New Plays Exploring Difficult Relations

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.

What? And Leave Show Business?

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.”

Haggard’s Accuser, and a Theater Troupe, Visit Megachurch

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.

Collaboration in the Catskills: A Retreat for the (Theater) Troupes

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.]

They Feel a Homeland Security Song Coming On

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

by Jason Zinoman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Funny and Sad Look at Facts, Myths and Spin

by Charles Isherwood

The elusiveness of truth in a culture swamped with stuff that looks, sounds and smells like information - but may be something a little more suspicious - is the serious subject of "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch," a merrily unserious, vaudevillian romp through the anxious chatter of contemporary America, which opened last night at the 59E59 Theaters.

Performed by the Civilians, a much buzzed-about downtown theater troupe, this informal sociological study recast as a cabaret has been thoroughly revamped (and modestly renamed) after its run last fall at P.S. 122 under the title "Nobody's Lunch." Snappy, scrappy and performed with deadpan razzmatazz by a young cast of six, the latest model is a funny, searching, at times plaintive look at the dangerous blurring of fact and myth in American culture and the unease that is its natural byproduct.

Written and directed by Steven Cosson, with perky pastiche songs by Michael Friedman, the production is the latest entry in the growing documentary theater movement, which has snowballed in recent years, possibly in reaction to a phenomenon the show explores, the growing mistrust of "traditional" sources of news. "That's why I stopped watching the news," someone whines in the show. "They tell you one thing and then they tell you something else." The nerve!

How and why we come to believe what we believe is the large question being explored with a wink in this collage of material culled from interviews with an odd assortment of Americans, ranging from soldiers standing vigil at Grand Central Terminal to a fellow who believes his body is inhabited by a celestial being who has useful tips on dispelling the fog of fear that has enveloped the country since 9/11.

The smaller questions posed by the Civilians in their researches range from major (moral justification of the Iraq invasion) to minor (sexuality of a certain gleaming movie star), and the responses have been mixed and matched to create a kaleidoscopic peek into the American mindscape, with a distinct accent on the absurdity thereof.

Caitlin Miller, a wonderfully droll mimic, plays several women named Jessica Lynch, all asked to describe the dramaturgy behind their namesake's misadventure 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."

That last phrase - emblematic of the exasperated blend of apathy and suspicion that is a recurring motif in the show - is a refrain in one of Mr. Friedman's ably structured little ditties. The songs provide a soft underscoring of melancholy that deepens the picture of general cluelessness that predominates, slipping some sympathy into a snarky recipe.

In a solo performed by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, the highly charged question of trading civil liberties for security is turned into an old-school, need-me-a-strong-man lament: "I just want to sit back and be told, to be controlled, to be secure. ..." A tart Kurt Weill knockoff, "Song of Progressive Disenchantment," compares the search for love to the search for truth, both ending in disillusionment, natch.

Mr. Cosson and his collaborators are not just survey takers presenting their results dispassionately, of course, and they can be legitimately accused of drawing conclusions as facile as they are clever. Implicitly condemning Americans' willingness to ingest spin, they're busy spinning their "data" themselves to maximize its entertainment value. Voices of reason - a harried young worker in the government's immigration department stands out - get less air time than the more amusing voices of near or actual lunacy.

All good fun, up to a point, but sometimes the juxtaposition of testimony is troubling. One sequence features a reading from a Newsweek magazine article about the plight of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent whose reports of being abducted in Macedonia and held at a United States prison in Afghanistan have been corroborated. It's immediately followed by a reading from a book called "Trance Formation of America: The True Life Story of a C.I.A. Mind Control Slave," in which the author says that an L. L. Bean outlet is a "front cover for C.I.A. activity" and that she was sexually abused by a host of well-known public figures.

Ha, ha. But wait a second, what exactly is the point being made by the twinning of these excerpts? Surely not that both narratives are equally credible or equally significant. Nor can it be argued that both are held to be true by an equal number of Americans; "Trance Formation" is hardly a best seller. It's the Civilians who have juxtaposed these stories, to admittedly surreal effect. But it's worth asking whether, in doing so, they aren't becoming part of the problem. Placed in the right context, almost any truth can be made to seem false or absurd.

"(I Am) Nobody's Lunch" does not, of course, aim to be a sober or thorough study of the current state of the cultural discourse; it's more a cheeky sidelong glance at its excesses, similar in attitude and methodology to "The Daily Show," and similarly tonic. Amusing as it is, it may be most memorable for the spotlight it beams on the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that has blanketed the country since 9/11 rattled our sense of complacency, the sense of uncertainty that inspires the urge to turn away from the big questions and take refuge in the diverting allure of the little ones.

Speaking of which, on the question of that movie star's sexual orientation, my friend's decorator knows his former assistant, and he says he's definitely gay.

(I Am) Nobody's Lunch

Written and directed by Steven Cosson; music and lyrics by Michael Friedman; sets by Andromache Chalfant; costumes by Sarah Beers; sound by Shane Rettig; lighting by Marcus Doshi; stage manager, Catherine Bloch; assistant stage manager, Robert Signom III; choreographer, Karinne Keithley. Presented by the Civilians, Mr. Cosson, artistic director; Kyle Gorden, producing director. At 59E59Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200. Through Feb. 5. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Matt Dellapina, Brad Heberlee, Daoud Heidami, Caitlin Miller, Jennifer R. Morris and Andy Boroson, piano.

Photograph: Leslie Lyons
From left, Jennifer R. Morris, Brad Heberlee, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Matt Dellapina (on bed), Caitlin Miller and Daoud Heidami in "(I Am) Nobody's Lunch," which explores mistrust of traditional news sources.

Rock the Cradle? Let's Rock the World

by Neil Genzlinger

Summit Conference is a long way from Golda's Balcony, the fairly straightforward biographical treatment of Golda Meir running on Broadway. But it seems downright conventional compared with another play, on West 42nd Street, called "The Ladies." It is a rollicking take on four first ladies who exercised power far more openly than did the Summit Conference mistresses.

The piece, from the inventive pen of Anne Washburn and directed with verve by Anne Kauffman, throws together Perón of Argentina (Maria Striar), Ceausescu of Romania (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), Jiang Qing, or Madame Mao, of China (Nina Hellman) and Mrs. Marcos of the Philippines (Alison Weller). Their interactions are marvelously indescribable, made up of snippets of their actual words, imagined words, chants, semi-songs and tape recordings of the actresses who play the parts, trying to give impromptu capsule biographies of the women.

On top of that Ms. Washburn and Ms. Kauffman have inserted themselves as characters into the play. (Jennifer R. Morris is Ms. Kauffman, Jennifer Dundas is Ms. Washburn.) Their dialogue is apparently drawn from recordings that they made as they shaped the piece.

The resulting stir-fry, presented by Dixon Place at Chashama through Sunday, can't be followed in any logical way, but it's brashly entertaining. And it's full of moments of quirky insight. A riff near the end by Ms. Morris about why she yearns to be powerful is simultaneously ridiculous and mesmerizing. Just as riveting is a monologue by the Perón character about why those who rise to great heights so often come to bad ends. Power, she says, makes them dizzy and clouds their judgment, like deep-sea divers who lose perspective and cast off the weights keeping them submerged.

"Their bodies rush upwards through the water too fast, and their brains are crushed, and when they arrive on the surface their bones are smashed, and they float on the surface like a mangled, limp thing," she says. "Like the vomit of whales, which lies on top of the waves and is called ambergris and is an extremely expensive ingredient in the best perfume from Paris. That is what it is like at the heights; what is most rare, most costly and sought after, is really just vomit."

In The Ladies Nora of A Doll's House turns up briefly, her declaration of independence sounding positively quaint juxtaposed against the words of these female giants. Ibsen's rudimentary cry for empowerment now rings naïve because underlying The Ladies and Summit Conference, both well-acted, is our knowledge of how four of these six powerful lives ended: violently, in executions or suicides. Watch out, Nora; it's not easy being queen.