THE CIVILIANS BLOG /

Occupy Wall Street, Part IV

2012-03-21T15:19:00.000-04:00

Following our first OWS cabaret in October of 2011, our artists continued to conduct interviews with Occupy protesters about people's reasons for demonstrating and what it has been like participating in the movement. This episode picks up where our October cabaret left off with monologues and a song crafted from interviews with demonstrators. This week features Garrett Neergaard and Dan Domingues as demonstrators Dan and Nelson; Scott Drummond as a key OWS figure; and Michael Friedman's song "Consensus is Hard."

Plus, check out our new OCCUPY material on our Occupy Your Mind Tumblr!

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Where would you put a park in New York City and why?

2012-03-15T12:58:00.000-04:00

We are so happy to announce that at our Annual Spring Benefit this year, we will be honoring our first Civilian of the Year: Robert Hammond, a co-founder of The High Line! The benefit will be on April 23, appropriately, at The Highline Ballroom right next to the park. We are so thrilled to be honoring Robert for his commitment to healthy urban development and for his tremendous efforts bringing New York City the ingeniously-planned haven for nature that is The High Line.

As is tradition, the benefit will feature a performance by Civilians Associate Artists and special guest performers (who we'll be announcing soon). This year, we are also going to be creating an original investigative theater piece to salute Robert and his incredible work. Our question this year is:

Where would you put a park in New York City and why?

Leave your responses in the comments below, and we will incorporate them into the piece!

And get your benefit tickets HERE!

A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part IX

2012-03-14T11:51:00.000-04:00

Here is our final adult entertainment podcast episode! Special thanks to our interviewing team: Mia Barron, Laura Nix, Taylor Wilcox, and Matt Maher. In this episode, Emily Ackerman performs an interview with producer Lynn LeMay; Daoud Heidami plays performer Sebastian Silver; next is a particularly filthy round of Porn Charades in which one of our audience members at Joe's Pub tries to act out a porn title while the cast guesses; Nina Hellman plays director and producer Kelly Holland; Dael Orlandersmith as Pamela Peaks; and last up is Gibson Frazier as director, producer, and actor Eli Cross. This material is inspiring Pretty Filthy, a new musical by Bess Wohl and Michael Friedman.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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LITERARY CORNER: SAME RIVER by Strike Anywhere Ensemble

2012-03-09T18:46:00.001-05:00

Literary Corner is a series on the blog by Civilians' Literary Associate EllaRose Chary that focuses on investigative theater projects going on around the city, the country, and the world. As the institute for investigative theater, The Civilians is excited to connect with other groups working in this genre. If you're doing an investigative theater project, feel free to keep us in the loop by emailing: literary@thecivilians.org.

SAME RIVER is an "improvised inter-disciplinary performance based on interviews" that is about the controversy over and reality of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking". (Don't know much about fracking? Watch this awesome video!) Created by the Strike Anywhere ensemble, SAME RIVER was playing February 23rd - March 3rd at the Irondale Center (home of The Civilians' production of IN THE FOOTPRINT in 2010) just down the street from The Civilians main office. Investigative theater in our own backyard? Obviously, I had to check it out. And, I wasn't the only one - several members of The Civilians family made up a strong contingent of the audience the night I went.

Something really cool about this performance was that it intentionally merged theatrical performance and visual art. Before one entered the part of the theater where the performance took place, there was an art installation created by participants in Strike Anywhere's residency at Brooklyn High School for the Arts, as well as art developed in a community art-making day that happened on February 11. In addition to the visual art component before the performance, there was also a striking visual element in the performance which featured a beautiful waterfall backdrop. SAME RIVER mixes dance, music, and improv to tell a story about characters based on people the ensemble interviewed.

Strike Anywhere used the investigative method to create this piece, having spent 10 days in residence in the Catskills interviewing local community members about drinking water and fracking. However, there is a sense of continued investigation associated with their particular method, as they intend to incorporate interviews from local community members into performances at different venues in areas where fracking is taking place or being considered. It's really interesting to think about the investigative method being applied in this way when the subject of investigation is an ongoing event. This is a way in which investigative theater might distinguish itself from documentary theater, as the investigation continues even after a certain moment has been documented.

As always, it's exciting to see the many different ways that theater artists find to incorporate investigation into their work, and SAME RIVER is a great example of how interviews can be the basis for a piece that still incorporates many levels of more abstract artistry.Visit Strike Anywhere's site to learn more about SAME RIVER.

A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part VIII

2012-03-07T10:00:00.002-05:00

What's it like to be a male adult entertainment performer? Find out in Michael Friedman's doo-wop-like song "Waiting for Wood" performed by Heath Calbert, Robbie Collier Sublett, and Andrew Kober. This week's episode also features interviews with power couple Elizabeth Starr and Tommy Gunn performed by Jennifer R. Morris and Brian Sgambati. Plus, we've got more audience participation in this one: audience answers to the question "What is the dirtiest thing you've ever done in real life?" These recordings are from a live performance at Joe's Pub in New York.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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OCCUPY YOUR MIND as part of LOW LIVES 4:OCCUPY!

2012-03-02T14:59:00.000-05:00

The Civilians is participating this Saturday, March 3rd, in the international performance event Low Lives, put together by the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. This is an online event, so anyone, anywhere can tune in!

Low Lives is "an international festival of live performance-based work transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and the world." This year is the fourth incarnation of Low Lives and the theme is Occupy. Hmm...Occupy themed performances done live and presented on the web? Sounds familiar...Obviously, this event is the perfect fit with The Civilians Occupy Your Mind project that launched in January. So, needless to say we're excited to included in the festival!

The Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics "is a collaborative, multilingual and interdisciplinary network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists through the Americas." They run a number of programs that connect artists, scholars and activists across the Western Hemisphere. From the ongoing, local Yes Lab to the biannual Encuentros, they have a lot of initiatives worth checking out, as well as a number of online resources on their site.

In the spirit of both Low Lives and Occupy Your Mind, The Civilians is doing a live Occupy Your Mind performance event Saturday night, part of which will be broadcast internationally and all of which will be performed (and recorded and put on tumblr!) for a small audience at The Civilians headquarters. The hour long presentation will feature 8 brand new OYM performances by Civilians artists and friends, the first two of which will comprise our 10 minute contribution to Low Lives.

Low Lives runs from 6 pm to 10 pm Eastern time and can be live streamed via Ustream at this address: http://www.occupywithart.com/llo-live-channel/ The event features an extensive line up that includes artists from a diversity of places ranging from Brooklyn to Oregon to Mexico City to Australia. The Civilians are scheduled to "go on" at 8:06 pm, but given the nature of the event tune in closer to 7:50 to make sure you don't miss us.

And, of course, if you haven't already, check out Occupy Your Mind!

A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part VII

2012-02-29T10:00:00.001-05:00

Big adult entertainment stars are featured in this week's episode, including performer and director Avy Scott played by Emily Rossell, POV director Dan Silver played by Greg Hildreth, and performer/director Kylie Ireland performed by Colleen Werthmann. We've also got the winning titles for Pornified Broadway, in which we asked the live audience at Joe's Pub to write down pornified names of Billy Elliot, Phantom of the Opera, and Mary Poppins. Plus Emily Rossell sings "First Contract Girl" by Michael Friedman. All monologues are from interviews conducted by our artists for Pretty Filthy, a new musical by Bess Wohl and Michael Friedman.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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Occupy Your Mind - DIY Investigative Theater

2012-02-24T12:41:00.002-05:00

This post is by Jay Stull, who participated in The Civilians' new Occupy Your Mind project, in which we are encouraging YOU to conduct your own interviews about the Occupy movement and create a performance from them. You then send us a video and we broadcast it to the world! Click HERE to view Jay's performance!

Last week I wanted to test a few premises of the Occupy Your Mind Project here at The Civilians. The Project sounds awesome: artists and non-artists alike, in conversation with people involved in the global Occupy movement, perform stories culled from those conversations and post videos of those performances on our website to share. People around the world grow increasingly interested; our idea goes "viral"; millions of interview-based performances are recorded and submitted; our website crashes, is rebuilt; Google blanches in fear; the world is united by art and tolerance. So yeah, it sounds really cool on paper. But I still had some secretly held misgivings about the viability of this work in all the different and varied performance spaces throughout the land. I mean, at The Civilians, the performances are great. Professional in every sense of the word. Great lighting and sound. Amazing artistic talent. Awesome venues. I began to wonder how much value was added by a strong production, value that we assumed wouldn't be necessary for (and knew may not be available to) everyone to do the work we envisioned. So I set out to see how these Occupy Your Mind monologues stood up in a room with only a handful of people, no theatrical lighting, and no mics; just folks connecting with a given material and an audience willing to listen to them speak.

Luckily, I had a ready-made group of willing, talented artists in the Winter Ensemble Class I'm taking at the LAByrinth theater. We'd been tasked with creating an ensemble-based work of theater of at least 20 minutes and for an audience of at least 20 people to be completed within the week. I knew that the Occupy Your Mind project contemplated the re-use of monologues already performed by artists and posted on the website, and I seized on this as a potential source text. I chose five monologues for six different cast members and we all divided up the duties of directing. With less than a week's notice, our only available space was a large recreation room in the apartment building of one member of the ensemble. We arrived two hours before the performance to run through the evening (which we had estimated would be roughly 60 minutes) for the first and last time. At that point, honestly, things looked grim. The room was darker than I had hoped. Our collective mechanical engineering skills failed for a time to figure out how to fully elevate the two music stands we had procured from friends of friends. The defunct sound system in the rec room was a barely audible conduit for the music we had intended to play interstitially throughout. Another tenant of the apartment, cradling a bowl of fruit salad and clutching a copy of The Lion King, made a competing bid for the room; management was called; a tense conversation took place just out of earshot. Meanwhile, a debaucherous 21st birthday party in the room next door threatened to drown out our mic-less performance with the thumping bass of a Britney Spears album (I kid you not, they were playing Britney Spears, who I had erroneously assumed died years ago). But we dispatched charismatic young actors to quell the thumping hysteria next door. We re-imagined the dark room as ready made for theater. We figured out the music stands, did away with our playlist, and maintained our hold on the room with an iron fist. We hoped - because it was all we could do at that point - that the monologues themselves and the work the actors had done to perform them would be sufficient to constitute an evening of theater. So the dust settled, the audience arrived, and we began to share these stories.

Here's the thing about these monologues: they have the peculiar ring of truth about them. And because they are at once both odd and specific, they are, to an audience, good theater. Without mics, music, lighting, or even a stage; without being off-book; without equity status, these monologues captivate. They are lived-in stories and, because they were told to us variously at protests, after a raid, after an arrest, they have in their very fiber the urgency and meaning of a good monologue. They take us somewhere and help us to connect to people we may suspect are strange or may have been taught are dangerous. But their stories reveal something else: that there is reason behind action and urgency behind reason. There was also, at least to me, a theatrical echo of the consensus method used in Zuccotti and elsewhere in the Occupy Movement, the "human mic" - a way of giving physical voice to the ideas of another. What is theater, I thought, if not a formalized, ancient tradition of the human microphone? We long to hear each others stories and, in this instance, the stories are most definitely, by themselves, enough. By way of experiment, I can say to you now: go interview, go edit a monologue and, without a penny to your name, find two listeners to perform. It hardly takes a "production", traditionally defined. What it does take is a willingness to listen, a curiosity about someone different from yourself, and the courage to become that person for at least four to seven minutes. And this, I can assure you from depths of a midtown apartment complex rec room, will most certainly be enough.

Jay Stull is currently the artistic intern at The Civilians. Clips from the Occupy Your Mind performance described above can be found on Tumblr, and if you an interest in getting involved in the project itself, please visit our website at http://www.thecivilians.org/programs/occupy_your_mind.html.

A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part VI

2012-02-22T10:00:00.001-05:00

The legendary Axel Braun starts off this week's episode. Our interview with him inspired both this monologue, performed by Brad Heberlee, and the song "Squirting 101" in A Pretty Filthy Podcast: Part IV. This week also has Porn Charades, Round 2 (in which an audience member tries to act out a porn movie title and the cast and audience try to guess what it is), Kelly McCreary as Ms. Brown Sugar, and Lexy Fridell singing "ABC, 123" by Michael Friedman. The live performance took place at Joe's Pub. These interviews were conducted by our artists with real adult entertainment professionals for Pretty Filthy, a new musical by Bess Wohl and Michael Friedman.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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Crime, Part IV: The Forensic Psychologist

2012-02-15T10:00:00.002-05:00

Extraordinary crime is the specialty of this interviewee, who has seen it all in 35 years as a practicing forensic psychologist. He is also a professor of criminal psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Tony-nominee Maria Dizzia performs this interview for our podcast this week, discussing topics such as sexual murders, crime scene behaviors, and the implications of this work in the court room. This interview was conducted for Crime, USA, a new play by our Associate Artist Alix Lambert, who also interviewed FBI agents, gang members, pawn shop owners, and more.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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R&D Writing Group: Mid-Year Update

2012-02-10T16:40:00.001-05:00

This post is by our R&D Coordinator, Annah Feinberg. For more information about the group, the writers, and the projects, please click here!

When selecting members for our R&D writers group, we primarily look for writers who think outside themselves. I have always understood investigative theater as a way to selflessly instigate the act of creating from the outside in. There are certain artists and writers who hone the craft of looking inside for inspiration, and others who hone the craft of looking out. I prefer the latter. I care deeply about context, and about how human behavior shapes our world. I am not usually drawn to plays that weigh primarily towards the articulation of feelings or action derived from angst. This artistic value of mine, which matches the priorities and goals of the Civilians, is where our process of creating the R&D writing community begins.

The five dynamic writers in the R&D group are selfless in their rigorous curiosity and on a constant hunt for fascination. They do not necessarily employ the interview-based development methods that the Civilians, but they all dive head first into the real world to craft their work. Research is the jumping-off point, the inspiration, and the primary reason for their artistic exploration.

Jackie Sibblies Drury and Jason are both using historical documents to crack open a particular moment in history. Jason is using the music of Shostakovich to structure a theatrical exploration of the relationship with that composer and Stalin during World War II, which opens up larger questions of the nature of private and public lives. Jackie is using the 19th century autobiography of Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole to examine the changing power dynamics within the healthcare system. Alix Lambert is continuing her extensive research on crime in America, using years worth of interviews from all over the country. The voices of the individuals she has conversed with throughout her travels, and their idiosyncratic perspectives of the world, are building towards a fascinating moralistic probe into the social norms many of us take for granted. Mia Rovegno is crafting a tornado-like tapestry of how we value home in America, through text pulled from Found Magazine and many other sources. Seen through chaotic but crystallized snapshots of diverse stories, Mia’s work is a reminder of the connections between our economic and personal realities. Heidi Schreck is delving into the social implications of group awareness training, using anecdotal evidence from people that have been through programs that utilize it. Through this, she is crafting painfully hilarious characters in order to understand this therapy’s place in the world.

I am incredibly excited about the shape that all five of the R&D projects are taking this year. The investigative brains of Jackie, Jason, Alix, Mia, and Heidi are pushing full speed ahead and expanding our definition of investigative theater. They continue to stretch outside themselves to generously share the stories of others. Keep an eye out for information about the R&D reading series in May; I can not wait to see where these writers’ investigations take them.

Porn Charades: A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part V

2012-02-08T10:48:00.001-05:00

This week's podcast episode, back in adult entertainment, features a recording of a game of porn charades in which one of our intrepid audience members was acting out a porn title and the cast members of the live evening at Joe's Pub were guessing. To get a visual sense of what was going on, here are some photos of the action. Plus this week, we have Aysan Celik as an adult entertainment performer and parent, Brandon Miller as male talent Bill Margold, and Michael Friedman singing his song "We Were Giants." This material is crafted from interviews with real people for the new musical PRETTY FILTHY, by Bess Wohl and Michael Friedman.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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Adult Entertainment 101: A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part IV

2012-02-01T11:16:00.002-05:00

Revealing some of the tricks of the trade and behind-the-scenes stories, this week's episode is back to our investigation about the adult entertainment industry. Associate Artist Alix Lambert performs an interview with adult entertainment performer Tabitha Stevens who discusses plastic surgery; Mia Barron plays an anonymous female talent; and Andrew Kober sings "Squirting 101" by Michael Friedman, a new song about female ejaculation from an interview with Axel Braun about his revolutionary techniques. This material is from interviews conducted by Civilians artists with adult entertainment performers, directors, agents, and more in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles and Las Vegas for Pretty Filthy, a new musical by Bess Wohl and Michael Friedman.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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LITERARY CORNER: Mission Drift by the TEAM

2012-01-30T10:57:00.000-05:00

Literary Corner is a series on the blog by Civilians' Literary Associate EllaRose Chary that focuses on investigative theater projects going on around the city, the country, and the world. As the institute for investigative theater, The Civilians is excited to connect with other groups working in this genre. If you're doing an investigative theater project, feel free to keep us in the loop by emailing: literary@thecivilians.org.

Last week I had the opportunity to see MISSION DRIFT, a non-traditional musical developed by The TEAM and presented as part of P.S.122's COIL Festival. MISSION DRIFT is the story of American capitalism starting on a dock in Amsterdam in the 17th Century and leading to Las Vegas in 2008. The score is a contemporary fusion of styles. The piece has received a lot of acclaim for its comic, yet poignant sensibility and engaging energy. What interests me, however, in relation to investigative theater is the way elements of fantasy and reality intermingle to create something that conveys down-to-Earth themes in a theatrical way.

According to press for the show, The TEAM spent a month in Las Vegas conducting interviews and doing research to help with the creation of this project. In some ways it's obvious how their research informed the work that ended up on stage. As revealed in this Culturebot interview with MISSION DRIFT's director, Rachel Chavkin, some of the sites the company visited in Las Vegas included The Neon Boneyard and The Atomic Testing Museum. One of the play's main characters volunteers at the Neon Boneyard and the details and sadness associated with this powerful image is one of the more successful elements of the play; especially when that character, Joan, lashes out one of the characters representing capitalism, saying that now victims of home foreclosure sleep in those remains. Similarly, one of the most satisfying parts of the show is the implosion sequence, which is connected imagistically to the atomic testing sequences - and the narrator character's name is Miss Atomic. In other ways, the direct correlation between investigation and text is less clear. For example, there isn't a single moment in the play that is clearly taken from an interview. Unlike in documentary theater, or other kinds of investigative theater that I've written about on the blog, or that we ourselves have done at The Civilians, all of the material taken from interviews as been woven into the play so that it is indistinguishable from the fictitious details about characters. As a result, you have two immortal characters who represent capitalism interacting with characters who have realistic stories, and it's possible that all of those characters are informed by interviews The TEAM did with people in Las Vegas, including everyone from Union Workers to tourists.

What I think is unique about MISSION DRIFT from an investigative perspective is that you don't know that it's investigative, but you can feel that it is. Obviously, that's a subjective response, but when watching it it was clear to me that themes, though conveyed through many layers of the fantastic, were grounded in a harsh reality. In some ways, that sensibility is one of the goals of investigative theater, and what distinguishes it from documentary film or news reporting.

You can still catch MISSION DRIFT as part of COIL, it's running through February 4th at The Connelly Theater, click here for more info.

Crime, Podcast Episode III

2012-01-25T11:42:00.002-05:00

A lawyer from the Department of Justice who specializes in organized crime cases discusses how he got into his field and some of the criminal schemes he has come up against in the courtroom. He also talks about the reasons that people cooperate with the American legal system and the relationship between cooperation and culture. This interview is performed by Brandon Miller, and was recorded at Joe's Pub. Associate Artist Alix Lambert conducting this interview for her play Crime: USA, which is crafted from interviews with gang members, pawn shop owners, FBI agents, and more.

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Meet the R&D: Mia Rovegno - A Housewarming Gift

2012-01-23T15:40:00.003-05:00

Today's post is from Mia Rovegno, one of the playwrights in our R&D Group and the director of our most recent Occupy Wall Street cabaret at Joe's Pub earlier this month. The writers in the R&D Group are contributing posts that will give insight into their processes: what they're thinking about, what material they're working with, how their research is informing their writing. For more info about the R&D Group, Mia, or her project, please click here. And here is Mia's post!

Whether I like it or not, every project I work on is inevitably informed by whatever events happen to be swirling around my life at that moment. So I guess it’s not surprising that in the midst of writing a piece centered on American identity and the ways in which the dislocated and relocated search for a sense of “home”, I find my mind occupied by the insta-community that sprang to life on September 17^th in Manhattan’s Liberty Square: The people of Occupy Wall Street.

For past couple of months at The Civilians, we’ve been conducting and transcribing hours upon hours of interviews from various Occupy events to create what we hope can be a kind of living document of this unique historical moment. I’m all for the pursuit of defining more ways in which art and activism can collide in the American theater without having to pull out the self-congratulatory soapbox or the factoid-y power point presentation. And working with The Civilians is a refreshing reminder that it is indeed possible to pull this off. Artists can be topical AND entertaining! Audiences can feel feelings AND learn something! Not to mention that all of us actually are capable of humbly checking in with our humanity without self-flagellation or hoisting our politics onto some pedestal. Seriously. It’s possible.

Case in point: Last week I had the privilege of directing a fantastic group of actors in an evening of theater featuring the diverse, powerful stories of this leaderless movement in a different kind of forum: The Occupy Wall Street Cabaret at Joe’s Pub.

I admit it can sometimes feel awkward to do more documenting of the OWS movement than actual occupying itself, and I tend to find myself in a bit of a conundrum. I question what can feel like my peripheral, objective participation in this critical community effort. I wonder how my creative work can offer an effective contribution to this movement. I look for how my dialogue with this cultural moment might reach beyond creating a forum of validation and catharsis for people on the inside of the movement. I ask: How can the work be impactful to those on the outside—those who don’t feel inspired to occupy Zuccotti Park, who won’t drop everything to Occupy The Highway from NYC to DC, who won’t be photographed at the barricades linking arms in a human chain, risking possible arrest or injury? How might visibility and credibility outshine the demoralizing impact of denied constitutional rights and police brutality that can so elusively steal the focus from the myriad messages of the movement? So many questions! I don’t know the answers.

But maybe the answers can live somewhere in the act of holding a different kind of space for the vital immediacy of this movement. An intimate space of quiet and undivided attention. Of celebration and reflection. Confession and testimonial. Where voices are heard, amplified, and perhaps even underscored. Maybe it’s a space where a community gathers to wrestle with the layers of contradictions one always finds within any intelligent, articulate, political discourse. Or a space that values the ephemeral moments that tend to be forgotten, without a photograph or a youtube or a blog post to prove they ever happened in the first place. A space where artists offer themselves as conduits for these voices to be heard. A kind of artistic home, perhaps, that can shapeshift between being a tent in Zuccotti park, a living room in Omaha, a general assembly in West Palm Beach, or a candlelit cabaret table at Joe’s Pub.

I want to talk about one of the most inspiring threads of the Occupy Movement that shifted my paradigm of what I thought “home” could mean in America. I’m talking about Occupy Our Homes, a group fighting to renegotiate mortgages for homeowners facing eviction in homes at risk of foreclosure. Vacant, foreclosed homes have been reclaimed and occupied in an effort to popularize the idea of housing as a human right. And this effort is spreading like wildfire, nationwide.

Below is an excerpt from an interview transcript performed at our OWS Cabaret, describing the experience of an NYC actor who joined forces with Occupy Our Homes:

“I went to the occupy homes yesterday in Brooklyn ... Occupy worked with a bunch of community groups from um from East New York. Because East New York has the most foreclosures -- five times the amount of foreclosures than New York State has. It's – the, the bankers have gutted it. They have gutted that place. I mean every other house is vacant. So what OWS and these community groups did was, um, uh, get together, pick a family, pick a foreclosed home -- it wasn't their home, but it had stood empty for three years, and occupied it, went in with a crew of carpenters, people who were cleaning with this family, and ... had had them occupy the house.”

Now there’s a beautiful definition of this thing called home: An impromptu community of strangers taking shifts to help occupy a house so a family can safely keep a roof over their heads. Below the interviewed party describes the most epic housewarming party one could ever imagine:

“There were probably about five, six hundred people there. With signs, and banners, and and a brass band, and so we, we stopped at several houses on the way ... um, and the people would come out and talk to us. And say 'I'm in foreclosure. I've been in foreclosure for two years.' And then they would tell their story, and we would people's mic it, you know. And then we arrived at our final destination. With this family, people brought gifts, because, um, like one of the councilwomen said, she's like 'We brought house warming gifts cause that's what you do. When you move in’.”

If you are interested to see what a housewarming like that looks like, I’ve included a link to a video of this amazing convergence in East New York:

This is another posting from occupyourhomes.org with some great footage of the children discovering the huge crowd of supporters and the brass band outside their window:

In the R & D piece I’ve been developing, some characters have emerged that are no doubt inspired by the heavy amount of OWS dialoging that’s been happening. In one scene, Occupy The Highway cyclists and fulltime RVers meet and discover an unlikely kinship in their reclamation of the open road as their home. Whether I’m writing about ex-deadheads and anarchists sipping beers and arguing politics in an RV lot in Tucson, or a councilwoman bringing housewarming gifts to a family occupying a vacant house in East New York, I suppose I’ve only just begun to peel back the layers of what it means to try to find our way home in America today.

If you missed the OWS Cabaret, you can check out the video here!

Post by Mia Rovegno

This Week in OCCUPY: Concrete Ideas and Occupy Your Mind

2012-01-19T14:07:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone who came out and supported Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street, Part II last Friday at Joe's Pub! We had another great round of performances by The Civilians associate artists and friends of touching and informative material collected from over 100 interviews by The Civilians Occupy "Street Team". If you missed the show (and the live stream) you can still watch it here. And, keep an eye on the podcast series for when this material comes out there.

Inspired by one of our interviewees Carey (performed by Greta Lee), we asked audience members at Joe's Pub to share their Concrete Ideas. Carey was frustrated by the criticism that the Occupy movement lacked "concrete ideas", so she brought a sign down to Zuccotti Park asking people to tweet at @OccupyIdeas #concreteideas, and they did! We also got a lot of great responses at the cabaret. Some of the more popular responses were tax the rich, tax breaks for low income people, and campaign finance reform. Our three favorites were:

1) Forgive the interest on my student loans! I'll be paying until I'm 80 at this rate.
2) Blow up Gitmo! (Evacuate first)
3) Sponsor/Fund Think tanks for youth - they have great ideas for the future!

We're going to be tweeting these concrete ideas and all of the ones suggested at the cabaret over the course of the next two weeks with the hash tag #concreteideas. Follow us on twitter, @Civilians, and tweet your concrete ideas at us!

One of the most exciting parts of the cabaret was the launching of the next phase of The Civilians' Occupy Project - Occupy Your Mind! OYM is a global, interactive project that allows everyone to participate in The Civilians unique approach to documenting this historic movement. Visit our website here for simple instructions on how to get involved, or to check out what other people are doing.

A Pretty Filthy Podcast Episode, Part III

2012-01-18T10:00:00.001-05:00

True Blood's Sam Trammell portrays adult entertainment super-star Evan Stone; legendary performer Ginger Lynn introduces the monologue from our interview with her, performed by actress Kathryn Hahn (Hung, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days); and Rutina Wesley (True Blood) and Peter Porte perform the song "Applesauce" from the new musical Pretty Filthy by Michael Friedman and Bess Wohl. This material is from interviews conducted by Civilians artists with adult entertainment performers, directors, agents, and more in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. This performance was recorded at Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

This episode contains material that is not appropriate for children of 18 years or younger.

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Literary Corner: ALEXIS. A GREEK TRAGEDY.

2012-01-13T15:04:00.000-05:00

Literary Corner is a series on the blog by Civilians' Literary Associate EllaRose Chary that focuses on investigative theater projects going on around the city, the country, and the world. As the institute for investigative theater, The Civilians is excited to connect with other groups working in this genre. If you're doing an investigative theater project, feel free to keep us in the loop by emailing: literary@thecivilians.org.

ALEXIS. A GREEK TRAGEDY is a show by Italian theater company Motus, and is being co-presented by The Public Theater and La MaMa as part of the Under The Radar Festival. Billed as a piece of "documentary theater", ALEXIS is an interesting approach to investigative theater that mixes real events, interviews, and classical theatrical storytelling. In 2008, a 15 year old boy "became an icon of rebellion" after being killed by a police officer. The Motus production weaves stories and actual documentary film that they took while in Athens from the activist movement reacting to this event (and other elements of Greece's system) with some of the themes, characters, and plot points in Sophocle's classic Greek tragedy ANTIGONE, in an effort that ends up connecting past to present and fiction to reality. The result is an energetic piece of theater that explores the state of political unrest present in the modern world (as exemplified, in part, by the Occupy movement which has taken hold internationally).

What's cool about this piece in particular is not just that it's investigative, but also the way that the investigative elements interact with completely traditional modes of theater. On a spectrum that includes classical theater created thousands of years ago and contemporary theater based on events that are still in newspaper headlines, ANTIGONE and investigative theater would seem to be at opposite ends. However, Motus has found a way to blend these elements in a way that allows each to draw from and gain meaning from the other. Despite calling itself "documentary" and using filmic elements, this interaction actually allows ALEXIS to highlight what makes investigative theater distinct from other modes of journalistic storytelling like documentary film. The truth of the interpretation comes not only from filtering events through an artistic lens, but also from using the most classical model of theaterical storytelling.

Visit the Under The Radar Festival website to find out when you can catch ALEXIS. A GREEK TRAGEDY before it closes.

If you're interested in the Civilians' work related to the Occupy Movement, check out the livestream of tonight's sold out cabaret at Joe's Pub.

OCCUPY: Inside The Movement - POC Caucus

2012-01-12T10:24:00.000-05:00

The Civilians are just one day away from re-occupying Joe's Pub with Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street, Part II! Tickets have been going fast, but you can still get them here. If you're not in the area or you can't make the show, we will be live streaming here - so tune in!

If you've been following the blog, you know we're featuring material from our over 100 interviews with people of varying involvement in the movement on January 13th at 9:30 PM at Joe's Pub. And you also know that there was no way we could fit all of the great stories we collected into one hour. So - we're using the blog as a way to showcase some of the other great material we have in our Occupy archive, material that you won't find at Joe's Pub on Friday, or anywhere else (yet!).

One Civilians artist interviewed Manissa Maharawal, who you might have seen in New York Magazine talking with Eliot Spitzer. Among other things, Manissa is involved with the People of Color Caucus in the movement. Here she tells a story of what happened when she and a group of her friends were at their first GA, and the organizers were getting ready to issue one of the movement's first public statements:

"I mean we're excited about this thing, but this is going to be like the document coming from the movement, then ... it can't .. we're - we're all saying that it can't go out saying that ‘We. Are. All. One. Race. Human Race.  Formerly divided by race class gender religion.’  Right?  Like, we know what they're going for, but like ... that's ignoring all sorts of like real problems.  That come up in society, but also like come up in activist worlds all the time.  And that reproduce themselves because we ignore them.  Right?  And so like, we said it, and they're like 'ok ok, email us about it' and we were like ... 'No.  Like we want this changed right now.' You know?  And so ... like the process kept happening, and then they were like are their any blocks?  And ... my friend and I looked at each other, and she was like 'Block.'   And I was like, but like -- if you've been in like consensus crowds that are just like ... blocking is not like something you do because you feel like it. You know?  It's like no one's stopping this whole process.  It cannot move forward unless you take up my concern.  You know, it's like a really, like it's a big deal.   It takes like a l-- it's mad responsibility.  And I was like I can't believe I'm gonna like stand here in front of like hundreds of people ... and block this thing.  And it's like ... you know, it's like Everyone's Gonna Hate Me.  (laughing) You know? Like literally. And I was like, well, I've got my friends who are like with me, and other people around us had been like listening to our conversation, and we just felt like literally like, the whole like, we wanted to make the point, because we felt like if everyone just got the point we were trying to make? They would be like, oh, yeah, totally.  You know?  And we just hadn't had, we felt like we hadn't had a chance to like explain ourselves properly because they're really trying to push this thing through, so I blocked it." 

OCCUPY: Inside The Movement

2012-01-11T14:39:00.000-05:00

Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street, Part II is happening this Friday! Tickets for the event are going fast, but can still join us on January 13, 2012 at 9:30 PM at Joe's Pub by clicking here for tickets. The Civilians will be bringing you material collected by our artists in over 100 interviews, featuring people with a variety of viewpoints and levels of involvement with the Occupy movement.

In anticipation of the cabaret, we're posting some of the interesting material we got that didn't make it into the cabaret, right here on the blog!

This excerpt is from a German oncologist talking about how he got involved with Occupy:

"And so the day the occupation start I thought this uh by chance I was at Grand Central and I saw many young people with backpacks and sleeping bags, which is not totally usual for Grand Central, and I was wondering what was up.  And uh then you know I do not know why I uh two days later or so, on the internet, saw one of the live streams where they had a General Assembly and this was for me I said Wow! This is like being home.  Because they were using exactly the same methods of consensus building that we had used in the 80s for our non-violent blockades.  Look uh clearly there were people involved who have the same background I have, who have the same ideas.  And this led to that then uh on the first Wednesday so it started Saturday, Wednesday after was the first time when I was at uh downtown with Occupy Wall Street.  Again this incredible feeling.  Like time travel, you know, as if uh, look, '84, '83 to now, as if there would not be a gap in between in a way.  And then that Wednesday I decided that I would participate, that I would give one day per week.  Because look, with my flexible schedule, uh, and I decided that it would be Wednesday because that's in the middle of the week when other working people normally cannot do it, that this would be my day to be there, and so essentially since then every Wednesday I'm downtown." 

Podcast: Atlantic Yards, Part III

2012-01-11T10:00:00.004-05:00

This week's episode is from our interviews about Atlantic Yards, the complicated and controversial development in Brooklyn at the site where the new Barclay's stadium is currently being constructed. We hear from some of the key players on both sides of the fight, passionately discussing topics like gentrification, what makes a neighborhood, change, affordable housing, and more. This week features Jennifer R. Morris as a member of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn; Heather Alicia Simms as Bertha Lewis, the head of ACORN; and Joaquin Torres as Saul Zarzana, a union member who supports the project; and Joaquin Torres leading the cast in "The Neighborhood Song" by Michael Friedman.

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OCCUPY: Inside the Movement - Interoccupy

2012-01-09T11:42:00.000-05:00

Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street is back with Part II, on January 13, 2012 at 9:30 PM at Joe's Pub (tickets here)!

Civilians artists conducted over 100 interviews, but the cabaret is only an hour! Which means we have a lot of great material that we can't perform on the 13th. So, we're featuring exclusive material here on the blog that you won't find at Joe's Pub on Friday, from interviews conducted with a range of people connected to the heart of the movement.

Here are excerpts from an interview with one of the first organizers of Interoccupy, which she describes as:

"But, um, Interoccupy, basically, what it’s trying to do- and it is doing this - is um, setting up a place for the occupations across the country to talk to each other and collaborate on projects- whatever… whether that be direct actions or more policy kind of things, you know um, demands, that kind of stuff."

And here she talks about one of the big questions post-raid - is Occupy more than just Zuccotti Park?

"It's a battle of economics, politics, and then just like social... Social.  Living.  Social justice..  And then, and then you have the camp, it's like you have the site itself.  It starts to become its own world, and its own politics, and you know.  And then, it's like well, what do we care more about?  Do we care more about the camp?  Or do we care more about what the camp represents, like, on a philosophical level.  I, I think that there's a lot of value to having a physical place where people went.  I mean there was a reason why tourists went down there, you know what I'm saying?  It's not just to look at the animals in the zoo, although that was probably some of it, but I think also, it was like, I know that I could go down there, and have conversation with a perfect stranger.  And they might be crazy, but most- a lot of times they weren't.  You know what I mean?  You could have actual exchanges with people, and I don't remember that happening at any other time in the city.  And I've been here for 20 years.  It doesn't happen.So I feel like that in and of itself is a huge success, you know, and, and... then it caught on in such a gigantic way.   It's like everywhere, like, every country, there's one of these things happening.  It's actually pretty hopeful." 

LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU, OWS PART II: Inside The Movement

2012-01-06T12:33:00.007-05:00

A lot has happened in the Occupy movement since The Civilians occupied Joe's Pub on October 28th, 2011. And so - get ready for round 2! Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street is back at Joe's Pub on January 13, 2012 at 9:30 PM with a whole new round of interviews from across the Occupy spectrum. For the past few months we've had interviewers out in the streets (and parks and plazas and public atria) of New York City getting the stories of over 100 protesters. The aftermath of the Zuccotti Park raid? We were there. December 6th Occupy Home Foreclosures? We were there. Occupy Broadway? We were there! (And not just to perform.) Check past blog posts for highlights from those events and many others.

We've also been working our way inside the movement, to get the stories of people who have been organizing and strategizing day in and day out - to hear not only what's been going on, but also to find out their opinions and predictions on the future of Occupy.

In order to gear up for the 2nd installment of Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street at Joe's Pub on January 13th, 2012 (tickets here) we're featuring material from people who've had a key role in the development of the movement. These excerpts are CIVILIANS BLOG EXCLUSIVES from material that we won't have time to feature in the cabaret. So, keep an eye on the blog and get ready for January 13th!

Mary Notari was fired from her job for pretending to be a spokesperson for the Bloomberg administration at at protest event, as part of Yes Men performance (watch that video here). She told The Civilians about her experience:

"What ended up happening with the way the media responded to it was wholly unexpected as well. I don't think we expected it to make much of a splash. Because it just seemed too ridiculous for anyone to take it seriously at all. But apparently not. Because the point of the action was never to fool the media. It was never to fool anyone, except maybe the police, and maybe Bloomberg. But like, it was just supposed to be a satire, like, oh look at this ridiculous, these ridiculously contradictory things. Like, I don't think at any point, we really expected people to be fooled by it. And honestly, on the ground, people weren't. For like, maybe 15 minutes, people were like, 'What is this?' Like, really? But then all it took was someone texting Stu Loesser, and him saying, 'No. I don't know—there's no one by that name.'

Stu Loesser is the, um, press secretary for the Bloomberg administration. He tweeted—and this is of course why he's press secretary. Tweeting's such an art, and I haven't mastered it yet. Um, he just—on Sunday afternoon that we did it, he said, 'I'm going into the train. For the next hour, please no one impersonate any members of my staff.'"

Keep an eye on The Civilians Blog for more exclusive excerpts from over 100 interviews. And get your tickets for Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street, Part II on January 13th!

Crime, Part II: The FBI

2012-01-04T10:00:00.001-05:00

Ever wonder what it's like to be in the FBI? This week features performances of interviews with two retired FBI agents conducted by our Associate Artist, Alix Lambert, for her play Crime: USA. The agents talk about how they entered their line of work, being a female agent, the mafia, what their jobs are like on a day-to-day basis, plus other stories and observations about serving on the force. The episode is performed by Maria Dizzia and Matthew Maher, and was recorded at Joe's Pub. The interviews were conducted as part of Alix Lambert's investigation into crime in America, which has included interviews with gang members, pawn shop owners, FBI agents, and more.

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A Pretty Filthy Podcast, Part II

2011-12-28T10:00:00.005-05:00

Back in the world of adult entertainment, we have another episode crafted from our interviews with professionals in the San Fernando Valley and Las Vegas. This performance was recorded at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles. This week features Sam Shelton as a female performer, Steven Weber as male talent Jack Lawrence, and Michael Friedman singing his song "These Girls," which is from an interview with an agent.

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The Revolution Will Not be Televised

2011-12-22T12:04:00.004-05:00

This last semester, our fabulous Associate Artists Emily Ackerman and Michael Friedman were teaching artists in the drama class at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts. The students spent their semester conducting their own investigation with Emily and Michael's guidance. They focused on the topic of the sixties, and they interviewed local Brooklynites about what it was like back then and asked particular questions about some of the major events of the decade. They worked with a social studies class at the school to research the history that they were examining, and crafted a play from the interview material that they collected.

We've got video clips of the performance! Students at the school painted the art work that you see on stage, plus there is a video at the beginning that features some of the interviewees, auditions, and other behind-the-scenes glimpses. We couldn't be prouder of all the great work these students did last semester!

Check out the monologue, drumming, and dancing in this clip!

This clip focuses on the Civil Rights Movement. These students did not shy away from heavy or difficult material. Don't miss the monologue at the end of the clip - it's an amazing story about racism in the sixties that the students did a great job with!

Here's a clip with their interviews about Vietnam.

Plus, they cover music in the sixties, the space race, and more!
For all of the videos, visit our YouTube channel HERE, and congratulations again to this incredible group of high schoolers!

Atlantic Yards Podcast - Part II

2011-12-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

We're back in Brooklyn this week with our investigation into Atlantic Yards, which is the largest development project in Brooklyn's history where the new Nets basketball stadium is currently being built, and the subject of our show In the Footprint, which will be at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia in a few weeks! In this episode, Billy Eugene Jones plays a homeowner who lived in the footprint talking about the process of negotiating with Forest City Ratner (the developer). Marsha Stephanie Blake plays City Council Member Letitia James who opposes Atlantic Yards. Sam Breslin Wright plays Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz, and Billy Eugene Jones returns to sing "The Circle Song" by Michael Friedman. Enjoy!

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This Week's Podcast: Crime, Part I

2011-12-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

Our weekly podcast series continues with its the performance of an interview conducted for Crime, USA: a new play exploring issues related to crime in America. This project is helmed by our Associate Artist and R&D Group member Alix Lambert. In her investigation for this project, she has interviewed lawyers, FBI agents, criminals, gang members, pawn shop owners, and more. This episode features actor Frank Harts as Antonio, a former gang member, talking about about the first time he got in a fight, the first time he carried a gun, his experiences as a gang member, and his life outside the gang. The material was recorded in our cabaret at Joe's Pub last year.

This episode contains some language and content that may not be appropriate for children under the age of 18.

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This Week In Occupy

2011-12-12T15:34:00.002-05:00

Last month's removal of occupiers from Zuccotti Park left a lot of people wondering what's next for the Occupy movement - is it true what protesters' signs claim, that "you can't evict an idea," or was the symbolic home a central part of Occupy's efficacy? As the Movement continues to change and its dynamics shift, The Civilians' artists are out documenting the process, as told by its participants, at Occupy GAs and events around New York City.

From an interview one artist conducted with a retiree visiting the GA from Florida, on what he thinks about the future of the movement:

"Yeah, it's difficult to know, because I mean the movement could fail! The movement could sputter out and - and - and, at least in a lot of places. And every, you know, a lot of us are gonna hedge our bets. I mean, I, like I said, I'm a semi-retired person. I just am lucky enough to have a period in my life where I have a lot of time and I don't have to, you know I only spend a little bit of it making money. And so I spend half of my time as a union organizer for the faculty union in Florida, right? That's what I've been doing for the last two or three years. So I'm takin' time away from THAT for THIS....Anyway, um, so yeah, I guess - I guess what I want on an ind-just on a personal level is to have the movement become VIABLE enough that I, I...it's still worth me taking time away from other important things as well, you know? (Laughs) And that's really, uh, that's uh, a tall order. That's a tall order. You know, it's, um, and you know, it's the, uh... we don't really know where this is going. And its...sometimes it just, it makes me crazy - and I'm sure there's a lot of very smart and very able people who have walked AWAY from it, and we gotta figure out how to get a lot of those people back."

And here's a conversation with an actor who helped co-ordinate Occupy Broadway, on her performing at the event (click here if you missed the post about The Civilians' performance at Occupy Broadway!):

"I did some, uh, dramatic karaoke. (Laughs) So, it's this awesome idea, and I was so glad to see it - because I had this idea - like, okay, joking with my friends - like saying song lyrics, like you know, (dramatic voice) "At first I was afraid. I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side." So you know, that kind of thing - I used to joke with friends with that. And so tonight I was like, "Oh my God! Dramatic karaoke! I gotta do that." So, I did, um, a Rage Against the Machine song, um, "Bulls on Parade" - I don't - I wasn't too familiar with the song, "Come wit it now, come wit it now, come wit it now," and then there's this, um, I wish I could remember it, but, um, it ends with "bulls on parade." Which is so funny you know - bears, bulls wall street, you know? So, yeah there was a line in there about, um, about libraries and how they you know - about being reduced to rubble and the books being burned, which is you know very relevant to what happened with the raid."

Simple Gifts

2011-12-09T12:36:00.004-05:00

In September, Steve Cosson and a team of artists were in Colombia conducting research and interviews about the beauty pageant that happens every year in the national women's prison in Bogotá. They spent about three weeks talking to the women in the prison, including the participants in the pageant (one woman is selected to compete from each cell block), the women watching, past winners, the prison staff, and more. They learned a lot about both the pageant and day-to-day life for the inmates. One of the pretty striking aspects of the daily routine at the prison is that the women don't have easy access to some things that are pretty important to daily life, like toilet paper. There are two ways that the women can get toilet paper and other similar items: if they have money, they can purchase them from the prison store, but more often, the women will have a family member or friend who will visit once a week and bring them what they need. So those who don't have family nearby are left to figure out how to get this stuff on their own.

So Steve and the team went to the Bogotá version of Costco, where they raised some eyebrows by buying around 560 feminine napkins, hundreds of rolls of toilet paper and bars of soap, and lots of laundry soap and bocadillo (a Colombian guava candy).

They put divided up all the stuff into bags (each including two rolls of toilet paper and seven feminine napkins, plus the soaps and candy), and divided the bags by cell block for distribution.

As you might recall from earlier posts, it's not that easy to get into the prison. Each bag had to be individually checked by security before the team was allowed to proceed to the Education Building to distribute everything. Each interviewee and international inmate received a bag. To claim their bag, they got a piece of paper from the prison staff with their name on it. When their name was called by the prison staff, they were allowed to enter the courtyard, walk to Steve who was stationed in the center, hand Steve their slip, he would hand them their bag, and they would then proceed to exit the courtyard and return to the Education Building. The Japanese inmate, who didn't speak much Spanish, seemed pretty confused about the whole thing.

Check out the skyline in the background!

And be sure to take a look at our photos posted this week on Flickr HERE of the pageant! Here's a few to whet the appetite - they're really incredible!

Check out the detail on this sequin work; it's incredible!

Costumes are made from recycled materials.

From the folk dancing competition

Occupy Wall Street, Part III

2011-12-07T10:43:00.001-05:00

This week's podcast episode closes out our three-part series about Occupy Wall Street. This episode features Emily Ackerman as Michele Kelley, an experienced activist; Billy Eugene Jones and Jordan Mahome as Omar Omes and Michael Curtis, two teamsters; and a group of young protesters played by Matt Dellapina, Kelly McCreary, Dan Domingues, and Matt Stadelmann. Michael Friedman then leads the cast in a sing-along of "Dump the Bosses Off Your Back" by John Brill, written in 1911.

Our artists are still out conducting interviews, so we hope to have more news about this project for you soon. Stay tuned for next Wednesday's episode from another of our exciting investigations!

Check out the project in:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Wall Street Journal
And check out the photos on Flickr from the live show!

TO SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Occupy Broadway

2011-12-03T15:01:00.001-05:00

Our artists, including Michael Friedman, Matt Dellapina, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine, along with Greg Hildreth and Celia Keenan-Bolger, performed yesterday at the very beginning of Occupy Broadway, which is "a 24-hour performance occupation" a few blocks north of Time Square. It's still going on, so if you're around, be sure to check out all of the great stuff packed into the remaining hours!

Here are some photos of Matt Dellapina singing to the crowd:

And here is the finale of The Civilians' performance: Michael Friedman leading the crowd in a sing-along of "Dump the Bosses Off Your Back," a song of discontent and protest from 1911. The lyrics below so you can sing along at home!

Are you poor, forlorn and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back.

Are your clothes all patched and tattered?
Are you living in a shack?
Would you have your troubles scattered?
Then dump the bosses off your back.

Are you almost split asunder?
Loaded like a long-eared jack?
Boob - why don't you buck like thunder,
And dump the bosses off your back?

All the agonies you suffer
You can end with one good whack;
Stiffen up, you orn'ry duffer
And dump the bosses off your back.

Occupy Wall Street: The Podcast, Part II

2011-11-30T10:00:00.001-05:00

We are so pleased to bring you Part II of our Occupy Wall Street podcasts. This material is from interviews our artists conducted last month at Zuccotti Park with the demonstrators about why they are protesting and what it was like in the Park during the first few weeks of this historic movement. This episode features Greg McFadden as Richard O’Mara, a member of the Tea Party; Emily Rossell as Maddy Enlow, a young woman; Dan Domingues and Colleen Werthmann as Chris Carter and Lily Johnston, who are on OWS’s medical team; and Michael Friedman singing his song, "The Signs." He composed the music and wrote the lyrics from signs that he saw and a few things he overheard in the Park.

Meet the R&D: The Illusive Truth, or Peter Sellers is a Funny Man

2011-11-28T11:30:00.002-05:00

Today's post is from Jon Kern, one of the playwrights in our R&D Group. The writers in the group are contributing posts that will give insight into their processes: what they're thinking about, what material they're working with, how their research is informing their writing. For more info about the R&D Group, Jon, or his project, please click here, and without further ado, here's Jon's post!

The nature of beginning a new play is that you start to see it everywhere. The nature of me when reworking an older play is that I look for any chance to distract myself. So when I was researching a scene for Tapefaces: Legend of a Kung Fu Master – Season1 DVD [click this for a disturbing photo], I hopped away from clips of Dick Cavett to land on an interview between Peter Sellers and Michael Parkinson from 1974. Toward the end of the interview, between an Inspector Clouseau blooper reel and some goofy non-sequitur about a bad British performer, was a moment of personal reflection.

At around the 2:40 mark, Parkinson asks Sellers, “You’ve had fairly sort of turbulent, mixed-up, uh, private life throughout—throughout your career, haven’t you? Are you kind of happier now then you’ve been at other points in your career?” And Sellers obliges by talking about his failed marriages, holding himself accountable without revealing too much detail, any pointed analysis lost in an ellipsis and a wave of his hand. In this moment, the actor stops looking to the audience, and the impression is given that he’s searching himself for a square view of his past. And I was captivated imagining this as honest.

The project I’m working is a look at how people deal with compulsive behavior, particularly internet addiction. What I’m really curious to explore though is how people become honest with themselves. I don’t think honesty comes naturally. I don’t know when human beings first realized they can construct their own identities, but I expect that as soon as groups had leaders, some clown in that group figured out how to impersonate a leader. Without breaking out my old sociology syllabi, it’s taken as a pretty evident fact now that we create our identities as much if not more often as we be ourselves. Even the idea of acting natural is a frequently performed posture.

Understanding the constructed quality of self-presentation doesn’t stop us for searching for something unconstructed. I’m pretty obsessed wondering if there is something in humanity that is like what Georg Simmel called “an unknowable core.” Compulsive behavior I imagine forces a reckoning with at least the uncontrolled aspect of personality. This in turn leads people to be very honest about their faults, their past, while perhaps never truly putting that past behind them.

Peter Sellers himself represents this question. He represents in a fairly generic “Behind the Music” kind of way. A drug addict. A self-destructive personal life. An early death. A diagnosis – heart attack – related to his addiction. An actor. An actor whose best performance likely came in a movie where he played a man with no personality [Being There].

The Parkinson interview is a part of Sellers legend as a man with no self. Sellers initially refused to go on in front of audience and camera. He apparently was gripped with stage fright. When told he must by Parkison because everything for the interview was already ready, Sellers replied, “I can’t do me!” Parkison, in what sounds like a showbiz-y pro thing to say, retorted, ““Look – I don’t care WHO you come on as – just so long as you COME ON.”

So Sellers came on as an antic WWII German soldier. Watch Part I of the interview. He’s the one shouting in the heavy coat and helmet.

Then Sellers does his striptease out of that character only to step into another amusing bit as a crappy magician. When he finally sits down, it’s supposedly as Peter Sellers. But this “Peter Sellers” is still mostly a prepared routine. At the end of Part I [beginning at the 8:10 mark], he launches into “an old actor’s story” voicing the old actor – Warrington Minge - who is trying to cash a check. When he comes to the mention of the check, Sellers unbuttons his left breast pocket and pulls out a slip of paper the size of a check. He had walked on stage with his props prepared. This, like so much else in the interview, is just another set piece.

Only when I concentrated on writing this blog post, really looking at what I had selected for inspiration, did I start to doubt that the moment I first saw held any honesty. Sellers answers Parkinson’s question about his happiness with an immediate “Yes.” He performs the role of the penitent ex-husband, confessing that his relationship troubles are “maybe—probably due to the fact I’m impossible to live with.” Is this a reckoning with himself or just the proper line to play the part?

There’s a moment in the first part of the interview [the 4:00 mark] when Parkinson asks about Seller’s father. Just the mention of the word “father” causes Sellers to take his only real sustained silence. Perhaps that expression at 4:02 is the most penetrating insight to be gained from this interview.

Ultimately, understanding our motives may come down to fairly prosaic tropes. My interest in the play I’m working on is less why people behave compulsively but what does a person do once she learns why she behaves compulsively. Certainly, in the case of internet addiction, the source of the compulsion is difficult to avoid and still remain in this century. [Google “hermit” and you can find suggestions on where to go to be alone.]

In my obsession with “an unknowable core” I have told myself, when I’ve remembered my own thoughts, that our labors to overcome a lack of understanding of ourselves only serve as proof that this core must exist. That lack equals the existence of the inviolate unknowable. We struggle with our ignorance as a way to learn about ourselves and what we really come to know is the struggle.

I want to learn how in knowing that struggle at least, we can gather pieces to form an impression of who we are. And when we look at this jigsawed portrait, we can tell ourselves, much as Sellers tries to convince before launching into a captivating apocryphal joke about a musician friend, “This is . . . probably true—probably based on fact.”

UNRELATED ADDENDUM: Over the weekend, I went to a wedding in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Moravian College is located and where the heart of the U.S. steel industry used to be located. Walking to the chapel, I passed by an Occupy Bethlehem encampment, a handful of tents cluster in a small patch of grass by the Bethlehem Area Public Library. Unfortunately, I was running late to the wedding. It makes me wonder, Internet: what is the most obscure town where the Occupy movement has set up camp?

Post by Jon Kern

Occupy Wall Street: The Podcast, Part I

2011-11-23T10:00:00.004-05:00

Hot off the presses, this is our first episode for Let Me Ascertain You: The Podcast Series about Occupy Wall Street! Last month, our artists were down at Zuccotti Park conducting interviews with the demonstrators about the first few weeks of this historic movement and their reasons for protesting. This episode features Matt Stadelmann as Robert Grote who was on the Brooklyn Bridge during the mass arrests; Matt Dellapina as Buddy Bolton, an out-of-work creative director for children's television; Alix Lambert at Charlotte Souza, a college-aged protester; Jordan Mahome as Preach of Occupy the Hood; and Kelly McCreary singing "I Have Not Slept" by Michael Friedman.

Check out the project in:
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The Wall Street Journal

And check out the photos on Flickr from the live show!

TO SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

OWS Project: Notes From The Field

2011-11-18T11:38:00.002-05:00

It's been a big week for the Occupy Wall Street movement and The Civilians artists have been out in the parks and squares interviewing people on the front lines.

Late Monday night/early Tuesday morning occupiers were evicted from Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night. Here's a snippet from an interview by one of our artists with a protester who was in the park when it happened:

"Uh, this morning they came in at one o’clock, they surrounded us with light trucks, big, uh, high beam light trucks, and, um, announced that they we constituted a fire hazard and public safety issues. Uh, they surrounded the camp, maybe a hundred and twenty we’re estimating and, uh, very cordially, uh, for about two and a half hours had media--mediators explain to us the situation and what our options were. During the course of that time we all rallied around our kitchen, which is the center in the heart of our - of our camp and, uh, several of our members, six of them, used u-locks to chain themselves together around the neck, so that they could not be moved without hurting them. Um, and then, as they advanced, they, uh, they tore down tents and tossed everything aside, a sanitation team came in and collected all of our belongings safely and put them in dump truck pressing devices. After about, uh, two and a half hours, around three thirty five, they, uh, they started arresting people. "

On Thursday, protesters responded en masse around the city (and the country) for the National Day of Action ending up at Foley Square. Signs and chants reflected the message "you can't evict an idea." One 75 year old woman at the march, who made note of the fact that she also marched with Dr. King, said:

"I think it's time now to fight back and kick the rich in the butt, you know what I'm saying? Kick them back- and this is a good showing. If they do this all over this country, for the next 6 weeks to 6 months, it's going to make a change, I guarantee you - they're going to come out like they did in '67 after the riots in Newark and put some kind of programs in place, only this time they're going to create some jobs, you hear me?"

And her friend said about being out at Foley Square:

"I'm the only one in my family, [and] my mother, the rest of them are so apolitical. I don't know what planet they're on, but they don't know they benefitted, everybody has benefitted in this country from what other people have done in the streets, historically."

As Occupy movement changes nationally and in NYC, The Civilians will be out there documenting, so keep an eye on the blog for more notes from the field as our project and the movement evolves!

If you missed the OWS cabaret at Joe's Pub, click here to watch it or read the article in the NYTimes.

A Pretty Filthy Episode

2011-11-16T15:40:00.001-05:00

A team of Civilians' artists conducted interviews with performers, directors, agents, producers, and more in Las Vegas and the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. This episode's song and monologues are crafted from these interviews, featuring several adult entertainment stars discussing the do's, don'ts, and won'ts of shaping a career, how they got into the business, and more. Mia Barron plays Katie Graham, Emily Swallow plays another female performer, Paul Provenza and Bess Wohl play one of porn's on and off-screen leading couples, and finally Emily Swallow sings "Beautiful" by Michael Friedman. These interviews are the inspiration for our new fictional musical Pretty Filthy, book by Bess Wohl, music by Michael Friedman. The material in this podcast was recorded in a live performance at Center Theatre Group's Kirk Douglas Theatre.

This episode contains sexually explicit material and is not appropriate for children under the age of 18.

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Literary Corner: SOUTHERN COMFORT

2011-11-14T17:07:00.000-05:00

As Literary Associate at The Civilians one of the fun things I get to do is check out shows going on that are connected to investigative theater. Because The Civilians is an institute for investigative theater, we like to support shows that fall on the spectrum of investigative by highlighting them here on the blog. Whether a show is directly investigative or the idea for it came from investigative source material, we’re interested!

Last month, I had the chance to see SOUTHERN COMFORT, with book by Dan Collins, music by Julianne Wick Davis, and directed by Tom Caruso, which played at CAP 21 October 5th through November 6th. This musical is based on a documentary of the same name, which tells the story of a “chosen family” of transgender individuals living in rural Georgia. The story is touching and the folk-bluegrass score is upbeat and moving. You can visit the website here.

What’s interesting about this piece from an investigative theater standpoint is that it’s based on a documentary, without actually being a piece of documentary theater. There aren’t that many musicals based on documentaries to begin with, but in the few I can think of – for example, GREY GARDENS – the theatrical version does not maintain a sense of interviewer/interviewee. In SOUTHERN COMFORT, however, characters respond to imagined interview questions as a function of storytelling. This element in particular contributes to the feeling that this musical is a hybrid of traditional musical theater and something more investigative. It’s always cool to see elements of investigative theater working their way into more mainstream forms, especially in a piece as unique and exciting as SOUTHERN COMFORT.

Though the show is no longer running at CAP 21, keep an eye out for future incarnations. And, stay tuned to The Civilians blog for more spotlights from the Literary Corner on shows related to investigative theater!

Post by EllaRose Chary

Let Me Ascertain You: Podcast Series Launch!

2011-11-08T18:36:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the very first episode Let Me Ascertain You: The Civilians Podcast Series!

Let Me Ascertain You is a weekly podcast series drawn from the company’s ongoing live cabaret series of the same title and including the best material from a decade of creative investigation. The episodes cover topics such as Occupy Wall Street, Atlantic Yards, the adult entertainment industry, Evangelical Christianity, and more.

Our first episode features performances of interviews about Atlantic Yards with Brooklynites about the controversy over the largest development project in Brooklyn's history. The site where the new Brooklyn Nets (formerly the New Jersey Nets) stadium is being built has been the source of extended and heated conflict, resulting in the enactment of eminent domain in New York State. This episode features the performance of interviews with Atlantic Yards bloggers, local business owners, residents, and activists, examining how the fate of Brooklyn and New York City is decided and what can be learned from this ongoing saga of politics, money, and the places we call home. The material was collected for the company's play In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards.

A lot of the performance is from our Let Me Ascertain You: Atlantic Yards cabaret last fall. It also includes a segment with Colleen Werthmann talking about what it was like to conduct interviews for In the Footprint. She talks specifically about the time that she spent with activist Patti Hagan (a prominent character in the play), and what Colleen has to say is really inspiring!

Featuring: Aysan Celik as a blogger, Colleen Werthmann as activist Patti Hagan, White People written by Michael Friedman and performed by Marsha Stephanie Blake, A scene at Levels Barbershop performed by Billy Eugene Jones and Marsha Stephanie Blake, and The Four Brooklyns written and performed by Michael Friedman

TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU PODCAST SERIES ON ITUNES, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Mr. Burns - Workshop at Playwrights Horizons

2011-11-08T13:29:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, a group of actors along with playwright Anne Washburn and Steve Cosson got together for a kind of a workshop - not a traditional one, in that they weren't working with an early draft of a script. There was no script yet, so the actors were working together on exercises as led by Anne and Steve. In one of the week's activities, Anne asked the actors to try to retell the "Cape Fear" episode of The Simpsons. This sparked what has become her new play, MR. BURNS. The play had a traditional workshop last week at Playwrights Horizons, which culminated in a reading. Per the program notes:

"The recollection of the Simpsons episode in the first act is largely verbatim, arranged from material collected in sessions with the actors Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Maria Dizzia, Gibson Frazier, Matthew Maher, Jennifer R. Morris, Sam Breslin Wright, and Colleen Werthmann. Special thanks to Matt Maher for his superior recall."

The cast was:
Matthew Maher as Matt
Gibson Frazier as Gibson
Jennifer R. Morris as Jennifer
Colleen Werthmann as Colleen
Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Quincy
Sam Breslin Wright as Sam
Rebecca Hart as Maria

You'll probably notice that five of the original actors returned for the reading. It's worth noting that they aren't actually playing themselves, but rather fictionalized characters originally inspired by work that they did in the original workshop (and Rebecca as a fictionalized character originally inspired by Maria Dizzia's participation in the workshop). Michael Friedman has written the score, full of references to some of the really iconic pop songs of our time. For more, check out the wonderful feature in Seattle's publication, The Stranger, which was written about a workshop that we did in July of this year.

Photos by Sam Breslin Wright. For more, check out his flickr HERE!

Here's the view from the rehearsal room.

Writer's Assistant Josh Luxenberg and Playright Anne Washburn in the back
left, Director Steve Cosson and AD Jay Stull

Colleen Werthmann, Jennifer R. Morris, Josh Luxenberg, Rebecca Hart,
Gibson Frazier, Michael Friedman, and Matthew Maher

Jennifer R. Morris, Matthew Maher, and Rebecca Hart

Working on the stage where the reading was held

CRIME, USA, HARTFORD

2011-11-04T11:58:00.000-04:00

Our cabaret LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU: CRIME, USA last year featured interviews about crime conducted in Florida and New York, plus some songs by the band Scrapomatic (photos of the evening are HERE , plus the audio from the performance will be included in our podcast series launching very soon!). The creative force behind that evening was our Associate Artist and R&D Group member Alix Lambert, who is continuing her fascinating work with the topic. She is currently in Hartford, CT conducting interviews, and she was also able to spend some time at Occupy Hartford. The following is direct from Alix, chronicling the first few days of her current investigation!

Post by Alix Lambert, Photos by Alix Lambert and Michael Premo

I am developing a play with the support of Real Art Ways and The Civilians about crime in Hartford, Connecticut, aptly titled: CRIME, USA, HARTFORD. Michael Premo and Jordan Mahome have agreed to come with me to Hartford for a week to conduct the initial interviews that the play will be based on. Meghan Maguire Dahn (Development Manager for Real Art Ways) has graciously offered to drive us from Brooklyn to Hartford, which saves us a Megabus ride.

Monday morning Dahn and I pick up Premo and Mahome, who both live within convenient proximity to my house, and we head toward Hartford. Dahn has been referring to Hartford as Treecapolyse after the horrendous storm the previous day which brought down many trees and left large parts of the city without power.

Here are Premo (L) and Mahome (R) sleeping in the car on the way.

We arrive to a city in chaos. Traffic lights are out, power is spotty (literally and metaphorically) and everything is generally upside down. We settle into our hotel and go by Real Art Ways to say hello to Will K. Wilkins (the director of Real Art Ways) and John O’Donnell (visual arts coordinator), who have been helping line up interviews and taking care of logistics for our stay. The play will be presented at Real Art Ways in March and I want to take a look at both the visual arts space and the theater space that I will be using. Mahome has contacted an old friend in Hartford who is without power but has agreed to talk with us. He is a school-teacher and we are interested in talking with his students as well, but school is closed for days due to the storm. In the evening we have an amazing and insightful conversation with Mahome’s friends that lasts over two hours.

On Tuesday we decide to drive over to the offices of the Hartford Courant (newspaper) and see if any journalists want to speak with us. The person at the front desk dismisses us by giving us a phone number and sending us away. We have noticed that across the street from the Courant is where Occupy Hartford is set up: a sprinkling of tents and a sad snow-man. We cross the street to see what’s going on over there.

We are greeted by Luke, who tells us he is recently out of a psych ward, and after living in the woods for a month in Ithaca NY, ended up in Hartford in a shelter, but the bedbugs were too much for him so now he’s living at Occupy Hartford. He shows us his tent. Premo speaks to an older gentlemen who talks about his friendships with Elvis and Robert Kennedy, while Mahome and I talk to a nurse who has some compelling stories about kids coming to her with lumps under their skin that turn out to be bullets that were never removed from their bodies. Luke tells us that his favorite thing to do is ride really fast on his bicycle while high on heroine, and I buy an Occupy Hartford pin for 2 dollars. Today we are heading to the Boxing gym, and tomorrow to the tattoo parlor, both promising to be brimming with Hartford crime stories.

Watch the Occupy Wall Street Cabaret!

2011-10-31T17:42:00.000-04:00

The Civilians' Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street Cabaret was last Friday, and it went great! We couldn't be prouder of our fantastic artists for pulling together to create such a wonderful show (and so quickly - interviews began just a few weeks ago)!

We got a great write-up from The Faster Times, who said that "The 80-minute show was the most moving work of theater I have seen all season." Read the whole article here!

We are so happy to announce that the entire show is available! Watch the videos posted here, or check out a snapshot from an interview posted below!

Watch live streaming video from joespub at livestream.com

Fate is a 19 year old in youthful, punkish clothing. She tells us what brings her to OWS and what it's like living there:

“I came out here with my boyfriend and my friends? But um…all I really love about this is …we’re making a point. We’re standing up for what we believe in and at the end of the day, you know, we still have our heads up…we still have hope. Hopefully none of these freaking PIGS (gestures to police) mess it up.

Well, being here my day is…is peaceful. Yeah, it is hard to sleep …early...but you know, everyone’s like, “Yeah come on,” everyone’s like rowdy, like “Yeah protestors” and it’s like, you gotta be up. We clean up, we put the blankets back so other people can use them. We eat. Uh. Our spots change all the time. There are people that are coming in from different states and different countries, so we have to make a little bit more room for them. And. That’s basically like…it’s like guests, coming into our home. This is our home. And we’re trying to make it look suitable…to people.”

TALES FROM MY PARENTS' DIVORCE Apprentice Show: Cake on Passover?!

2011-10-27T15:32:00.000-04:00

Tales from My Parents' Divorce is going strong at ArtsEmerson! The show is getting some fantastic feedback. Check out this awesome video of audience responses, plus a few snippets from the show! For tickets to the remaining shows, click HERE!

Plus, here's another clip from the Apprentice Show made this summer by apprentices at Williamstown Theater Festival when the show was there. The apprentices conducted their own interviews about home and holidays: this one is about what can happen when a cake comes into the house on Passover - probably not what you'd expect!

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Omar

2011-10-27T13:23:00.000-04:00

With The Civilians' Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street cabaret at Joe's Pub only a few days away, we're giving you a sneak preview of some of the interviews featured in the show. To hear more from this story and many others, come to the cabaret!

The cabaret is on October 28 at 7:30PM at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan). To purchase tickets, click HERE!

Omar is a Teamster from New York who came out for the rally on October 5th.

“It feels good that we’re seeing other people with the same plight. We’re all here to support each other and it makes it feel good that everybody’s willing to speak up and say something against corporate America, you know what I’m saying? Because pretty soon if it wasn’t for the union what would it be like? It would be like Thailand where you have an 8-year-old,you know, doing the job of his father or mother instead of going to school, you see what I’m saying? If we don’t speak up, nobody’s going to listen. Politicians won’t listen. It’s like when you vote, if people don’t vote, nothing happens, nothing changes, it’s just going to be the same old good old boys controlling the reins, you know? Hopefully this protest we have going here, will – will affect, um, the politicians to make some changes, you know, let – let the big guys pay some of the tax bill for bailing out the banks and Wall Street , you know? Why should it always be the middle and lower class paying for everything? You know, they stay with the money in their pockets and we lose ours, you know, that’s just not fair. It’s not fair. “

Miss the snapshots from earlier in the week? Click here to check out some of the other preview posts!

Be sure to check out our features about the interview process and the role of art in the movement in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal!

And if you can't make the cabaret on Friday, it'll be streaming live online! HERE is the link that will allow you to watch the performance at 7:30PM EST!

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Maddy

2011-10-26T11:58:00.000-04:00

The latest installment of our quarterly cabaret series Let Me Ascertain You is getting closer! For this one, The Civilians have been out doing interviews at Occupy Wall Street. Here on the blog we've been posting some sneak peak preview material from interviews the artists have been doing. To hear the rest of this story, and many more come to the cabaret at Joe's Pub on October 28th! More info and tickets HERE!

Maddy is a young woman with dyed candy apple red hair. We caught up with her while she was painting a coffee-house art style painting in Zuccotti Park.

REGARDING THE COMMUNITY THAT HAS SPRUNG UP IN THE PARK:

“But, yeah I feel like these people are my family. We share - my mother thinks I'm crazy when I talk about my political views, and when I'm here everyone's like, 'Yeah, that makes perfect sense, yeah,' and that's great to feel like people, that I'm not crazy. And school, I go to like a small Catholic school, I proposed the idea of not using money in society and some girl freaked out and went 'But I need to pay my bills.' She failed to recognize that if we lived in a society without money there wouldn't be bills, but I don't know, maybe I'm not crazy, I'm just smarter than her, I don't know.”

Be sure to check out our features about the interview process and the role of art in the movement in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal!

And if you can't make the cabaret on Friday, it'll be streaming live online! HERE is the link that will allow you to watch the performance at 7:30PM EST!

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Wezel

2011-10-25T11:09:00.000-04:00

In anticipation of our upcoming cabaret, Let Me Ascertain You:Occupy Wall Street, we're posting some sneak peak previews of material from interviews used for the cabaret. This is an excerpt from an interview with Wezel, a farmer in his 70s with some interesting thoughts on the situation. To get the rest of his story and many others, come to the cabaret at Joe's Pub on October 28th! More info and tickets HERE!

“I’ve got a sixth grade education. You’re talkin’ to the wrong man. We need to reform our judicial system, our penal system - the whole medical thing is a disaster. My wife and I, we’re in our sixties and seventies, ah, we’re fucked. No, we can’t, how could we, you know? We live on a thousand dollars a month, we couldn’t afford insurance. So I get social security, my wife is 63, so we’re still waiting, and she lost her job. Her school closed down. She’s an art teacher. They completely shut the school down, she lost her insurance, and then she had a heart attack. So, so we have- we don’t owe any money to anybody in the world except the hospital, about 50,000 dollars. Well, when you live on a thousand dollars a month, that’s a lot of money for us. And, uh, we thought Obama was gonna fix it-but…

A little bit at a time.  We go an’ dive dumpsters, an’ grow most of our own food, but it puttin’ us in a bind - but we still love it. We love (smiling) our country livin’, an’ we have a good life. We-look at our children, ya know? An’ our - one of our daughters is- is pretty well - doing a big thing in North Carolina. She’s had meetings with the police chief and the county commissioners, so we can occupy a park there. She also has a vegan restaurant, so she is feeding everybody, hundreds of people a day.  So yeah it’s- it’s a- life’s good."  

For more information about the investigative method and occupy wall street, check out our feature in the Washington Post HERE and the Wall Street Journal HERE!

Plus, we're working on bringing some of our interviewees to the theater! A donation of $15 buys one ticket for a protester. Click HERE!

SNAPSHOTS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET: Michele

2011-10-21T16:44:00.000-04:00

Last week, we introduced you to some of the people interviewed by Civilians' Artists at the Occupy Wall Street Protest. This week, as Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street draws nearer, we're going to give you a sneak peak at some of the characters who you'll find at Joe's Pub on the 28th, here on the blog!

The cabaret is on October 28 at 7:30PM at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan). To purchase tickets, click HERE!

Michele is a longtime New York activist who has been going to the protest since day 3. She was arrested in the Brooklyn Bridge march. Here's a preview from her interview:

“I just decided, you know, the Brooklyn Bridge is a big monument; everybody across the country is going to know what the Brooklyn Bridge is. And, I didn’t want to get arrested, like I promised my partner I wasn’t going to get arrested. From the beginning, the second I went down to Wall Street, “Oh, don’t worry I’ve been doing this forever, I don’t want – I’m tired of getting arrested,” but I’m telling you, the energy at that moment - and people started saying, “Let’s take the bridge,” and then people started singing and dancing, you know? That chant that says you know, “Go up, go down there is revolution in this town”, and we literally just like started dancing out on the bridge and it was just – it was impossible to not do it, you know? And it just- it just- it was like, okay, maybe this is going to get the media’s attention, because up until that point there really hadn’t been anything except, I think it was the Daily News that had the cover of that woman’s cleavage, you know, with the police holding the woman down, you know? That unfortunate photo. Um, so anyways, uh, you know, we went out onto the bridge and I just accepted it and I was like okay, we’re going to get arrested and – and this – I hope it’s worth it, and, uh, and it was.”

Stay tuned to the blog for more interview excerpts coming next week!

And to check out our awesome feature in The Washington Post, click HERE! The reporter, Peter Marks, talked to Steve and to our Associate Artist Greg McFadden about the creative process, investigative theater, and conducting interviews for our Occupy Wall Street cabaret. He even spent some time with Greg out at Zuccotti Park while he talked to some of the protesters! Check it out!

TALES FROM MY PARENTS' DIVORCE Actors Working with Students

2011-10-20T15:50:00.000-04:00

Get ready! TALES FROM MY PARENTS' DIVORCE is heading up to Boston for a run at ArtsEmerson next week. Jenny Morris and Robbie Collier Sublett (actors in and writers of the play) are there now leading a workshop for some students at Emerson College, who will be creating their own piece from interviews that they are conducting. Check out this great article in the Emerson's newspaper The Berkeley Beacon HERE to find out more about what the students are up to! And for tickets to the show at ArtsEmerson, click HERE!

While the show was up at Williamstown for its very successful run, Jenny and Robbie led a workshop for the apprentices. They conducted some of their own interviews about family and the holidays, and they made a lovely piece about it that they performed as a coda to The Civilians' show (which is what the Emerson students will be doing, too). Here's a clip featuring a hilarious song (that I think one could call Michael Friedman-esque at points)! Congrats to these talented youngsters!

Unity Within Diversity - R&D Group 2011-12!

2011-10-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

Post by Annah Feinberg, R&D Group Coordinator

What excites me most about this year’s crop of investigative theater projects being cultivated in the Civilians’ R&D writers group are the threads that link the wide range of projects together. During our first meeting of the year this past Monday, topics of conversation ranged between Stalin’s love of tractor musicals, Radical Faeries in Tennessee, historic accuracy, the Landmark Forum, suicide girls, nail polish, crime, Internet addiction, Occupy Wall Street, high school prom, and many more. While these all seem to come from vastly different corners of our contemporary consciousness, they are all strung together by projects that are questioning social perception of sanity and what has changed or is changing in our world that has lead or is leading to these changes in sociological awareness.

The R&D group is an incubator for the bouncing of ideas among investigative theater artist; it is a collective creative exploration of investigation. The artists range from first time playwrights who are well versed in Civilians methodology to seasoned playwrights in search of a new way of working and connecting to the world around them. By creating a conversation around these new projects, we hope to spark conversation within the projects; ideas of the artists in the group will inform and fertilize the projects of the other artists in the group.

I’m thrilled to find the unity within the diversity of projects being created this year, both artistically and tactically. Perhaps one writer will discover a new avenue for research and investigation that will open up a creative door for another. Perhaps one writer’s discoveries about the Landmark Forum will influence another’s project about the American Rehabilitation System, which will influence another’s project about Internet addition, and so on. The potential artistic links in this year’s group seem infinite, and I cannot wait to watch them connect.

In Monday’s meeting, Civilians Artistic Director Steve Cosson said something that really stuck with me: He remarked that partaking in the investigative process, and unlocking an underexplored corner of society “makes the world bigger”. I hope that’s what we will do this year in the R&D group—make the world bigger, one meeting at a time.

For more info about the artists (pictured above) or their projects, click HERE!

Kevin Kline, Liev Schreiber, José Rivera y Otros Apoyan A Grupos de Teatro Amenazados en Bogotá

2011-10-14T11:43:00.000-04:00

Esta mañana envíamos la siguiente carta a los periódicos y a los medios de comunicación en Estados Unidos. Se trata de las amenazas de muerte contra compañías de teatro en Bogotá. Para más información, haga click ACA para el artículo de Steve Cosson sobre las amenazas y la respuesta, y qué puede usted hacer para ayudar.

Lo que usted puede hacer:
Por favor, escriba a cualquiera de los siguientes contactos para hacerles saber que usted está preocupado por la seguridad del teatro y los grupos artísticos en Bogotá. Dígale al gobierno colombiano y a la policía que haga todo lo posible para proteger a los grupos e investigar la amenaza.

Volmar Antonio Perez
Defensoria del pueblo
Calle 55 No 10- 32
Bogota, Colombia
Email: http://www.defensoria.org.co/red/?_item=0008&_secc=00&ts=1

Hernan Jaime Ulloa
Programa presidencial de derechos humanos
presidencia de la república
carrera 7 No 6 – 54
Bogota, Colombia
Email: ppdh@presidencia.gov.co

Mariella Barragán
Secretaria de Gobierno Bogota
comunicaciones@gobiernobogota.gov.co

For this post in English, please click here!

The Civilians Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-12T17:13:00.000-04:00

Over the past few weeks, Civilians' artists have been downtown talking to the 99% about the current demonstrations, our government, the economy, and the future. The company's next cabaret evening in its Let Me Ascertain You series will take this interview material and reveal the thought-provoking and unexpected, the infuriating and hilarious, the communal and the personal stories of the large and ongoing display of discontent that is Occupy Wall Street. Don't miss this one-night-only performance of monologues and songs by Michael Friedman crafted from interviews in The Civilians' unique style, giving voice to the people and examining the current exercise of democracy that will leave its mark our nation's history.

The cabaret is on October 28 at 7:30PM at Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan). To purchase tickets, click HERE!

Here are some excerpts from the interviews we've done so far:

FORMER INVESTMENT BANKER ON WHY HE'S THERE:

"We, the 99%, that’s who, you know everyone who isn’t putting in these policies and – and benefitting from them... the federal reserve for instance [is a] privatized bank which we’re not allowed, uh, even to audit, you know, our government, yet they print our money. But they have no resources and they’re not federal, they’re privatized, and we have to borrow that money from them on loan when section – Article 1, Section 8 of The Constitution, uh, prohibits anyone else from coining money except for Congress, so, you know in that way the wealth would stay with the nation, but what happens is the wealth gets siphoned out of the nation and all the resources get siphoned out of the relation and a few bankers are – are pocketing that money."

A YOUNG MAN ON HOW TO GET THERE:
"I hitchhiked here all the way from California to get out here for this protest...Um, so what you do, is a lot of people use a cardboard sign, uh white cardboard if you can get it, because it stands out more, but my friend got me a wonderful gift years ago, which was a white, a white – like a dry erase board so that way I could express myself at any given moment or if I wanted to take a new route, I could change it or I could just like write funny shit on there and try to get a laugh out of people . Um, and I – I used that, I have a backpacking backpack that I loaded up with all of my gear, and I carried with me a lawn gnome on the back, which is an unnecessary 10 pounds, but my friend gave it to me and was like take this with you on your journey this time and we named him “Gnome Chomsky” and currently he’s sleeping over there on my bed..."

VIETNAM VET ON THE MEDIA:

"I said I would've been arrested, I would've done it just just to a say wait a second this is what democracy's supposed to be about you know we're supposed to do this, that's what brought this country together, you know, and then you got people, that's what I'm saying, the news people really disappoint. I even heard O'Reilly, I haven't heard O'Reilly say What are we going to do about these people, you know, I thought O'Reilly at least was going to say Hey, this is what America is all about, but he's a punk, he keeps talking telling everybody how tough he is, you know? I'm Bill O'Reilly and I'm a I'm a tough guy. No he's not. He's a sissy. He ran away from Vietnam, too. Tell him that if you ever see him."

SEND AN OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTER TO THE THEATER!

Donate $15 to send one demonstrator to the show!

Please click the link below to make a donation of $15 or more and we’ll invite actively protesting members of the 99% to witness their stories being told.

Kevin Kline, Liev Schreiber, José Rivera, and Others Support Threatened Bogotá Theater Groups

2011-10-12T13:06:00.000-04:00

We released the following letter to the national media this morning in regards to the death threats issued against theater companies in Bogotá. For more information, please click HERE for Steve Cosson's post about the threats and the response, and what you can do to help.

What you can do:

Please help by writing any or all of the contacts below to let them know that you are concerned for the safety of the theater and artistic groups in Bogotá and that you urge the Colombian government and police to do everything it can to protect the groups and to investigate the threat.

Volmar Antonio Perez
Defensoria del pueblo
Calle 55 No 10- 32
Bogota, Colombia
Email: http://www.defensoria.org.co/red/?_item=0008&_secc=00&ts=1

Hernan Jaime Ulloa
Programa presidencial de derechos humanos
presidencia de la república
carrera 7 No 6 – 54
Bogota, Colombia
Email: ppdh@presidencia.gov.co

Mariella Barragán
Secretaria de Gobierno Bogota

comunicaciones@gobiernobogota.gov.co

Para esta entrada en español, por favor haga clic ACA.

Current Investigative Theater: BROOKLYN UNDERGROUND by The Artful Conspirators

2011-10-06T18:46:00.000-04:00

Hi, I’m EllaRose Chary, and I’ll be with The Civilians this year as the Literary Associate. One of my jobs is going out and seeing shows put on by other companies that are in the same genre as what we’re doing. It’s always exciting for us here at The Civilians to see the ways that other groups find to make theater with an investigative approach. When I see things of note, I’ll be reporting back here on the blog, so stay tuned for future updates!

This past weekend I got the chance to see BROOKLYN UNDERGROUND: THEATRICAL STORIES FROM GREENWOOD CEMETERY. This site-specific piece was created by the Artful Conspirators, a Brooklyn-based theatrical collective, from a mixture of sources including historical events, community interviews, and the rules and regulations from the cemetery itself. BROOKLYN UNDERGROUND weaves fictional and factual material together to bring audiences a new perspective on Brooklyn’s historic Greenwood Cemetery.One of the most exciting elements of the piece was not only learning about the people who are buried in the cemetery, but also discovering events that occurred on the grounds. Who would have guessed that a cemetery is a common place for people to commit suicide?

A wonderful component of the show was the fact that I had to walk through the cemetery at night to get to and from the chapel where the show was being performed. The spookiness of wandering past mausoleums in the moonlight on an October night definitely contributed to the impact of the information I received during the play. One of my favorite things about investigative theater is the way that research and interviews help you contextualize the world in a way you weren’t previously. This contextualizing is one of the biggest successes of BROOKLYN UNDERGROUND. Audience members will never look at Greenwood Cemetery the same.

Though the show’s no longer running, you can still check it out online at the Artful Conspirators BROOKLYN UNDERGROUND website.

Colombian Drug Trafficking

2011-09-30T18:20:00.000-04:00

Steve and his team of artists have continued the process of conducting research and interviews for the BOGOTÁ PRISON PAGEANT at the national women's prison in Bogotá, Colombia. The women are in prison for many different reasons, but one of the more prevalent crimes is that of drug trafficking. In the movie "Maria Full of Grace," the mulas (women trafficking drugs - mules is the literal translation) swallow the cocaine in packages made of condoms. It seems that this method no longer works, since anyone suspected of carrying drugs is x-rayed at the airport. Now the traffickers have ways of blending the cocaine into clothing, shoes, whatever. You can open a suitcase and everything looks perfectly normal, but then you'll find that all of the fabrics are actually made of drugs. Most of the mulas are paid and know what they're doing, but it does seem that some are tricked into carrying drugs. Apparently, one tactic in international trafficking is to send a group of mulas to the airport at the same time and set one of them up to get caught who is either knowingly or unknowingly carrying a smaller amount of drugs. The narcos pay off the police and the airport, and the set-up mula gets arrested with the smaller amount. The other mulas who've got the bulk of the stash pass through safely and fly off to deliver the goods.

In an interview with one of the mulas, she described this process to Steve and the artists, giving them one of their favorite lines:

"Cuando la policía detuvo, me sentía absolutamente ningún miedo. Solo pánico."

"When the police arrested me, I felt absolutely no fear. Only panic."

Getting into Prison

2011-09-28T13:12:00.000-04:00

As Steve and his team of artists can attest, it's not so easy to get inside a prison (which is probably a good thing, ultimately). We already posted photos of the group of artists waiting to get into the national women's prison in Bogotá, Colombia to do research and interviews for the BOGOTÁ PRISON PAGEANT. After this waiting game, they have to pass through several checkpoints, and collect a series of stamps (sellos en Español). Here are photos of some of the artists' favorite sellos that they have been sporting over the course of the past few weeks:

This last one is a mouse.

Also trying to get into prison is this beautiful doggie. This dog's owner is presently locked up in El Buen Pastor women's prison. Every morning the dog comes to the gate of the prison sits outside and waits. Some of the guards give him bread and snacks. He hangs out all day, then goes somewhere at night, and is back at the gate the next morning. It is unclear how long this has been going on.

Updates from Bogotá - Domestic Drama

2011-09-23T13:00:00.000-04:00

Things have been going great down in Bogotá, where Steve Cosson is working with Colombian artists on conducting research and interviews in El Buen Pastor Women's Prison about the annual beauty pageant that they put on there. The winner is being crowned today -- more on that soon!

In the meantime, there's been some drama around the apartment. Steve's recent Facebook status was:

oh dear lord. I am presently trapped on the balcony of my rental apt here in Bogota. I guess when I rented the place I should have specified that I wanted a door to the balcony with handles on the inside AND the outside. It's funny how sometimes you don't realize there's no handle on the outside until you shut the door. I'll be here for an hour until the landlord comes with a key. It's cold and I have to pee. Please share amusing thoughts to stave away the panic.

55 comments later, he was rescued by our Project Coordinator Ella, though the food he had cooking on the stove wasn't so lucky. The resolution, as per FB:

A few more details now that I"m back home in my smokey apt. When the moment of rescue came I heard "steve steve" from above looked up and there was Ella, her friend who lives in the building, and the doorman looking over the ledge of the balcony above with three different sets of pliers... they got lowered one by one on Ella's yarn. The third one worked. Got into an apt filled with smoke. And the landlord arrived 2 minutes later. Of many things I learned today - in Colombia the doormen don't keep spare keys because nobody trusts their doormen enough. And the smoke detectors are only in the halls... so basically you can asphyxiate to death in your own apt and if the fire gets really really really bad and makes it out in the hall then some alarm goes off.

So we're happy to report that with no fires or injuries, Steve was successfully returned to the interior of his apartment.

Meanwhile, out in the hall: This poster has been posted around Steve's apartment building. Transcription and translation below.

Jerónimo perdió su osito de dormir en el edificio:

Jeronimo lost his little bear in the building.

Si lo encuentras por favor retornarlo al apt. 2105:

If you find it, please return it to apt. 2105

RECOMPENSA!!!!

REWARD!!!!

Muchas Gracias!

Many Thanks!

(El señor Berns sabe)

(Mr. Berns knows)

Pretty reminiscent of another poster that has popped up in The Civilians' world:

Lost Back-Pack

Valuable Contents:

2 Beanie Babies

and a toy dolphin

mostly needed back/

If found, please call

That's right - this is a snapshot of the original poster quoted in Gone Missing, complete with absolutely adorable illustrations. It's hanging in our office now. We'll let you know if Jeronimo finds his bear, and we can only hope that the beanie babies and toy dolphin have safely found their way home.

Bogotá Prison Pageant: Intro to the Investigation

2011-09-15T10:49:00.000-04:00

From Steve Cosson in Bogotá:

I've been here in Bogotá for a couple weeks now leading the investigation for our new Bogotá Prison Pageant show (working title of course. Saying that title out loud kindof feels like coughing). I'm just now getting a chance to catch my breath – both literally and figuratively. Bogotá is about a mile and a half up in the air which I'm aware of every time I have to climb stairs. The city is quite a metropolis—it stretches North and South with the Andes bordering the city on the East. The wealthier people live to the North, the poorer to the South. I'm living somewhere in El Centro which as you might guess is in the middle of the two – 31st street to be exact at the intersection of two main drags – Carrera 7 and 13. Carrera 7 is almost completely dug up with construction which is a big drag. Por ejemplo, last night jack hammers were working till about 1 am. Apparently the construction had a lot to do with corruption and kickbacks of Bogotá's last mayor. Which is part of why he is no longer mayor.

But why I'm here: I'm leading a group of 5 Colombian actors/theater artists in an investigation of the annual beauty pageant that takes place each year here at El Buen Pastor, a women's prison. Sadly there is no pageant at the men's prison. After much to-ing and fro-ing with the national prison bureaucracy we got access to El Buen Pastor about ten days ago and the group has been visiting each morning conducting interviews with the inmates – some contestants some not. El Buen Pastor has 9 "pavellones" or cellblocks. Though a straight translation would be "Pavillion" which sounds much more fun. It's really not a fun place. The beds are concrete slabs and often women sleep on the floor. The prison was built to hold 1,000 and currently holds 1,800. Each cell just has bars on the windows so it's fairly exposed to the elements. Oh, did I mention Bogotá is COLD. Or at least for a cell exposed to the night air it gets down to 40 degrees. From these 9 pavellones there are 12 contestants. Three of the pavellones are grouped together since the population of each is fairly small. So from the six, a "reinita" or young queen and a "reina madre" or older/mother queen is elected.

There's a lot of pressure on each of these women to compete and win, of course. But unlike a traditional beauty pageant the emphasis is on the group and not just the contestant. So each pavellon (aka patio) has to work together to build a float according to a theme, and a group of women from each patio learn a traditional dance and make costumes to accompany the presentation of their reinas.

The theme this year is "the planet." As one of the psychologists of the prison told us, the administration wanted to raise awareness of environmental issues and global warming (see here for The Civilians play about all that). So of the six patios each is assigned a region of Colombia (determining their dance and costumes) and a planet-related theme: air, water, fire, earth, living planet, dead planet. We spoke to one of the queens having to represent the "dead planet" and initially she was fairly bummed at her patio's theme. I've been informed though that as of yesterday she figured out how to make a really killer outfit that's both glamorous and scary so now she is psyched.

The theme is also key for the "Desfile de Carrozas," or the Parade of Floats. Here for example are the carrozas for the National Miss Coffee pageant: http://www.calarca.net/nacional/carrozas/index.htm
(Did I mention that beauty pageants are a big deal here? There's a pageant for just about any place, food, product or abstract idea you can imagine). The carrozas at El Buen Pastor are a big effort – weeks of work to make spectacular floats out of shopping carts, recycled materials and some paint.

I'm hoping by the time of the Desfile de Carrozas that I'll get permission to take photos. So far no luck there.

Here however, are a couple photos of our team of interviewers waiting to enter the prison. This is a fun ritual they get to do every morning at 8AM. In future blog postings I'll be introducing you to the Colombian Civilians.

Un abrazo!

Bogotá Theater Groups Threatened with Exile or Death.

2011-09-07T14:27:00.000-04:00

by Steve Cosson, The Civilians

The right is eager to consolidate power and re-take political control. And apparently, that requires threatening teenagers, stilt walkers, mimes and musicians.

Shortly after arriving here in Bogotá I learned of a crisis here in the city that seems perfectly surreal but is in fact very real and worthy of some international attention. (I find myself in Bogotá in order to lead the research of a new Civilians project about a beauty pageant that will take place in a few weeks at El Buen Pastor, the national women’s prison. More on that to come in future blog postings here.)

Here’s what’s going down. On August 23, a group of twelve theater and arts groups were threatened by the very sinister-sounding “Bloque Capital D. C. de las Águilas Negras” (The Capita District Sector of the Black Eagles). The groups received a note saying such things as: “Today we begin the social cleansing of all the dirty organizations that stand in our way... we are not playing around you motherfucking disgusting sons of bitches. Don’t make us finish you off one by one.” In short, the groups were ordered to leave Bogotá or be killed. The full text in Spanish and English follows.

The Aguilas Negras are essentially a right-wing paramilitary group. Under former president Uribe the paramilitaries were officially disbanded. However, many of these groups have reformed and are sometimes described as "neo paramilitaries" or “emergent criminal groups.” In this instance however, the origin of the threat from the Aguilas Negras is likely not criminal but political which has everything to do with upcoming elections this fall.

WHO IS THREATENED:

The groups primarily work in the working class/poor south of Bogotá, often with a focus on social service, providing activities for youth, etc. The work is populist, often street theater: parades, dance, masks, stilt walking—a kind of spectacular visual theater that’s a tradition in the area. The key factor in this is most likely the youth. While not necessarily political companies, the groups tend to be left-leaning and the right-wing perceives them as competition in the effort to gain recruits among the young.

THE RESPONSE

In response to the threat, the threatened groups and other cultural organizations of Bogotá have convened several large meetings. At a recent convening one of the threatened teatreros commented that while all the groups felt very concerned they could not imagine who would want to kill them. In referring to the text of the death threats, part of which stated the the Aguilas Negras will attack “these motherfucking organizations of shit who pretend to be defenders of the human rights through artistic expressions that are against the policies of our government.” The teatrero commented that the threatened groups could not understand how the defense of human rights could inspire a death threat, nor did they understand what the Aguilas meant as “our government.”

On August 30th, the day that the groups were supposed to leave Bogotá, the groups instead organized a festive parade through the streets of downtown Bogotá calling on fellow citizens and cultural groups to come out in support. Here are some photos and a short video I took of the march:

You can see a bit more of the march in this video, created by others attending:

The march was followed by another large convening. The Police have opened an investigation into the threat and have offered protection to the threatened groups. Part of the investigation’s purpose is to determine who exactly is making the threats as there is a history of various groups using the name “Aguilas Negras” to intimidate their enemies. In this case, whoever might be using the name, it seems to many here in Bogotá that this crisis is happening as part of the lead-up to the fall elections which will elect a new Mayor of Bogotá, state governors and numerous city councils. After the failure of a left-leaning mayor here in Bogotá, the right is eager to consolidate power and re-take control. And apparently, that requires threatening teenagers, stilt walkers, mimes and musicians. Recent newspaper articles here have argued that the threats may be coming from “delinquent groups” comprised of former guerrilla, narcos and paramilitaries who wish to continue control of the local drug trade and that the artistic groups may “present an obstacle.” Just my opinion here, but I can’t see how dancing teenagers pose a threat to the drug trade. The political theory carries more weight.

In the meantime, the artistic groups argue that they do not feel sufficiently protected. And while the police continue their investigation of the threats, it’s vitally important that the international community work to shine a light on this situation and remind the police and the government of Colombia that the world is watching.

Please consider writing or sending an email to the entities listed below. Many national and international human rights groups are already aware of the issue. However, the more international attention we can garner, the greater chance that these threatened groups will be safe. Letters and emails sent directly to officials here in Bogotá truly make a difference. Through The Civilians and other US organizations, I will also be organizing a letter for publication. If you would like to help in that effort please feel free to contact info@thecivilians.org.

Here is a scan of the death threat (click to enlarge):

English translation:

Today we begin a social cleansing of all the dirty organizations that stand in our way.

3.1 To formalize a release in the south-center and south- western areas of the city to the motherfucking organizations of shit that pretend to be defenders of the human rights through artistic expressions that are against the policies of our government.

[List of the the threatened organizations]

We don't care whether you're protected sons of bitches, it won't do you any good. You have 8 days to leave the city, motherfuckers.We are not playing around motherfuckers, disgusting bitches don't make us finish you off one by one. The Capital Section of the Aguilas Negras.

Please help by writing any or all of the contacts below to let them know that you are concerned for the safety of the theater and artistic groups in Bogotá and that you urge the Colombian government and police to do everything it can to protect the groups and to investigate the threat.

Volmar Antonio Perez
Defensoria del pueblo
Calle 55 No 10- 32
Bogota, Colombia
Email: http://www.defensoria.org.co/red/?_item=0008&_secc=00&ts=1

Hernan Jaime Ulloa
Programa presidencial de derechos humanos
presidencia de la república
carrera 7 No 6 – 54
Bogota, Colombia
Email: ppdh@presidencia.gov.co

Mariella Barragán
Secretaria de Gobierno Bogota

comunicaciones@gobiernobogota.gov.co

And here are some links to recent articles about the threats:

http://www.semana.com/nacion/teatreros-bogota-bajo-amenaza-criminal/163371-3.aspx(Spanish)

http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=18695 (Spanish)

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/culture/18685-bogota-theater-groups-protest-death-threats.html (English)

And an overview of the heirs to the paramilitaries:

http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/02/02/colombia-stop-abuses-paramilitaries-successor-groups (English)

LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU: BEST OF...!

2011-08-26T14:03:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, The Civilians took over The Living Room in the Lower East Side for an afternoon of performances of some of the best interviews from our archives. Much like Disney, we cracked open our vaults and brought some great monologues to the stage. We had some great characters, including a Remote Viewer, a facialist, an Evangelical Christian in the air force, and the founder of Hot Nude Yoga, If you missed it, don't worry - all of these will be released on our podcast series (launching this fall). Here are couple of choice quotes from the event:

"...the pendulum swings, we talk about the pendulum at the academy, and just swingin’ from y’know too strict to too loose and that kinda thing,. I think the pendulum swung way the other way, to where it’s just getting ridiculous, you got cases where, uh, the protes – or the uh Inner-Faith council, you’ve got people complaining on the inner-faith council cause there were Easter Bunnies, on the tables on Easter, and saying well, Christian’s are tryin’ to evangelize, everybody’s getting an Easter bunny, well Christians, don’t like the Easter bunny. Y’know, we don’t like Santa Claus." - an Evangelical Christian

"Don’t get me started on Bush. And people say he’ll get re-elected. He can’t get re-elected, he was never elected in the first place. The Supreme Court handed him the presidency. Iraq, that war was fought for Halliburton. Don’t get me started on that. It’s a fact. It’s been all over the place. It’s a fact. Cheney worked for them years ago, and now he says he doesn’t – then why is he getting paid one million dollars a year by them? They have a contract to reconstruct Iraq." - A facialist

And lastly, here is a photo of Emily Ackerman playing a 70 year-old lady who Emily interviewed for This Beautiful City, who said:

"And then I started picketing at Planned Parenthood. And there were women who would come down there and have their children in strollers, and we would hold signs, but nothing really active... It’s just that killing those babies is just killing babies. For no reason. And they think there’s a reason. And I dug that thing out, the thing I wrote, a few years ago, and I said Jeepers! I wrote that? I did a pretty good job on that! It was the first thing I had done on my own, that I had written, and I could pick my own subject. I’ve just been an activist from that time."

TALES FROM MY PARENTS' DIVORCE at Williamstown

2011-08-19T18:40:00.000-04:00

TALES FROM MY PARENTS' DIVORCE has officially opened at Williamstown Theatre Festival, and we still have a weekend of performances to go! The actors, who all interviewed their own parents and in fact play their own parents, do a fantastic job of, dare I say, becoming their parents and telling the stories of building and dividing their families. Writer and actor Robbie Collier Sublett brought up another layer that the show offers during a talk-back after Tuesday's performance - which is that these actors witnessed a lot of these events as kids, and in fact, the stories that they're now telling had a major impact on shaping their childhoods. So it's all the more cathartic to be able to look at these events with the distance (all of the parents are over 20 years divorced at this point) that their parents' have been able to get over time.

The Boston Globe liked it, too, saying it's an "engrossing production" and applauding the actors' "impressive skill." Click HERE for the whole review!

And here are some wonderful program notes written by our most fabulous former Literary Associate, Rachel Lerner-Lay! The notes take a look at some of the statistics (with some great info-graphics) to accompany our stories of one of the wide-spread social phenomena in America today (click on it to enlarge).

And here's a photo of the theater....

And here's a photo of the set! (Note the dishwasher in the back - it really works!)

Congrats to all the cast and crew - break a leg this weekend, and we can't wait for the show to go up to ArtsEmerson in October!

GONE MISSING at Barrow Street on 8/08!

2011-08-12T16:15:00.000-04:00

We would like to give a big thank you to everyone who came out to the Barrow Street Theatre last Monday for the concert version of GONE MISSING! It was such a treat sharing the show with members of the original audiences as well as introducing it to some fresh new faces. Everyone had a blast, but we all seemed hyperconscious of forgetting something upon exiting the theatre… Keys? Check! Rings? Check! Phone? Check! The nostalgic event brought back many great memories (though as we learned from the show- the word nostalgia comes from the Greek roots “algia” meaning pain and “nostos” meaning homecoming). I found myself reflecting on things that I have lost in my own life along the way. The investigation might be completed for now, but we still want to hear from you- Do you sometimes feel like your mind is an etch sketch? Is your apartment the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle? Share your own stories of lost and found in a comment below!

And here are some photos from rehearsal for you to enjoy!

L-R: Emily Ackerman, Colleen Werthmann, Brian Sgambati, Stephen Punkett,

Lexy Fridell, and Matt Dellapina

Down in front! Just kidding, that's Steve.

And this one is from the production at Barrow Street in 2007!

GONE MISSING - Blast from the Past!

2011-08-05T17:37:00.000-04:00

In celebration of the Gone Missing concert this Monday, August 8th at Barrow Street Theatre, we have been checking out some videos of past productions of Gone Missing on the web. Professional and community theatres as well as universities and high schools have been putting up productions all over the country. These talent-filled, heart warming, and sometimes hilarious performances have brought back lots of great memories.

Check out this video of Everett High School's Drama Club rehearsing for their performance of the show. Don't miss the 2:10 mark- you will fall for this actress' spin on our work!

And let us not forget this incredible animation done by Rita Sá for School of Visual Arts:

Can't get enough? Be sure to pick up tickets, put on your Gucci pumps (if you can find them), and join us next Monday. So if you saw the show at Barrow Street and have missed it, or missed it during its last run, don't miss Gone Missing on August 8 at 8pm!

Tickets can be purchased at Barrow Street's website:

http://www.barrowstreettheatre.com/whats-on/gonemissing_onenight.asp

See you all next week!

MR. BURNS Workshop in Seattle

2011-07-25T21:15:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, Steve Cosson along with Associate Artists Anne Washburn and Michael Friedman were out in Seattle for a two-week workshop of MR. BURNS: A POST ELECTRIC PLAY at Seattle Repertory Theatre. Below are some cool photos from rehearsal, plus some of the Space Needle!

The readings got a fantastic write-up by Brendan Kiley in The Stranger. It contains a really interesting discussion about the script (which is still a work in progress) and points to some of the fascinating questions raised by the text. Here's an excerpt:

"The conceit of Mr. Burns—a single episode of The Simpsons growing from light entertainment into an epic, given the proper cultural/material conditions—is simultaneously cheeky, touching, and sad. Did the Iliad come from such circumstantial, vicious origins? Or the Oresteia? Or the Bible? Or everything we call culture?"

For the article, click HERE! There's also a very cool illustration inspired by the show drawn by James Yamasaki at the top of the article - check it out!

And for more info about MR. BURNS, click HERE!

Tutkiva teatteri - Investigative Theater

2011-07-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

Tutkiva teatteri means "Investigative Theater" in Finnish - a fact we learned when Alix Lambert, one of our R&D Group playwrights and Associate Artists, was interviewed by Janne Junttila, a Finnish journalist, who is writing a book about contemporary documentary theater. The video of the interview, below, shows her talking about her project Crime, USA, for which she's been traveling around the country conducting interviews with criminals, cops, crime writers, pawnshop owners, the FBI, the DOJ, experts on serial killers, former gang members, and more. The journalist also got some footage from inside an R&D Group meeting, showing a short clip of Mia Chung's project and the discussion. Check it out!

Tutkiva teatteri from Janne Junttila on Vimeo.

For more information about the artists and projects in last year's R&D Group, click HERE.

PLUS, Janne Junttila has collected short excerpts of the interviews he has made here www.dokumenttiteatteri.fi. Interviewees include Judith Malina (a student of Erwin Piscator), Anna Deavere Smith, Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor of London's Tricycle Theatre, German group Rimini Protokoll, British director Peter Cheeseman's widow, one Russian, Icelandic and Finnish theatre group. We're thrilled to be included in this awesome project!

Climate Models!

2011-07-07T20:36:00.000-04:00

These fascinating climate models are from http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/visualization to help us visualize the future of the planet. They show the relationship of surface air temperature and sea-ice cover from 1860 through to 2100. Watch as the sea ice disappears and the earth heats up (by a lot)! We worked with these models as part of a recent reading of THE GREAT IMMENSITY!

Final Four Ridiculously Amazing or Just Ridiculous Facts!

2011-06-29T15:30:00.000-04:00

It's your last chance to support The Civilians
in our tenth anniversary season,
which officially ends TOMORROW!

And without further ado, the final four of our
TEN RIDICULOUSLY AMAZING OR
JUST RIDICULOUS THINGS
THAT HAVE HAPPENED TO THE CIVILIANS IN THE LAST TEN YEARS

4. While The Civilians are flying to Colorado Springs to conduct interviews for This Beautiful City from varying airports on the East Coast, the news about Ted Haggard breaks.
Timing = ridiculous.

3. We have a rehearsal for our very first show in front of a dumpster while a chorus practices “Jailhouse Rock” in a space down the hall. The Civilians will forever appreciate how ridiculously amazing it is to rehearse in actual studios.

2. Remember that time Caitlin Miller called all of the Jessica Lynch’s in the phone book for (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch? Amazing (and a little ridiculous).

1. Ten original shows, over 40 cities nationally and internationally, in the New York Times year-end “Best of” lists twice plus other equally exciting awards and accolades, eleven projects in our upcoming eleventh season ranging in subject matter from climate change to divorce to the adult entertainment industry.

We're just $1,015 away from meeting our $5,000 goal...

$10 (for 10 years) makes a big difference!
$20 gets you a signed copy of the script of our Best Of Concert which will be happening this summer!

If we get 500 people to give $20 or more,
we'll make a brand new, original video
for the website with some of
your favorite moments from shows and a few of our Associate Artists telling personal stories
about memorable interviews!

CLICK HERE TO DONATE NOW!

10 Ridiculous or Ridiculously Amazing Facts

2011-06-23T16:25:00.000-04:00

THE CIVILIANS HAS MADE IT THROUGH TEN YEARS -
HELP US MAKE IT TEN MORE!

We’re closing out our tenth anniversary season and we're trying to raise $5,000 to meet our goals for this year.

Any amount helps. How about $10 for 10 years?

Or $20: $10 for the first 10 and $10 for the next!

For a gift of $20 or more, you'll get a signed script from our upcoming Best Of Concert, which will include all of our favorite monologues!

PLUS, if we get 500 people to give us $10 (or more), we’ll make a brand new, original video for the website with some of your favorite moments from shows AND a few of our Associate Artists telling personal stories about memorable interviews!

And just for a little more fun, here are a few of the things that have happened in the last ten years that are either hilarious or amazing, and which have us very excited to get going on the next ten!

TEN RIDICULOUSLY AMAZING OR JUST RIDICULOUS

THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED TO THE CIVILIANS
IN THE PAST TEN YEARS

10. When The Civilians wins an Obie, Swoosie Kurtz presents the award and reads the lyrics to “The Civilians Theme Song”.

9. After In the Footprint, the following is overheard being said to Mayor Bloomberg at a meeting: “I saw a play about Atlantic Yards last night, and you were played by an empty suit!”
...followed by dead silence.

8. We’ve made some ridiculously amazing friends. Check out videos HERE and HERE made by past interviewees with wonderfully kind words for our tenth anniversary!

7. When two Associate Artists stalk Anna Paquin in a stairwell in preparation for Canard, Canard, Goose?, she will not comment on the treatment of geese in Fly Away Home. She is portrayed in the show anyway, paving the way for Jay Z’s appearance in In the Footprint ten years later.

6. The Civilians outrages the super right wing by receiving support from the National Science Foundation. This one’s a twofer, since the support is ridiculously amazing, and the outrage was ridiculous.

5. We started an Education Program! Here’s a video of these ridiculously amazing high schoolers who made a short play from interviews!

Stay tuned for the final four in the top ten list... and click here to support our tenth anniversary season!

Jeff Daniels or Jeff Bridges?

2011-06-17T15:10:00.000-04:00

Here's a video from LET ME ASCERTAIN YOU: CANARD, CANARD, GOOSE?, a concert version of our very first show ever that we recreated at Joe's Pub last Friday! Watch as The Civilians try to retell the plot of Fly Away Home (whose actual plot - and cast - can be found here!)

First Show Ever for our Tenth Anniversary!

2011-06-08T15:44:00.000-04:00

We can hardly believe it's been ten years since that photo was taken, but since the calendar seems to think it has been, we've arranged a special treat (which is a critic's pick in The Village Voice!) for our 10 year anniversary: a one-night-only revival of Canard, Canard, Goose? at Joe's Pub, the very same venue where it premiered!

Canard tells the story of the original Civilians troupe's attempts to suss out the truth about alleged goose abuse by Disney during the filming of Fly Away Home. Though the investigation itself went nowhere some ways, we emerged with this wonderful play and a brand new process of "investigative theater". As Steve says in our anthology: "Canard certainly has its rough edges, but it’s the way—like Anna Paquin—we learned to fly."

This was The Civilians' first piece of investigative theater, and the methods were a little different back then. The artists didn't transcribe their interviews, as they did for This Beautiful City and In the Footprint, so the characters in the play are based on how the interviewers remembered them, and the dialogue comes from notes that the artists made immediately after the interviews. As the intro in the show states, "Everything that you're about to see is fact. Everything is exactly as it occurred, as we managed to remember it."

Additionally, we definitely want to shout out to the original Canard cast members who will be performing this Friday: Aysan Celik and Jennifer Morris (both in the picture above). And we're of course also excited to have Matthew Dellapina and Greg McFadden (of In the Footprint), Brandon Miller, Caitlin Miller, and Maria Elena Ramirez joining them!

Friday, June 10, 9:30 PM
Let Me Ascertain You: Canard, Canard, Goose?
at Joe's Pub
Buy tickets here!

Young Civilians at Work, Part II!

2011-06-01T18:15:00.000-04:00

Last week, we posted the presentation from our new Education Program. Here is the Question and Answer session from after the performance with our two amazing students and their teacher and our Associate Artist Emily Ackerman! The students field questions about what they learned, how they conducted their interviews, taking on the personas of the different interviewees, and what it was like to talk to friends, family, and even strangers! They've got some great things to say about the investigative method, so check out this behind-the-scenes peak at how to craft a performance from an investigation.

Young Civilians at Work!

2011-05-25T18:50:00.000-04:00

In the spring semester of this academic year, The Civilians piloted a new Education Program at a public high school in Brooklyn! The class, taught by the fabulous Civilians' Associate Artist Emily Ackerman (of THIS BEAUTIFUL CITY and recent THE GREAT IMMENSITY readings), focused on issues of the environment. These high school sophomores talked to family, friends, neighbors, shop keepers in their neighborhoods, and more about their beliefs about climate change and their role in preserving the environment on a local level, covering topics like littering. They then used these interviews to craft a play - sound familiar? Check out the video posted below to see what these extraordinary kids came up with in the funny and interesting presentation that they did at the end of the class!

BENEFIT X Success!

2011-05-17T18:18:00.000-04:00

Things went great on May 2 at (le) poisson rouge! We met all of our goals, which puts us in a wonderful position for launching our eleventh season, and we're so grateful for all of your support. The performance was lovely with our special guests, Ana Gasteyer and Marc Kudisch. We also had some really special guests: past interviewees saying hello! Here are some awesome videos that we played at the event!

From Nancy-Jo, the real Christian T-Girl from THIS BEAUTIFUL CITY

From Carol, the real Chaneler/Entity from (I AM) NOBODY'S LUNCH

Thanks so much to everyone who helped make this event such a fabulous evening!

BENEFIT X UPDATES!

2011-04-28T14:31:00.000-04:00

BENEFIT X is going to be amazing! First of all, we've got our fabulous Associate Artists performing, and they'll be joined by Saturday Night Live's
Ana Gasteyer and Tony-nominee Marc Kudisch! Plus, we've got some old friends joining us that you won't want to miss - some of our past interviewees will be saying hello, so this is an awesome opportunity to see some of the real people who inspired the Civilians characters that you know and love!

And our silent auction is really gearing up! It's a featuring auction on our auction host's homepage (HERE). We've got some amazing packages (a fashion package with a guided shopping trip, fashion advice from an expert, and a $250 gift card to Saks; a rock climbing package; a relaxation package with a massage, facial, and 3 month membership to Yogaworks), delicious food and drink options (some amazing wine selections from our board and Honorary Committee, a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne Vintage 1998 with gorgeous Baccarat flutes), plus lots of travel (Cape Cod, Vegas), lots of shows (signed unpublished script from Lynn Nottage, Tony Kushner package, Playwrights and MTC, Atlantic and Soho Rep, Vineyard, AND MORE!), PLUS an original song written by our dear Michael Friedman, and a private reading by the illustrious and lovely Kathleen Chalfant.

CHECK IT OUT HERE! And forward to your friends! This is a great way to support the company if you can't make it to the event, and get some amazing stuff!

And if you haven't bought tickets yet, please GO HERE!

Thanks so much! See you on Monday!

How do you know what you know?

2011-04-27T15:24:00.000-04:00

(I AM) NOBODY'S LUNCH is "a cabaret about how you know what you know when nobody knows if everyone else is lying and when someone or something wants to have you for lunch." So one of the interview questions that our artists asked people was about how they know what they know.

A Young Republican answered, "Truth is…is there one truth? Well, I think truth is whatever the majority believes is true. If the majority of people believe that Osama Bin Laden is an evil man— there are some that might believe otherwise, and people are entitled to that opinion. But it does go against the accepted truth. So, right if enough people believe something is true, then it becomes true, to a certain degree."

A Young Man in New York said: "I told you I have a very hard time with reading comprehension. Asperger’s people are more left-brained than right-brained which means we’re very good at anything that involves rules or language and not so good at things like reading comprehension, social clues and world knowledge. Like I’m not good at inferring things. For some reason it’s not the same with entertainment news. I pick it up; it’s in the air around me. But see what I am trying to do now is to learn how to distinguish the language of Melrose Place from the language of the real world."

And HERE is the Song of Progressive Disenchantment, which is also relevant.

Relevant to today's news headlines:

OBAMA RELEASES LONG-FORM BIRTH CERTIFICATE

to which Donald Trump is quoted saying, '"We have to look at it," Trump said. "We have to see if it is real."'

which brings us back to how you know what you know when nobody knows if everyone else is lying and when someone or something [or Donald Trump] wants to have you for lunch.

BENEFIT X Silent Auction is Live!

2011-04-21T15:56:00.000-04:00

We're less than two weeks away from BENEFIT X!

Our silent auction just went live and it is looking fantastic! Check it out here:
http://www.biddingforgood.com/thecivilians

We've got VIP Yankees tickets, some awesome art offerings, an iPad, lots of theater tickets (wanna skip the line at Shakespeare in the Park?), some great trips, and lots of other fun stuff, so be sure to take a look!

Reading(?) of THE GREAT IMMENSITY?

2011-04-14T14:46:00.000-04:00

We had a reading of THE GREAT IMMENSITY on Monday, and it went great! We had a good, responsive crowd - and to those of you who filled out the surveys: thank you!

I was talking to one of my friends about it, and he asked me what a reading is. It's likely that most of you reading this will know the answer to this question having acted in, produced, directed, or written a script that had a public reading, but it's actually a good question. A reading is a presentation for either a small group of friends or an audience where actors read the script aloud, usually with minimal movement and without costumes or lighting cues (of course the lights are on and actors wear clothes, though!).

The Actors Equity Association (the union for actors) has a set of guidelines for what makes a staged reading that can be found HERE, and they give you information like the maximum number of hours of rehearsal (15), how many public presentations you can show (up to 3) and, perhaps the most defining features: "9) Book in hand, no memorization, only minimum staging with no choreography permitted."

So what is a workshop? The term is one of the "Fungible Terms" pinpointed and defined by David Dower in his essay "The Gates of Opportunity" for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He says the term "workshop" can be used to describe:

"- Anything more than a five-hour rehearsal process for a reading.
- The pre-production sketch of a new play—sometimes fully staged, sometimes fully memorized, sometimes involving design collaborations and tech.
- A period of anywhere from two to three weeks in a room with actors to create a devised text, culminating in a reading.
- A multi-week process that involves designers.
- A low-budget premiere of a play. Tickets are sold, press is invited to review the work, and the process involves a full rehearsal period and full complement of design elements.
- The interaction between the artist and the community—workshops are skill building opportunities led by the artist 'in residence' or a period of 'development.'"

So why would you want to see this stuff? Well, it's fun to be able to see a show grow, and can give you insight into how the artists are working. Plus it's a great way to support the arts - these are crucial events for artists to learn about how an audience reacts to a show. They get invaluable information about where laughs fall (or don't), pacing, and how the show as a whole sounds. You wouldn't publish a novel without asking your friends, mom, editor, etc. to read it first, and this is how to get an inside look at the theatrical creative process!

Hope that helps! Tune in next time, when we'll talk about the 29-hour reading...

Hearing with Lasers - Post by R&D Group Playwright Don Nguyen

2011-04-01T16:31:00.000-04:00

"This changes everything." That's been quite the popular phrase lately. It gets applied to almost everything nowadays. Political campaigns. The unveiling of a new Apple product. But what about hearing implants?

I'm currently working on the first draft of my play which deals with the identity of Deaf culture past and present. One of the topics the play explores is the debate about cochlear implants. These are hearing aid devices used by a deaf person in order to hear sound. Unlike external hearing aids, cochlear implants are internal, connected to a receiver on the outside. It's been proven highly controversial amongst the deaf community. Some feel it helps them to hear. Others feel it's a waste of time and forces deaf recipients to lose their deaf identity altogether.

So there may be a new kid in town to add to the debate. Currently being tested in the laboratory is a new way to hear. With lasers. Yep, lasers. What can't lasers do? This article explains how "laser hearing" works:

http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2011/03/infrared_light_used_to_stimulate_heart_and_innerear_cells.html

I found this section to be the most interesting:

Existing cochlear implants convert sound into electrical signals, which typically are transmitted to eight electrodes in the cochlea, a part of the inner ear where sound vibrations are converted to nerve signals to the brain. Eight electrodes can deliver only eight frequencies of sound, Rabbitt says.

"A healthy adult can hear more than 3,000 different frequencies. With optical stimulation, there's a possibility of hearing hundreds or thousands of frequencies instead of eight. Perhaps someday an optical cochlear implant will allow deaf people to once again enjoy music and hear all the nuances in sound that a hearing person would enjoy."

This sounds really exciting. Or course I'm a hearing person reacting to this news. I wonder how this news will be taken by the Deaf community. I'm sure some will be intrigued and excited about this news. Some will be skeptical. And some probably won't even care.

So there you have it. Hearing with lasers. This changes everything.

Or does it?

Post by Don Nguyen, R&D Group Playwright

MAPLE AND VINE gets great reviews!

2011-03-30T14:59:00.000-04:00

MAPLE AND VINE, currently at the Humana Festival, has gotten some fantastic press and has been really well received by the community down there! Congratulations to our Associate Artists, Jordan Harrison and Anne Kauffman, as well as the rest of the cast and crew! Here's what people are saying:

Courier-Journal "a fresh work that is both touching and thought-provoking"
Leo Weekly: "Jordan Harrison’s hilarious, captivating script"
My Loueyville: "Go see it. This is great theater, y'all."
Theatre Louisville: "This play is a must-see at this year’s festival."
The Arts Louisville: "entertaining but thought-provoking"

It's still running for a few more days, so if you haven't seen it yet and are in Louisville, be sure to check it out! Get your tickets HERE!

Paris Commune in the News

2011-03-28T18:08:00.000-04:00

First of all, let's all wish the Paris Commune a happy 140th Anniversary! March 18 marked the first uprisings that led to the overthrow of the government. March 26 were elections, and March 28 (today!) was the day that Commune was officially proclaimed. Here is text in our play, PARIS COMMUNE, straight from one of the posters for the election made in 1871:

“Citizens: We have defended Paris. Aided by your generous courage, the Paris Guard expelled the government which was betraying us. But our mandate has expired, and we do not pretend to take the place of the old government. This is not a military coup, but a legitimate change of power. Hold communal elections, and we will step down. And let Paris write a fresh page in the book of history!”

Paris Commune is of course still implicitly present in the current revolutions, and Glenn Beck, according to the Huffington Post, is also seemingly talking about "government officials' salaries should not exceed that of the average worker" - an idea that the Commune also had.

Benefit Photos 2010!

2011-03-16T15:56:00.000-04:00

I know it seems like just yesterday we were at the fabulous Kiss & Fly Club in the meat packing district celebrating the 2009-2010 season and The Great Immensity with Benefit 2010: It's Not Easy Being Green. Take a look at the photos we just posted from the evening to relive the magic, and to start building the anticipation for the benefit this year: BENEFIT X, celebrating our tenth anniversary season at (le) poisson rouge on May 2. Tickets go on sale and invites will be sent out next week, so let's get pumped!

Click HERE to see the photos on Flickr!

Below are a few choice images to whet your nostalgia (that sounds gross) and get the excitement rolling!

Our lovely Associate Artists performing

Long-time board member and friends

Bess Wohl and Michael Friedman, playwright and composer/lyricist for Pretty Filthy

(yes, there is also a photo of them smiling together)

The background is getting crooked, though our Associate Artists are looking great!

and here are more of our Artists are at the end of the night!

WHAT IS YOUR IDEA FOR A CIVILIANS SHOW?

2011-03-11T11:58:00.000-05:00

If you have reached this page, it means that you just bought tickets to our benefit this year, BENEFIT X! Tickets will be held at the door for you under the name used to purchase the tickets. If you would like further confirmation, please email Rosalind at rosalind@thecivilians.org.

First and foremost, THANK YOU! Can't wait to see you on May 2!

Secondly, we are asking a question (as we do every year), and YOUR ANSWERS will be used to create an original Civilians' performance for the benefit! This year's question is:

WHAT IS YOUR IDEA FOR A CIVILIANS SHOW?

Tell us your answers in a comment at the end of this post!
(Or email them to liaison@thecivilians.org.)

And lastly, if you haven't seen all of The Civilians' shows since 2001 and are wondering what our ticket levels are all about, I'll just let the shows speak for themselves:

GUCCI PUMP - FROM GONE MISSING

TOM

So, do you know Laura? So she was meeting with some big TV people. And she had on this pair of black Gucci pumps and a nice skirt and everything, and after her meeting we were all going out. And somewhere along that night she lost her shoe. One of her Gucci shoes, because she had changed at PS 122 because she felt overdressed. She thinks that she left the shoe in the bathroom. I think she actually lost the shoe later that night, because I think they went out drinking--

answering machine beep

LAURA

Hi, it’s Laura, um I was really hoping that you could have secured the shoe before you

left town but apparently you have not, so I’ve been working with Tom and Tom has gone back to PS 122 numerous times. And I’m leaving numerous messages for the house manager, the artistic director, the director of development to see if they have gotten their act together enough to find the shoe. Um, I am sending a packet of flyers to you, to Tom, to Big Daddy, and to Elizabeth, and I’m sending maps of where I’d like you guys to post the flyers because I’m really hoping if someone sees some--you know-- one legged person wearing it–who wears a size six--that uh, it will become clear whose shoe that is and where they need to send it to in Los Angeles immediately. Um, I am working on the flyer, and I’ve also started an email address: ilostmyshoe@earthlink.net. So, um, I don’t know if you have gone back to PS 122 or not--no one there returns my calls and it’s really depressing-–but I’m really hoping the flyers will stir up some leads!

FRENCH GOOSE - FROM CANARD, CANARD, GOOSE?

CHARLIE

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special little treat for you tonight – no, no I’m sorry we can not give you a sad story about little lost frozen popsicle geese – there is no sad story about little sad chilly little imprinted-on-Anna-Paquin geese –No– tonight we give to you ladies and gentlemen the real geese of Long Lake. They are from French. France. And do not be tricked, ladies and gentlemen, although these geese star in a “documentary,” they are not amateurs. No. They are professional performers. And these geese live now in a comfortable tedious retirement with two French girls who wait ever so patiently for them to die. So, please help me welcome these very very talented geese to our stage, they are very very happy to be here, as they have nothing else to do.

SCHRODINGER'S CAT - FROM (I AM) NOBODY'S LUNCH

MALE SOLO

I've been thinking how love is like Schrodinger's cat

Locked up tight out of sight in a box and how that

Means it's dead and alive at the same time and so—

When you think of the box it's like seeing a

Photo of a cloud or fog

It’s an outcome that remains uncertain

You can't see a thing in all that fog

You can't see a man behind the curtain.

FEMALE SOLO

What are you so afraid of?

We’re gonna find an answer, it’s just around the corner and I know…

What are you so afraid of?

We’re gonna find an answer, find an answer…

So leave your comments below! Thanks again!