ARTicles vol.4 i.4b: The Civilians Have a Few Questions for YOU!

(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch is the latest creation of The Civilians, a five-year old ensemble that has established a reputation as one of New York’s hippest and most innovative theatre groups. ‘’ name is borrowed from an old vaudeville term for non-vaudevillians, and indeed the company’s colorful theatrical style owes much to the song and dance of American vaudeville.

When Artistic Director Steven Cosson founded The Civilians in 2001, he was inspired by Joint Stock, the legendary British ensemble that created investigative dramas from research and interviews. “I wanted to create a theatre that would engage with larger social, cultural, and political realities through the eyes of real, ordinary people, or ‘civilians’,” he explains.

The Civilians always begin their creative process with a question, such as “what are you afraid of?” They pose the question to a civilian world that includes friends, family, experts, and random strangers. The interviews are not recorded but memorized by the actors in order to foster a more natural, informal exchange. “It does something different to the actors if they can’t record it,” says Cosson. “They have to actually understand what the person is saying.” Cosson only selects interviews in which the interviewer and subject established a connection. He and the company then synthesize these stories, discern common themes, and make associations between characters to create a patchwork composition of colorful personalities and experiences.

Music is a key component of a Civilians show. The company’s resident composer Michael Friedman (music director for many A.R.T. productions, including Marat/Sade and The Merchant of Venice) often writes songs before the script is developed. “The songs create the direction the show will take,” explains Cosson. Friedman’s music incorporates a wide variety of styles from pop to cabaret, with themes and lyrics lifted directly from the transcripts. The song “It’s Scary how Easy it is” from (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch takes its title from an interview between a Civilian and two proselytizing teenage Baptists who knocked on her door.

To prepare for their first show, Canard, Canard, Goose? (2001), the company traveled to Long Lake, NY to investigate an erroneous rumor that the Walt Disney Company had abandoned and left to die the flock of geese they had used in the filming of Fly Away Home. In 2002, Gone Missing meditated on lost possessions such as shoes and cell phones, which in the wake of September 11, resonated with losses far more intangible and profound,

(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch is the Cilivians’ most ambitious and political creation to date. The show asks, among other questions, “How do we know what we know?” and “How do we know what is true?” The company interviewed children, psychics, aliens, National Guardsmen, Homeland Security staffers, and every woman called “Jessica Lynch” in the phone book. After a residency at the Sundance Institute they performed a sold-out run in New York in January 2006. Charles Isherwood of the New York Times described the production as, “Snappy, scrappy, and performed with deadpan razzmatazz” and Time Out called it, “That exceedingly rare show that leaves you thinking, laughing, and humming all at once.”

Cosson says that the success of (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch is due in part to the timely nature of the questions it raises, and because the company had no forgone conclusions when they started their investigation. “If the journey is worthwhile and important to us it will be so for the audience,” he explains. “How do people make sense of all this information that bombards us? How do we know what we know about what’s going on in the world now? These become more pressing questions for us every day.”

Kirsten Bowen is Associate Producer for The Civilians, and a 2005 graduate of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute’s dramaturgy program.

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