwright Rich Hall, they clearly are having trouble connecting the land of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July with the world of Rush Limbaugh and approaching Armageddon, in which so many Americans apparently believe.

Perhaps the only form grotesque enough to encompass the confusion is cabaret. (I am) Nobody’s Lunch, from the Civilians company of New York, has a script as sharp as a tack, clever songs, five terrific singer/performers led by the flame-haired Caitlin Miller, one pianist and a candy-striped set like a fairground tent.

What makes it all the more piquant is that almost everything said is based on verbatim interviews with Americans who were asked why they believed what they believed, mostly, though not exclusively about current events. The title comes from one particular line of thought, that we may all be some alien creature’s putative midday meal (belief in little green men is almost as widespread as belief in God in the US).

If the script is sharp, the music (by Michael Friedman) is sharper still. Even the harmonies have a fractured quality to them, reminiscent of Kurt Weill, putting one in mind of another time when cabaret flourished, the imploding Germany of the 1930s. My, how we laughed at the satire of the madness of the times, just as we laugh now.

Serena Davies reviews Improbable Frequency, (I Am) Nobody's Lunch and Taylor Mac

2006-08-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Three exceptional fringe shows are serving up variations on vaudeville. Irish company Rough Magic's Improbable Frequency is a crazed, delightful musical starring a machine called PAT - "Probability Adjustment Tank".

PAT is responsible for such surprising phenomena as the songs on the radio forecasting the weather and compromising neutrality in Ireland during the Second World War (where the play is set). Six flawless performers act out their unlikely tale in (unlikely) verse and song.

Some gags are pantomime: John Betjeman (yes, the portly poet) suggests they levitate because, "he doesn't understand the gravity of the situation". Others are more subtle: an Irish lass in carnal embrace with an English spy bemoans the fact that she's been "Infiltrated by British Intelligence: / Oxymoronic as well as a sin."

Also with a wit of its own is (I Am) Nobody's Lunch, a "cabaret docudrama" from the precocious young American company, the Civilians.

Drawn from real-life interviews that the cast made with everyone from a former Miss New York to a soldier, the piece tackles the ambitious question of how we know what to believe when everybody seems to be lying.

Its subjects range from lovers' mutual distrust to whether Tom Cruise is gay, and it is far funnier than its existential theme suggests. Yet its fierce engagement with the current crisis of confidence in American politicians is also deeply moving.

Add to this, disarmingly pretty songs and eccentric robotic dancing and it makes for a heady mix of poignancy and mirth.

Theatre or performance art ("which is just a fancy way of saying 'drag'") - Taylor Mac doesn't know what his shows are.

But this tall New York cross-dresser with a tiny ukulele is one of the most jaw-dropping things on the fringe this year, not least on account of his mesmerising beauty.

Bejewelled golden dreadlocks frame a face made up like a cross between a Venetian mask and David Bowie in his Aladdin Sane phase. In gorgeous homemade dresses, he sings songs demanding "the revolution will not be masculinised" and dissecting his love life.

It's camp and very naughty, yet suddenly devastating. This man in his perfect mask is a Pierrot figure for the modern age, all broken heart and outsider insight.

'Improbable Frequency' until Aug 27. Tickets: 0131 228 1404. 'Nobody's Lunch' until Aug 28. Tickets: 0131 226 2428. Taylor Mac until Aug 27. Tickets: 0870 745 3083.

Collaboration in the Catskills: A Retreat for the (Theater) Troupes

2006-08-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

by Alexis Soloski

Maplecrest, N.Y.

AT Sugar Maples, a derelict summer resort perched here atop the northern Catskills, the Olympic-size swimming pool has been filled with concrete, and the roller skating rink has fallen into grave disrepair. Waist-high weeds obscure the ball fields. Roofs list, and doors dangle on their hinges. But in this dilapidated holiday spot, a new arts group, the Orchard Project, sees a warm-weather retreat for innovative theater artists. While other residencies, like the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, are devoted to playwrights only or playwright-director teams, the Orchard Project will try to serve entire companies who create work collaboratively.

Ari Edelson, the Orchard Project’s artistic director, met his co-founders, Piers and Lucy Playfair, two years ago at a benefit for Old Vic/New Voices, a program started by Mr. Edelson that sends up-and-coming New York playwrights to London and brings British playwrights to New York. Mr. Playfair, the chief investment officer of a private equity firm, Bassini Playfair Wright, had recently become involved with the nonprofit Catskill Mountain Foundation, which has raised $8 million to revitalize upstate New York towns through arts initiatives.

As Mr. Playfair’s family tree features a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate and a knighted theater director, he naturally felt that the foundation should sponsor more theater. Impressed with Mr. Edelson, Mr. Playfair told him: “Come upstate. There’s all this theatrical hardware, maybe you can think of something to do with it.”

Speaking from Tokyo, where he is preparing a production of “Blood Wedding,” Mr. Edelson remembered his initial visit to the area. He toured a movie theater the foundation had revamped, as well as the Red Barn performance space and another cinema, the New Orpheum, that will reopen as a 265-seat theater next summer. Then Mr. Playfair drove him to Sugar Maples, an 80-acre, 22-building campus recently donated to the foundation.

“I started plodding through this property, this ghost town ‘Dirty Dancing’ resort,” Mr. Edelson said. “It was amazing.” He said he knew immediately how the space should be used and told Mr. Playfair, “Writers have the O’Neill, writer-director teams have Sundance, but there’s nowhere for companies to go.’ ”

Intrigued, Mr. Playfair signed on as the project’s chairman, and his wife stepped in as the development director. With horticultural metaphors of fruition and a dash of Chekhov, they named their venture the Orchard Project and set to work developing a business plan and persuading Peter Finn, the chairman of the Catskill Mountain Foundation and the chief executive of the public relations firm Ruder Finn, to let them use Sugar Maples.

Eventually Sugar Maples will include four rehearsal spaces, costume and prop storage, and housing for 70 participants. For now only five buildings have been renovated, and four more are near completion, but these primarily serve the organic farm and visual arts institute that share the campus.

Dormitories and dining areas were not ready in time for the Orchard Project’s inaugural season this summer. Nevertheless the Civilians, a quasi-documentary company in Manhattan best known for musical shows, arrived in June with two projects. Mr. Edelson, under the aegis of another Manhattan troupe, the Play Company, arrived with one. For two weeks writers, directors, composers and actors lived together in three donated houses in the town of Hunter, a short drive from Maplecrest, and rehearsed in the foundation’s movie theater.

Caitlin Miller, a writer and performer with the Civilians, spent her time on “Way to Go!,” a one-woman show that examines the separation of church and state. Her goal was to transform it from a three-part piece into a cohesive evening. “I still have a lot more work to do,” she admitted. “But when you have the time, and you don’t have other distractions, it’s amazing how much can get done. Poor cellphone service could make for great art.”

Her colleague Steve Cosson, a director, went upstate with the playwright Neal Bell and a group of Civilians actors to work on Mr. Bell’s “Shadow of Himself,” which combines the contemporary military with the epic of Gilgamesh. Mr. Cosson explained: “I wanted to discover with the actors how they could play these different kinds of realities that coexist within the play. I’m really glad we had four days to do that out in the woods and not in the first week of rehearsal in a three-week rehearsal process.”

Mr. Edelson was working with a composer, Jamshied Sharifi, and an Iranian-American journalist, Roya Hakakian, on an adaptation of Ms. Hakakian’s memoir “Journey From the Land of No.” In the evenings members of the companies ate together and chatted.

“What amazed Roya,” Mr. Edelson said, “was how the Civilians operate and the unique joint stock process that the Civilians use to create work. And what amazed the Civilians were the ways we were taking a memoir that was all first-person account and turning it into something else.”

Mr. Cosson remembered the evening talks somewhat differently, “I’d like to say that we had deep soul-searching artistic conversations, but mostly we talked about pie.” Apparently the lemon meringue was excellent.

According to its mission statement, one of the Orchard Project’s foremost goals is “engineering collaboration,” staggering scheduling so that companies can watch one another work. But how do you engineer anything more collaborative than swapped dessert recipes? This week the second part of the project’s pilot season will begin, with 24 representatives from 24 companies on hand to produce a version of “The 24-hour Plays,” in which artists race the clock to produce new work.

“I’ve got someone from the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Mr. Edelson said, “someone from Radiohole, and someone from this Brooklyn puppet company, Drama of Works — such a hodgepodge. Hopefully it will be a way for us to get to know a few companies who we might look at for the Orchard Project.”

Still, more spadework is needed before any companies can be invited back. Though the project has the promise of new buildings and an impressive advisory board (including P.S. 122’s Vallejo Ganter and the Tectonic Theater Project’s Moises Kaufman), it still must clarify its abilities and aims. The mission statement and business plan are ambitious but diffuse, with many goals and proposals in discussion: an apprentice company, courses for writers and performers, and a two-week theater festival.

Before next summer officers have to establish an application process, decide their criteria for successful projects, start raising money and determine just how an array of bucolic rehearsal spaces will help make the Catskills an arts destination.

In the meantime there are mundane details, like sewage permits, to see to. “We’re waiting for approval to flush the toilets,” Mr. Edelson said. “Then we can house some artists.”

After the first season he and the Playfairs remain optimistic, confident that their project can benefit theater troupes. Mr. Playfair, for one, has overcome some initial reservations. “I thought, all we’re doing is giving 20 people a holiday in the Catskills,” he said. “But I don’t believe that at all now.”

[Photo by Dean Strober: At the Orchard Project, Steve Cosson, left, directs the Civilians company in a play reading.]

So how do we know what we know when nobody knows who's lying?

2006-08-13T20:02:00.000-07:00

by Jackie McGlone

Stephen Sondheim is a fan of The Civilians, the documentary cabaret theatre company that is one of New York's hottest tickets. I know the composer likes them, because he's sitting next to me at the company's final performance of their sell-out show (I Am) Nobody's Lunch. Along with the rest of the midtown Manhattan audience, Sondheim is splitting his sides at the production, described by the New York Times as "a vaudevillian romp through the anxious chatter of contemporary America... performed with deadpan razzmatazz".

Now the six-strong ensemble bring their docu-drama, which is often as poignant as it is amusing, to Edinburgh, where Fringe-goers will discover a musical like no other, since it is about the Bush administration, the war on terror and Tom Cruise's sexuality. It is also about the search for love and has been compiled from scores of interviews with a wide assortment of people.

Led by artistic director and writer Steve Cosson, the company tracked down a disaffected worker from Homeland Security, a former Miss New York, a cult author who thinks Bush is a shape-changing reptile, an Egyptian student, an elderly fan of Fox News, and a psychic. They also called up everyone they could find with the name Jessica Lynch, asking the women to tell everything they knew about their namesake, the Jessica Lynch captured in Iraq.

The actors, explains Cosson, did all the interviews, then transcribed them from memory, before he edited the stack of material, which poses pertinent questions such as: Can we trust the news? Is the CIA torturing prisoners? How do we know what we know when nobody knows if everyone else is lying and when someone or something wants to have you for lunch? If the latter convoluted sentence reads as if it might have been written by Donald Rumsfeld himself, that's the idea.

Cosson's script for (I Am) Nobody's Lunch is a sparkling cut-and-paste job, exploring an America in which fact and fantastical fiction blur together, but it's done with all the verve and panache of a classic Broadway musical, with tuneful music and sassy lyrics by Michael Friedman, who has come up with numbers such as the self-explanatory 'Song of Progressive Disenchantment' and 'It's Scary How Easy It Is', in which blind faith in the government is compared to belief in a religious cult.

The show, which transfers to London's Soho Theatre after Edinburgh, has been re-cast and tweaked, but Cosson insists the premise is still: "How do people know what they know? How do they believe what they believe?"

He formed the company while studying at the University of California, San Diego, under British director Les Waters, who taught the techniques of Joint Stock, the renowned company of which he was a member. They used collage-like scripts made up from interviews, always conducted without notebook, pencil or tape recorder.

"It's not journalism," says Cosson, adding that the element of cabaret they have introduced differs from Joint Stock's approach because he wanted The Civilians to have a uniquely American angle.

Cosson formed his Obie-awardwinning company with a group of 25 graduates he met at college, although he first began writing plays when he was a child. Their 2002 debut show, Canard, Canard, Goose? parodied their botched attempt to expose avian abuse in upstate New York, and set out their mission statement: "We think pretty hard about stuff - then make a show about it."

Since then they have staged Gone Missing, a post-9/11 musical in which half a dozen actors play 30 characters and tell stories about things that they have lost. In 2004, their next show, The Ladies, centred on four first ladies: Eva Peron, Mrs Ceausescu, Madame Mao and Imelda Marcos.

Theatre in America has become more and more conservative, Cosson sighs. "I want to make theatre that speaks directly to our time and place. This is our purpose with The Civilians. We want to reveal something about the present, so we're not averse to twisting stories. We're political, yes, but with a small 'p', although we talk endlessly about the politics of what we're doing."

Why The Civilians? "It's old vaudeville slang to refer to people outside of the business," he replies. "Politicians use it in Washington DC, and models use it too. I like it because we have this neo-cabaret aesthetic. I hope we're in the old popular entertainment tradition, but also about the real world we all inhabit."

-- (I Am) Nobody's Lunch, Assembly, George Street (0131-226 2428), Tuesday until August 28, 3.15pm

Privates on parade (and off the rails)

2006-08-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

by Kate Bassett

Presented by the new National Theatre of Scotland company in a vast disused drill hall, Black Watch is a top ticket at this year's Edinburgh Fringe. Gregory Burke's docudrama is a gritty portrait of the valiant Scots regiment, based on the playwright's interviews with former soldiers who were posted in Iraq and saw their own killed even as politicians back home announced the Black Watch's inglorious end.

What is unexpectedly dramatic and double-edged is that Burke incorporates the interview situation and its simmering tensions. It starts with comic misunderstanding as Burke's stage incarnation walks sheepishly through the pub door, sorely disappointing Brian Ferguson's Cammy and his shorn-headed mates who've been led to expect a bit of skirt. But their distrust of how he will portray them ultimately explodes in a hair-raising assault by the most unstable veteran. These scenes are intercut with flashbacks to Iraq: hanging around, joshing, quarreling, air attacks, getting letters from home.

The drill hall's echoing acoustic is problematic but the scale of the place is exhilaratingly epic, with a bare desert of concrete. The show gets away with its stylized, balletic-meets-bodyslamming battles (choreographed by Steven Hoggett of Frantic Assembly) because the acting is excellent and authentically mouthy. Director John Tiffany and designer Laura Hopkins also inject electrifyingly imaginative images. The pub's scarlet pool table suddenly rips open to reveal two squaddies crawling out into the air. The fatal explosion is also unforgettable, with bodies suddenly hanging from ropes 20 feet up, falling in slow motion for a seeming eternity.

Docudramas are everywhere this year. Unprotected is a study of a different kind of danger zone: a collage of re-enacted verbatim interviews with Liverpool prostitutes, outreach workers, politicians, cops and - most harrowingly - the mothers of two street walkers who were murdered. Staged with understated acumen by fast-rising Nina Raine, using a scattering of plastic chairs and projected cityscapes, this should not be missed.

Also at the Traverse, Pumpgirl is a three-hander of interwoven monologues dealing with a gang rape. Though writer Abbie Spallen is heavily influenced by Mark O'Rowe's Howie the Rookie, she's a talent to nurture with vivid powers of description, and Mike Bradwell's production is characteristically fine-tuned.

The Pleasance Theatre's star-studded comedy thriller, Marlon Brando's Corset, with Les Dennis (doing his best) and Mike McShane (desperately hyped up), proves to be complete garbage plot-wise. One presumes it's not intentionally ironic that the murder victim, a scriptwriter, keeps harping on about the dumb celebrity-led rubbish everyone churns out these days.

The Assembly Rooms' big play, Tim Fountain's adaptation of the 1960s movie Midnight Cowboy, following Charles Aitken's dull Texan hunk to the Big Apple and into male prostitution, is a string of clichés too. Considerably more interesting at the same venue is (I Am) Nobody's Lunch, devised by Manhattan experimentalists The Civilians. This satiric cabaret taps into contemporary America's fears and ignorance, using verbatim vox pop interviews that morph into peculiarly catchy songs.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

Traverse (0131 228 1404); Pleasance (0131 556 6550); Assembly (0131 226 2428), at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to 28 Aug

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-11T20:12:00.000-07:00

by Gerald Berkowitz

Members of this New York-based company interviewed a cross-section of Americans, asking where they got their information, what scared them and whether they thought Tom Cruise is gay. Their responses have been shaped into a fast-moving mix of spoken word and song whose polish and professionalism raise it far above usual fringe standards.

What the interviews suggest is that many Americans seem to make it their business not to be informed, out of fear of being forced then to think and have opinions, while those who do absorb information and misinformation are generally made unhappy by it. Curious, for example, about the public reaction to the story of Jessica Lynch, the soldier whose heroic rescue was later called into question - the interviewers ring up every J Lynch in the phone book and find that most have no view on the topic at all.

Much of the power of the piece comes from evocative juxtapositions - a Muslim student uncomfortable at being asked any questions by anyone and a Homeland Security staff member who knows how ill-prepared they actually are; or a conspiracy theorist who sounds nutty until he is put next to a real nutcase.

Occasional songs by Michael Friedman punctuate the hour and provide variety while being strong in themselves, notably I Wouldn’t Be Surprised, a wry collection of conspiracy theories and a mordent Brecht-Weill-flavoured finale.

True Lies

2006-08-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

What does a 40,000-year-old alien have to do with the war in Iraq? One theatre company thinks it has the answer.

by Brian Logan

How do we know what we know? Can we really be sure what's going on in Iraq, or whether or not a Hollywood star is gay? And is CNN any more to be trusted than the philosophies of a 40,000-year-old alien channelled by a friend of Steven Cosson's aunt? If anyone knows, Cosson does. Cosson is the 37-year-old artistic director of New York theatre group the Civilians, who for his new show [I Am] Nobody's Lunch has asked America the above questions, set the answers to song and sketch, and will be reporting back all this month in Edinburgh.

The show, as with the previous work of this Obie award-winning troupe, is verbatim theatre - but with a considerable twist. Cosson studied under the British director Les Waters, and cites Waters' famous company Joint Stock as the major influence on his work. From British theatre in general (Caryl Churchill sits on the Civilians' advisory board), he learned that "theatre was an important place to take on social and political questions".

The twist is all his own. The Civilians' take on docudrama is unique. They don't present the public's words as stark, stripped-back truth. And this isn't verbatim theatre as campaigning journalism, seeking to score polemical points. Instead, the Civilians co-mingle docudrama with cabaret, spinning their interviewees' responses into improbable, inquisitive song-and-soliloquy revues.

"The work of my peers in America has gone the way of a lot of other art disciplines and become more insular and specialised," says Cosson. "I wanted our work to speak in the language of show, so you didn't need a Master's degree in postmodern theatre to understand it."

It's important to him, too, that the Civilians stay responsive to the surprising human variety that their inquiries reveal. "When I first began interviewing 'ordinary people', I realised that the world was a more complex and interesting place than I'd thought. That's exactly what you want, I think, from a good piece of theatre.

"I think of our investigative pieces as a concentrated, strange and very quirky conversation between different people. The most important principle is that we can't have a foregone conclusion about what we're going to find out."

With 2003's Gone Missing, which visited London's Gate Theatre, the subject was loss - under the shadow of 9/11, the company interviewed New Yorkers about misplaced items, or memories, or loves. With Nobody's Lunch, the field of inquiry is truth: how we acquire and establish it in a sceptical, media-baffled world.

The show was created at the height of American sabre-rattling in the lead-up to the Iraq war. "We felt in a constant state of alarm," says Cosson. "So we had to ask ourselves: what is it about what's going on right now that we are truly curious about?" Looking around themselves, at an America sleepwalking into an unprovoked war, Cosson and company found the answer. "The most important question was: how is everybody making sense of all of this? How is it that people are believing this, or not believing it?" In a country whose media "had failed in its job to report reality and to serve as an engine of public discourse", the company challenged itself to find out "what America was thinking, what your neighbour was thinking, what the other people in the subway were thinking. And why they were thinking it."

The result is an intriguing, funny and plaintive docu-musical (with beautiful songs by resident composer Michael Friedman), which combines the wildly divergent perspectives of a staffer at the Department of Homeland Security, an alien, an Arab-American cabbie, and everyone listed in the phone book who shares the name of the captured then (supposedly) rescued US prisoner of war, Jessica Lynch. Watching the show, it's hard not to conclude that western society is an information free-for-all, and truth, on any subject more taxing than tabloid gossip, too exhausting to pursue.

Cosson says: "So many people would tell us, 'We can't know what's true about Iraq because we can't see it. There are so many conflicting stories. It's too hard to sort out what's going on. The only way to know what's true is to see it.' And that's problematic. If you're going to live in a big country, and your country is going to go to war on the other side of the world, then you have to believe that somebody can tell you what is going on."

Are the Civilians those somebodies? Perhaps not, says Cosson. "No, our little play is not going to give the answer." But what his investigations have taught him is that "you have to participate in the truth. The truth is something that is made between people. At the moment, we have given over our responsibility to seek the truth, to know it and believe it. And by doing so, we allow ourselves to be manipulated. We have to work together as a society, as a culture, to get it back".

· [I Am] Nobody's Lunch is at the Assembly Rooms (0131-226 2428) until August 28, then at the Soho Theatre, London W1, from September 6.

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

by Emma Drage

Was 9/11 a US government conspiracy? How do we know Hitler really existed? These are just a few of the questions posed in this quirky political satire. Composed from real life interview responses, the show combines verbatim theatre with musical cabaret to create a fast moving performance that is as funny as it is intellectually stimulating. It’s a very topical production with the issues raised about the reliability (or not) of government and media as relevant to contemporary Britain as they are in the US, where The Civilians hark from. Moving, thought provoking, and sometimes hilariously silly, this captivating production about reading between the lines will lead you to reassess the boundary between truth and lies.

Assembly @ George Street, 4 - 28 Aug (not 14), 3:15pm, prices vary, fpp 174

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

by Alan Chadwick

Young New York theatre company The Civilians has been bracketed alongside those other off-the-wall, left-field pranksters The Team. And it's easy to see why. Both play with convention to offer up a uniquely dynamic experience: in this case by mixing musical cabaret with verbatim theatre.

A satirical journey through the American heartland and its state of mind post-September 11, (I Am) Nobody's Lunch asks the question: How do we know what we know, and how do we know what we know is true? In order to find out, The Civilians set about conducting interviews on topics such as What Are You Afraid Of?, How Do We Know What We Know? and Is Tom Cruise Gay?

Interviewees include a foreign student, a soldier standing guard at Grand Central station and a policymaker at Homeland Security. Various people called Jessica Lynch are also interviewed to find their opinions about the rescue in Iraq of army supply clerk Jessica Lynch, who became the poster girl of the invasion. Domestic issues about relationships are also aired. The responses are then intercut with a series of musical numbers.

Simply by choosing what truths to explore and where to place them means The Civilians are inevitably caught up in spinning the spin. But the end result is a thought-provoking and funny alternative cabaret that delights in letting the cat out of the bag. If you go see it you'll know exactly what I mean.

Until Aug 28 (not Mon), Assembly @ George Street (V3), 3.15pm. http://www.assemblyrooms.com

[Photo by Leslie Lyons of Brad Heberlee, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Daoud Heidami, and Jennifer R. Morris.]

American splendour

2006-08-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

by By Guardian Unlimited / Murdo MacLeod's photo blog

A record number of New York acts are appearing at this year's Fringe. Gathered outside the Traverse Theatre are cast members from Cherry Pitz, Fahrenheit 451, LREI, Civilians, Acrobat, Two Men Talking, Clean Alternatives, Finer Noble Gases and The Team. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

The Civilians bring (I Am) Nobody's Lunch to the the Edinburgh festival from New York. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

[(I am) Nobody's Lunch cast members pictured in bottom photo are (l-r) Brandon Miller, Lexy Fridell, Caitlin Miller, Daoud Heidami, and Matt Dellapina.]

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

by Steve Cramer

The initial premise of this piece by New York company The Civilians is that if you send some actors out with tape recorders and record folks’ observations about how they know what the truth is, you can weave from the transcripts a night of strong political cabaret. Implausible on the face of it, but quite true, if you’ll allow me a word that the show proceeds to question.

In it, a succession of narrators, including a whole crowd of women called Jessica Lynch, but not the one who was rescued by a commando task force, or became the subject of a military photo opportunity, depending on how you look at it, during the Iraq war, are asked whether they believe they were told the whole truth about the story of their namesake. These, and many other answers are intriguing.

What emerges, after some moving and often very comical renditions of songs by Michael Friedman in Steve Cosson’s intriguing and powerful production, is a peculiar kind of optimism in the world, a reassuring moment where we realise that we are very far from alone in our uncertainty about the world. All grand narrative, from the bullshit churned about the Iraq war by our governments to our capacity to subscribe to the notion of love as an absolute value beyond history and circumstance are questioned. If the question of whether the postmodernist rejection of all grand narratives isn’t in fact the biggest grand narrative of all is not quite answered, there’s a huge amount to chew on here. Not least, the skilled and thoroughly accomplished performers, who actually contrive to bring Schrodinger’s cat into the action without the least disruption of the humour and pathos of the piece. A cracking night’s entertainment for anyone who’s ever loved or dabbled in empiricism.

Assembly Rooms, 226 2428, until 28 Aug (not 14), 3.15pm, £11-£12 (£10-£11).

(I am) Nobody's Lunch

2006-08-09T20:26:00.000-07:00

by Andrew Burnet

ASSEMBLY ROOMS @George Street (VENUE 3)

GOVERNMENTS have been lying to their citizens since democracy was in diapers. But the Bush administration has been able to raise state mendacity to a whole new level, thanks to the erosion of public faith in anything and anyone, from the New York Times to the Homeland Security service.

That, broadly speaking, is the premise behind this compelling show from the Civilians, a New York-based company making its Edinburgh debut. Based on vox-pop interviews conducted in 2003 - the year of "shock and awe", weapons of mass destruction and the (some say) staged rescue of Private First Class Jessica Lynch - the show explores what modern Americans actually believe in the face of (dis)information overload.

Is the US army practising torture at Guantanamo Bay? Can the use of torture ever be justified? Is George W Bush actually a giant lizard? And is Tom Cruise really gay, or maybe just a little bit bisexual? Whose word do you trust anyway?

This is a kind of cabaret, with original songs by Michael Friedman interspersed with re-enactments of the interviews. The songs, arch, witty and beautifully performed, play on Americans' wistful, disenchanted love affair with their nation; while the interviews expose not only the failure of political faith, but also the freakish belief systems that spring up in its place. Most intriguing of all is the "channeler", the mouthpiece for an extra-terrestrial, who patiently explains that his race is "farming" humanity so it can feed on our fear.

Meanwhile, there's a suspicious bag that the cast can't get rid of - and it's mewing. Could this have something to do with Erwin Schroedinger's famous thought experiment, involving the life expectancy of a cat in a box?

The design is based around pink and grey - indeterminate, blanded-out colours that contrast tellingly with the reassuring certainties of red, white and blue. Steven Cosson, who scripted the show from the company's material, directs it with assurance. Above all, it's a piece that bristles with ideas. And although it poses many troubling questions, it does carry one clear message: there's nothing to be gained from compliance or complacency.

-Until 28 August.

Edinburgh Festival 2006 - THIS WEEK’S TOP 20

2006-08-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

We’re going to all sorts of shows, all day, every day, to select the best stuff for you. After much debate, this is our Top 20 for the week – across the board – in alphabetical order (first name first, folks).

Andrew Maxwell
Comedy
He may be slight, but his joke book is fatter than your Auntie Jean. Maxwell’s insights give him enough material for two shows this year.

Andrew Weatherall
Clubs
Celebrating We are . . . Electric’s first birthday in style with the legendary techno turntablist.

Black Watch
Theatre
Greg Burke’s reflections on the experience of Blackwatch soldiers at Camp Dogwood in Iraq.

Doug Stanhope
Comedy
Set to blaze a presidential trail of controversy all across Edinburgh, this embattled comic should be upsetting the tabloids round about now.

Dylan Moran
Comedy
More fine fettered Irishmen; this time it’s a case of fast mouth rather than fast feet from Edinburgh’s funniest adopted son. Wry, raw. and always hilarious.

Finer Noble Gases
Theatre
Adam Wrapp’s dark existential farce about the last days of drug addled rock musicians.

The Goodies
Comedy
Taken out and dusted down from the comedy closet at the BBC and reminding us why gloriously silly, surreal humour ages very well.

The Gruffalo and Friends
Kids
The queen of the nursery bookshelf, Julia Donaldson, acts out her own books with help of husband Malcolm, and copious audience participation.

(I Am) Nobody's Lunch
Theatre
New York's acclaimed Civilians present alternative cabaret based on verbatim conversations about the war in Iraq.

Lambchop
Music
Kurt Wagner was among those who inspired the whole notion of alt.country and continues to amaze with this year’s Damaged.

Martha Wainwright
Music
An all too brief pair of dates for Montreal’s finest chanteuse who plys a winning trade in stark, visceral folk pop.

Onysos the Wild
Theatre
Subway commuters meet the ghost of Dionysus and explore their dark repressions in this French visual feast.

Particularly in the Heartland
Theatre
The TEAM raise the ghost of Robert Kennedy in a Kansas farmyard. Wild political satire follows.

Penny Spubb's
Comedy
It’s about time someone brought those bedfellows – comedy and seafood – together. Wix and Crilly do it with style, in Prawn Free

Reginald D Hunter
Comedy
The sharpest suit in the comedy pack will be in full stride after taking a year out from his mandatory Perrier nominations. The show’s called Pride and Prejudice and Niggas, folks.

Petrol Jesus Nightmare #5
Theatre
Henry Adam’s story of two Israeli soldiers in a fire fight who receive some unwelcome civilian visitors.

Robert Mapplethorpe
Visual Art
Creator of some truly iconic photographs of everything from lilies to penises. New York’s rebel with a lens enjoys a major retrospective.

Tapeire
Dance
Dublin’s James Devine is putting tap dancing back on the map not just as an art form but as a sport with his record breaking footwork.

Wil Hodgson
Comedy
Former wrestler and lover of Care Bears completes his unofficial trilogy about life in Chippenham. Comedy rendered black (and pink).

ZooNation: Into The Hoods
Dance
Who’d have thought injecting the work of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods with a supply of hip hop stylings would be such a good idea?

Steve Cosson - ThreeWeeks Quick Quiz

2006-08-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

by Clovis Sangrail

1. Why have you decided to come and perform at the Edinburgh Festival?
We, The Civilians, made this show--(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch--because we were dismayed at the political direction of our country (The USA). We thought that others might share our dismay. And we thought it would be fun to get together and share some mutual dismay. Plus all of our phones are tapped so we had to get out of the country to have a private conversation. Not that any of us has anything particularly confidential (or even interesting) to say it’s just a drag to have to avoid phrases like “dirty bomb” or “sleeper cell” or “let’s assassinate the President,” just because you don’t know who’s listening on the other end.

2. How are you preparing yourself for the Festival?
We’re all hoping to expatriate by marrying into some other nation. So each of us in the company is learning a new language and figuring out ways to be attractive to citizens of countries that have socialized medicine and less problematic foreign policy.

3. What are you most looking forward to about this year's Festival?
We hear that Edinburgh is home to an impressive diorama depicting Sawney Bean and his family of cannibals. We hear it is one of the most impressive cannibal dioramas in the world and it will be an honour and a delight to gaze up on it.

4. What are you most fearing about this year's Festival?
Real cannibals.

5. In 30 words (no more now) why should we come and see your show?
(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch is the only epistemological cabaret-theatre show in the entire world.

Steve Cosson is the Artistic Director of (I AM) NOBODY’S LUNCH
Assembly Rooms, 4 – 28 Aug, (not 14), 3:15pm (4.30pm), prices vary, fpp 174.