TIMES SQUARE: Upcoming concert performance at Joe's Pub

We're gearing up for TIMES SQUARE a concert performance at Joe's Pub on June 1st and 4th, a new musical based on the cult classic 1980 film of the same name.
Get your tickets now HERE

Singer-songwriter Jill Sobule along with her longtime collaborator Robin Eaton, Tony-nominated writer Jim Lewis and director Steve Cosson are deep in rehearsals right now. 

Check out Jill in rehearsal at Joe's Pub performing "Pretty Monster" below:

TIMES SQUARE tells the story of Nicky Marotta, a volatile street kid with dreams of becoming a musician, and Pamela Pearl, the withdrawn daughter of a wealthy City Commissioner. The two forge an unlikely bond, and through the alchemy of rock and roll, turn their lives inside out and recreate themselves as a proto-Riot Grrl punk duo called The Sleeze Sisters.  Together, they find friendship, love, and music on the rough-and-tumble streets of pre-Disney Times Square.

TIMES  SQUARE 
Concert Performance
Joe's Pub
June 1 and 4, 9:30 pm
Tickets: $20
Get your tickets now HERE

Music and Lyrics by Robin Eaton and Jill Sobule
Book by Jim Lewis
Directed by Steven Cosson

Featuring: 
Alyse Alan Louis – Pamela Pearl
Jo Lampert – Nicky Marotta
Matt Saldivar - Johnny LaGuardia
Christina Sajous – Margot, Bridget, Others
Joseph Melendez – Roberto and Others
Darren Ritchie – Richard Pearl and Others.

Chris Fenwick – Music Director

Band: 
Allison Miller – Drums
Alex Nolan – Guitar
Octavia Romano – Bass 

Check out these videos of  Aylse Alan Louis and Mike Brun  performing two songs from TIMES SQUARE as a sneak peak of the show performed at our "Let Me Ascertain You: LGBTQ All Out!" last month.

"Last Kiss" performed by Alyse Alan Louis and Mike Brun


"Barricade" performed by Alyse Alan Louis and Mike Brun

Paris Commune - The Podcast

Our latest show, Paris Commune, will be having its world premiere run at ArtsEmerson in Boston followed by a run at BAM's Next Wave Festival this fall. The play is about the explosive Parisian uprising of the working class in 1871, in which French citizens launched an attempt to overthrow the government and reinvent society. We wanted to give you a look behind-the-scenes at our efforts to recreate these historic events for the stage. This episode features interviews with Paris Commune's director and co-author Steve Cosson; co-author and translator and adapter of the songs Michael Friedman; and actor Aysan Celik (who is also our Featured Associate Artist this month) who has been with the project throughout its development. The episode closes out with Quincy Tyler Bernstine singing "La Canaille," a song performed at the radical cabaret of the actual Commune in the nineteenth century.

Grab your tickets to ArtsEmerson HERE! (BAM is already sold out - keep your eyes on the blog for a special ticket offer next week, though!)

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

Simpsons Writer Attends Mr. Burns, Anne and Steve do too.

Hi folks, it's me Steve Cosson Artistic Director of Civilians. I will confess I am woefully under-prepared for the apocalypse zombie or otherwise. But I did just direct a play about it.  

Anne Washburn (author of said play with music by Michael Freidman) and I had the great pleasure of catching the closing weekend of Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play at Woolly Mammoth theater in DC. The play is Anne’s imaginings of what would happen to our culture after some cataclysmic event wipes out most of the global population and all the civilization that goes with it.  The Civilians commissioned the play, and Anne started her work by gathering up some of our Associate Actors and having them attempt to reconstruct a Simpson’s episode from memory.  Somehow fittingly, we did all this deep in the bowels of Wall Street in an abandoned bank vault that was somehow given over as non-profit art space. Thanks Wall Street for your generous support. It was musty. And felt very zombie apocalyptic. Thanks mostly to Matt Maher’s savant-like ability to recall the Simpsons, we reconstructed a number of episodes, but settled on “Cape Feare” the Simpsons parody of the Scorsese movie, itself a remake of an older film, which in turn took its inspiration from a book. These Wall Street basement sessions contributed to the first part of Anne’s play – a group of survivors huddled around a fire distracting themselves from their grim circumstances with a retelling of the Simpsons' Cape Feare. The second and third parts then imagine how this story becomes theater seven years in the future, and then 75 years after that.  We had a blast doing the show in DC thanks in large part to our talented and intrepid cast and crew.  Suffice to say that the theater of our post-apocalyptic future has everything – music, sword fights, masks, violence, rap, Britney, Gilbert and Sullivan. It alas, does not have electricity.

So, all that’s the prologue to the most important thing, which is that the lead writer for The Simpsons Cape Feare episode, Jon Vitti, read about our show in The New York Times and came with his wife from LA to see the show in DC. And then sent a copy of the script. In case you can't read the note it says "To the Human Race - preserve and protect this script! Forever!!!"  

Along with this lovely note:   

We have promised him that his script has been placed in a zombie-proof vault so that when the apocalypse comes his episode will remain. And our culture will live on. 

If you’d like to see an interview with Anne Washburn and some clips from our production check out HERE 

And to hear a podcast about the process of making Mr. Burns  have a listen HERE:   

Mr. Burns: The Podcast

Anne Wasburn's new play is currently receiving its world premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, DC. Almost all of the recollection of the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons that the characters do in the first act is from a Civilians workshop in 2008, in which a group of Associate Artists led by Anne Washburn and Steve Cosson attempted to recreate the Cape Feare episode of The Simpsons from memory. This podcast episode features some of the hilarious audio taken during that workshop. This episode also has an interview with playwright Anne Washburn, who discusses the role of the workshop in her creative process and her interest in this subject matter. Matt Maher, an actor in the original workshop and a Simpsons savant, then speaks about the exercises in the workshop and even tells us about his personal favorite Simpsons moments. Composer Michael Friedman talks about the music in the play and shares an excerpt of his post-Apocalyptic score of jumbled pop hits, as well as some of the music from the third act in which The Simpsons have spawned a whole new mythology and entertainment.

We're so excited to be able to bring you this behind the scenes look at this show, which has been called "kookily brilliant" and "inexhaustibly brilliant" in the Washington Post!

And don't miss the show's trailer:


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

Mr. Burns, a post-electric play

Check out the blog post on Woolly Mammoth's blog about Mr. Burns, a post-electric play discussing our role in the show's development. Here's an excerpt:

In 2008, a group of Civilians Associate Artists set out to explore the notion of a post-apocalyptic Simpsons narrative. Playwright Anne Washburn, director Steve Cosson, and six actors got together for a one week workshop focused on the topic. They did many different kinds of improvisation exercises, one of which was focused on recreating theCape Feare episode of The Simpsons from memory (and as it turns out, our Associate Artist Matt Maher was incredibly good at this). Anne Washburn then took her notes and audio recordings and started writing what is now Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. The Act 1 recollection of the Simpsons episode is pulled almost verbatim from these exercises. The rest of Act I, and Acts II and III were created by Anne, although very much inspired by the energy and capacity of the original actors and by her discussions with Steve. The characters share first names –and some share a few characteristics—with the actors in the original workshop. We’ll leave you to find out who is who, and to guess which qualities match up with their real-life counterparts!

For the whole post, click HERE!

The show is starting it's first day of tech today, with the first performance on May 28. This new show by Anne Washburn with music by Michael Friedman directed by Steve Cosson is not to be missed - get tickets HERE!

Simple Gifts

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

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

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!

Updates from Bogotá - Domestic Drama

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

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!

IN THE FOOTPRINT in the New York Times!

This is a fantastic article with great photos about In the Footprint! Here are a few tidbits:

"The songs in “In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards” (the creators call them blogosongs) serve not as emotional showstoppers but as commentary and explanation — the Greek chorus of the digital age."

"'Being an investigative theater company where we try to engage in important stories, this seemed like the most important local story that we could take on,' Mr. Cosson said recently over brunch in a cafe in Fort Greene."

"Forest City Ratner declined to be interviewed for the show, but Mr. Ratner and his colleagues are represented in others’ interviews and through public statements. (A spokesman for Forest City Ratner declined to comment for this article. The company was also the development partner for The New York Times Company headquarters in Manhattan.)"

Click HERE for the whole article (and to find out what Marty Markowitz has to say about the show)!