STEVE COSSON

The show, which has a book by
Steven Cosson, was originally
created and performed by The
Civilians theater company in
2003. It was built on more-or-
less verbatim interviews that
company members conducted
with both people who have lost
things and people whose job it
is to find them. Mr. Cosson
arranged the interviews into a
series of monologues, and
Peter Morris dreamed up some
public radio-style segments,
while Friedman composed
songs that expanded, sweetly
and tartly, on the themes that
emerged.

Review: ‘Gone Missing,’ Now a Poignant
Reminder of a Life Cut Short
The two-night revival of “Gone Missing” at New York City
Center is both a very good show and a very bad, very
cosmic joke. Because this documentary song cycle is
about loss: of minds, rings, a dog, the hour badly spent.
And the irretrievable loss, the one you can hear in pretty
much every plink and strum from the onstage band, is the
loss of the show’s composer, Michael Friedman, who died
a year ago from AIDS-related complications. Which makes
“Gone Missing” an accidental and indispensable elegy.

Ken Rus Schmoll directs a
six-person cast for this
production, part of the
Encores! Off-Center
season: Taylor Mac, Susan
Blackwell, David Ryan
Smith, Deborah S. Craig and
John Behlmann, alongside
the longtime Civilians
member Aysan Celik. The
setting is minimal, the
costumes pleasantly
generic, Karla Puno
Garcia’s choreography
decidedly low profile and
Mr. Schmoll’s direction
affectionate and barely
there. The actors still carry
scripts, though that is no
bar to Mr. Mac’s dangerous
enthusiasm or Ms.
Blackwell’s mild-mannered

The songs range — any
Friedman score (“Bloody
Bloody Andrew
Jackson,” “The Fortress of
Solitude,” “Pretty Filthy”) is
almost necessarily rangy —
from mariachi to Burt
Bacharach bossa nova. Some
of the anecdotes that
connect them are cute, and
some are alarming. Good
luck forgetting the crack
about a “Colombian
necktie.” Most are funny,
including a prized bit about
an actress who lost a shoe
at P.S. 122 back when it was
still called P.S. 122.

I saw “Gone Missing” at the long-gone Belt Theater in
2003 and then again a few years later at the Barrow
Street Theater. Listening on Wednesday night, I was
thrilled to discover that I remembered every single song,
though I hadn’t heard them in more than a decade.
From left, Mr. Smith, Taylor Mac, Ms. Blackwell, John
Behlmann, Deborah S. Craig and Aysan. The actors still
carry scripts, though that is no bar to Mr. Mac’s
dangerous enthusiasm or Ms. Blackwell’s mild-mannered
insanity or Ms. Celik’s infectious disdain.CreditEmon
Hassan for The New York Times

This is a thing about
Friedman’s
compositions. In the
moment, they can
seem disposable
pastiche. But their
lightness is
indelible. There’s
surprise in the way
that the
recognizable
signatures play
against the brainy,
wrong-footing
rhymes.

I heard something
else in that song,
a rhymed chorus
that didn’t really
rhyme: “I’m an
Etch a Sketch
(But now I’m all
shook up)/ I’m a
piece of wax (But
now the imprint’s
lost.”) That slant
rhyme makes the
song deliberately
unfinished. It’s up
to us listeners to
make it whole.

That said, the songs don’t sound the same.
We’re all 15 years older (those of us who got to
grow older, anyway), and the points of impact
have shifted. Hearing them, I felt a happy-sad
nostalgia, not only for the composer himself but
also for the theater scene that birthed him —
those theaters in the East Village and the
Lower East Side and those post-show bars,
many of them now gone.

There was audible sobbing during “Etch A Sketch” and more during
the final song “Stars,” which has a verse so apt it’s pretty much
unbearable: “So when I leave you, you’ll know, I’m just a shadow, an
echo/ You never possessed me/ Never possessed me.” That song
ends in a half cadence, forever unresolved.
Here’s another thing I hadn’t clocked in past
performances: “Gone Missing,” though delightful, is a
little thin. It seems to have been written by young
people who are curious about loss rather than by
older people — or different younger people — who are
actually living it. So it’s Friedman’s too-short life — all
the things he didn’t do and all the scores he didn’t
write — that fleshes out “Gone Missing,” deepens it

It matters who you know,
and in 1997, the 21-year-
old Jason Eagan knew
almost no one in New York.
But quality can indeed
make up for quantity. One
contact — the illustrator Ian
Falconer, now of “Olivia”
fame — ushered him into a
glamorous downtown
crowd. Another, Julie
Taymor, pointed him toward
a behind-the-scenes job on
“The Lion King.”

At the Encores performance, I caught some jokes that had whizzed
past me before. From the Gershwin-ish “The Only Thing Missing”:
“Think what my nephew Chris/ Just lost at his bris.” Because yes, ha
ha ha, foreskin. But also, who names a Jewish kid Chris? And don’t tell
me Friedman needed the name for the rhyme, because he could
rhyme anything. I give you “Etch A Sketch,” a song about memory loss,
which pairs “tabula rasa” and “Kinshasa.”

In the half a lifetime since he arrived from his native Los
Angeles with dreams of directing on Broadway, Mr. Eagan has
made himself into a vital New York someone for many other
artists to know.
For the past 15 years, he has been the remarkably well-
connected, stealthily low-profile, principal creative force
shaping the innovative Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova.
From its base on West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, Mr.
Eagan, the 43-year-old founding artistic director, has built a
formidable record as a spotter and nurturer of outside-the-
box talent.

The group’s work has been produced at theatres all over the country:
at the Public Theater and the Vineyard Theatre (New York City), at
Center Theatre Group, A.R.T. (Cambridge, MA), La Jolla Playhouse
(La Jolla, CA), HBO’s US Comedy Festival (Aspen, CO), Studio
Theatre (Washington, DC), and the Actors Theatre of Louisville
(Louisville, KY) to name a few. Since making their first show with only
“six dollars and a pack of gum,” the company has expanded
ambitiously. Currently, they have their hands full with a diverse range
of projects varying in topics and styles. They are working on: You
Better Sit Down: Tales From My Parents’ Divorce, a play made from
the artists’ interviews with their divorced parents (first performed on
13 November 2009 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, NY) that has
also been made into a series of short video clips broadcast online
through the WNYC website (http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/ civilians/)

For More Information Visite The
Link
https://www.stevecosson.com

Thank You