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

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

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

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.

Studio Theatre's New Season

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.