(I Am) Nobody's Lunch

“(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch” Table of Contents

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1. “Edinburgh Theatre (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch”, (review), LONDON TIMES, August 18, 2006 2

2. “In George We Don’t Trust” (review), THE SCOTSMAN, August 9, 2006 3

3. “Finding the Truth is Fantastic Fun” (review), EVENING STANDARD, September 13, 2006 5

4. “So How do we Know What we Know When Nobody Knows Who’s Lying?” (feature), SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY, August 13, 2006 6

5. “A Funny and Sad Look at Facts, Myths and Spin,” (review) NEW YORK TIMES, January 23, 2006 8

6. “(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch,” (review) TIME OUT NEW YORK, January 26, 2006 10

7. “They Feel a Homeland Security Song Coming On,” (feature) NEW YORK TIMES January 29, 2006 11

8. “Satire With Side of Ham in ‘Lunch,” (review) BOSTON HERALD, April 28, 2006 13

9. “Turning the Sad Truth Into Spirited Satire,” (review) BOSTON GLOBE, April 27, 2006 14

10. “Theater Troupe Gets Creative With the Facts,” (feature) BOSTON GLOBE, April 23, 2006 16

11. “Who Do You Trust?” (feature) BOSTON PHOENIX, April 21-27, 2006 18

12. “Nobody’s Lunch,” (review) TIME OUT NEW YORK, October 7, 2004 19

13. “Nobody’s Lunch,” (review) THE NEW YORKER, October 12, 2004 20

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September 13, 2006

Finding the truth is fantastic fun by Kieron Quirke

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.]

"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.

August 13, 2006

So how do we know what we know when nobody knows who's lying? 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

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Satire with side of ham in ‘Lunch’ By Terry Byrne Friday, April 28, 2006

Tom Cruise, Jessica Lynch, SpongeBob and Schrodinger’s Cat all find their way into the hilarious and heady “(I am) Nobody’s Lunch.” The cabaret show (“That means there’s no story,” one performer helpfully explains), which is having its New England premiere at Zero Arrow Theatre, is delivered by the six-member Civilians, a talented troupe that combines the comic timing of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch with impressive vocals and sleek choreography.

In a delirious 90 minutes, the Civilians skewer our fascination with truth in trivia even as we blithely accept ridiculous lies on important issues. The show intercuts musical numbers with interviews the company did with a wild assortment of people—from a Homeland Security policymaker to an elderly Jewish woman, from a soldier guarding Grand Central Station with an unloaded gun to a teenager with body piercings in “super-secret places.”

The result is an informational download that seems random yet has a surprisingly sharp focus. The pieces are held together by Michael Friedman’s haunting music and lyrics, which range from the torch ballad “Someone to Keep Me Warm” to the Kurt Weill-like “Watch Out Ladies.” Lexy Friedell’s chanteuse style makes Friedman’s lyrics about wanting someone to “print and card her” (“I need to feel his power”) sexy and scary at once. The company is equally effective in “It’s Scary How Easy It Is.”

The politics of this talented troupe is abundantly clear, but the way they present their material allows the audience to discover it in its own way. In the midst of the madness, they move a gym bag with a meowing cat zipped inside on and off the stage. It’s time, they seem to say, to let the cat out of the bag.

“(I am) Nobody’s Lunch” presented by American Repertory Theatre and World Music/CRASH Arts at Zero Arrow Theatre, Cambridge, through Sunday.

STAGE REVIEW Turning the sad truth into spirited satire

By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff April 27, 2006

CAMBRIDGE—How do we know if we can handle the truth if it’s impossible to tell what the truth is? In a world in which one ranting voice drowns out another and 24-hour news channels careen from the war in Iraq to Tom Cruise’s personal life, it’s getting harder than ever to tell what’s what.

Enter the Civilians, a vibrant sextet of satirists who charge their way into our contemporary Tower of Babel, taking the measure of what we know and what we don’t know. Or what we think we know and what we think we don’t know. Though they’re surveying a sad state of affairs in their latest show, “(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch,” it’s as high-spirited a lamentation as you could hope for.

Like many on today’s theater scene, the Civilians create drama using interviews as raw material. They talk to people, ordinary—civilians, hence the name—such as an elderly liberal schoolteacher, or not so ordinary, such as a man who thinks he’s channeling a space alien.

The questions they ask are as seemingly simple as “What are you afraid of?” and “How do we know what we know?” Bolstered by Michael Friedman’s witty songs, the three men and three women onstage play out the answers.

But this isn’t one of those Anna Deavere Smith knockoffs in which the words of interviewees are directly regurgitated. Here interviews are juxtaposed against one another in comedy skits, turned into song, sometimes even turned inside out.

Friedman’s songs include a sensational riff on Brecht-Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” toward the end of the show, with allusions to suicide, paranoia, and all kinds of other fun stuff. Jennifer Morris, who delivers the number, and her mates are fine singers as well as actors, handling poppy tunes with understated style while pulling out all the stops on the Brechtian material. The poker faces contrast beautifully with the implied satire.

To what purpose? The society they survey has more information than ever, less violence than ever, more romantic possibilities than ever. So why do so many people seem so uninformed, paranoid, and disconnected? Conversely, why do so many other people seem so sure of themselves, whether they’re proselytizing for Jesus or for space aliens?

One man thinks that the United States may have been responsible for 9/11; another is an Arab-American who thinks his phone line is being tapped. What often emerges, as the actors speak, is a deep distrust of established institutions, such as the media and political parties. There’s nothing that binds us together anymore, and the cacophony that results only feeds into disunion and alienation.

“It’s like the people have forgotten how to feel pain,” says one elderly respondent. Another talks about withdrawing into her world of boyfriend, family, and 15 DC friends.

But the show is not a sociology textbook. The mood is more in the breezy spirit of “Avenue Q” meeting Tom Lehrer. Morris plays a variety of ditzy redheads as well as several women named Jessica Lynch, who are asked what they think of the captured soldier. There’s a knee-jerk patriotism in most cases, followed by humorously conflicting thoughts about what happened.

On the negative side, “(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch” takes at least a third of the 90 minutes to get going, or at least to establish its direction, and at its worst can seem overly glib. But once it got me on its wavelength, it kept me there.

And it is not as relativistic as it might seem about the truth. There’s a duffel bag onstage from which cat’s meows keep emanating. Is there a cat in the bag or not? The answer has to be either yes or no. But as “(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch” reminds us, it’s getting harder to come up with where the truth lies.

Ed Siegel can be reached at [email protected].

THEATER Theater troupe gets creative with the facts For Civilians, interviews are just the start

By Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff April 23, 2006

The work of the Civilians, a New York theater troupe that makes its New England debut this week at Zero Arrow Theatre in Cambridge, often gets labeled “documentary theater.” But founder and artistic director Steven Cosson says that’s not quite right.

“I don’t call it documentary,” Cosson says in a phone interview. “It’s a mix between investigative and creative.”

What that means for the Civilians show that the American Repertory Theatre and CRASHarts are presenting here, “(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch,” is that the Civilians’ six actors interviewed a range of people— from a Homeland Security planner to every Jessica Lynch in the phone book who’d talk to them—to find out what they knew about what’s going on in the world. Or, as Cosson puts it, “We wanted to know how people figure out what to believe. How is it that people know what they know? And our emphasis really is on how—not on what facts do people have or not have, but on how they got them.”

The Civilians have won praise for their entertaining mix of hilarious storytelling and serious thought, which distills the materials they collect in interviews into a fast-paced, cabaret-style performance of loosely linked scenes about the various “characters” they’ve talked with. Their shows also include music; composer Michael Friedman provides original songs for “Nobody’s Lunch.”

For this show, in talking to a diverse group of people about politics, the Iraq war, the Bush administration, and many other current topics, Cosson says, the Civilians “learned how to ask questions open-ended enough to let people tell us how they understand the world.” So, for example, they might simply ask,” How do you know what’s true?”

“We’d get a different answer depending on the person,” Cosson says. “One might say, ‘Well, I read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and then I go online and read the Guardian, and then I compare it all and put it all together to see what’s going on.’ Somebody else might just talk about their mother. One woman said the only thing she trusted was the squirrels and the pigeons.”

That one didn’t make the cut for the show, Cosson says, but the troupe did find room for other views that are just about as far from the mainstream. In fact, they talked to someone who purports to channel an alien—and found it surprisingly enlightening.

“He’s got a lot of information; he’s like, 40,000 years old,” Cosson says. “Whatever’s going on, however you take it, he’s a very helpful character.”

The Civilians have been conducting this kind of creative investigation since 2001, when their first piece led them to upstate New York to explore a rumor that the Walt Disney Company, after filming “Fly Away Home,” had abandoned the starring geese to freeze to death on a lake. The Civilians soon found that legend to be false, and their resulting work, ”Canard, Canard, Goose?,” was as much a reflection on rumor and belief as it was a tale about a wild goose chase. But the geese made for some good laughs— and brought the company critical acclaim.

As for “Nobody’s Lunch,” says ART associate director Gideon Lester, “I think it’s the most mature piece they’ve done. It’s the first time where the questions they’ve been investigating have been really serious. It’s frivolous on one level, but the questions that they ask stimulate really provocative considerations of how content people are not to know very much about the news.”

In an earlier version, the piece received strong reviews in New York. The Civilians have revised it extensively to keep it current, Lester says, and will take the new version to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, then on to London in the fall. “It’s got wide audience appeal,” Lester says. “It’s smart, sexy, very funny, and at the same time not empty of content.”

One thing that differentiates the Civilians’ work from documentary is that, when the Civilians do interviews, they don’t use a tape recorder—or even a notebook. Instead, they listen closely, observe, interact, then right after the encounter transcribe everything they remember about it.

“It’s not like it’s the real truth of the person, but another person’s interpretation of that truth, turned into performance,” Cosson says. Any presentation, he notes, is subjective, and this method is no different. But he does believe it provides “a kind of detail that is truthful and maybe different from what goes for truth in the theater. It’s meant to scrape off some of what we think is true in theater and show something different.”

As an example of how the Civilians reach a more complicated “truth” by talking with real people, Cosson cites an Egyptian student whom one actor called to interview shortly after all foreign students in the United States were ordered to register with the federal government. “At the end he said, ‘Oh, you know, I don’t want to talk about this over the phone. I think Arabian people’s phones are tapped; I think the US is watching Arabs,’” Cosson relates. “If you gave that to an actor, I think most of them would give it a very intense reading, maybe sort of quiet, almost a whisper. But he actually said it fairly loud, and, maybe from the tension of talking about it, he giggled all the way through.”

Ultimately, “there’s something edifying in doing interviews with all different sorts of people,” Cosson says. “There was a consistent thread of people feeling underestimated [by the government and the media] and wanting more. . . . So many people said, ‘I don’t care about Paris Hilton.’ So who are all these people who do want to know? Is it really nobody?. . . .We’ve all sort of agreed to be stupid, but we’re not, really. It’s this weird American phenomenon.”

Louise Kennedy can be reached at [email protected]

October 12, 2004 | home

NOBODY’S LUNCH

The Civilians theatre troupe presents a startling, funny, and disturbing view of what Americans hold to be self- evident these days. Exploring the questions “What do you know?” and “How do you know what you know?,” the actors conducted interviews with a diverse bunch of Americans, including a very young Homeland Security policymaker, a gung-ho marketer, and a channeller of alien beings. The characters are brought to life by the protean cast, who expose both cultural difference and real lunacy without making judgments. Written and directed by Steven Cosson, with music by Michael Freedman. (P.S. 122, First Ave. at 10th St. 212-477- 5288.)