Off-Broadway group tackles complex subject of loss through interviews

NEW YORK – If you’ve ever lost something – say, a cell phone or a favorite ring – and never gave it a second thought, congrats.\nBut if it really bums you out – still stings, even years later – an edgy off-Broadway theater group feels your pain.\nThe Civilians offer a thoughtful and sometimes looney show about forgotten wallets, missing childhood sock puppets, the lost island of Atlantis, squandered inheritance and even an absent Gucci pump, size 6.\n“I think it challenges people to re-evaluate their relationship to their attachments,” says Stephen Plunkett, one of the show’s six performers.\nWith a mix of monologues, dialogues and songs, the actors in “Gone Missing” read missing dog posters, recreate radio interviews and portray a handful of regular folks talking about their missing stuff.\nThere’s a story about a wife’s diamond ring stupidly lost down the shower drain and a woman’s lament about her still-prized Agnes B scarf which, she fears, is now likely balled up in the back of some dude’s SUV.\nAt various points in the show the actors – each wearing identical gray suits – burst into original songs by Michael Friedman, turning the show into a kind of docu-cabaret.\n“I think the upshot of the show is that: You lose everything. That’s just a reality. And that’s not necessarily an answer,” Plunkett says. “It just sort of tosses it up to you to be like, ‘How do you feel about that?’”\nThe quirky approach can produce something else lost – audience members. The company recalls one very drunk woman getting up and leaving during a recent performance at the Barrow Street Theatre. “The music is great, but I don’t know what they’re talking about,” she loudly announced as she stumbled up the aisle, slurring her words.\n“You either go with it or you don’t,” says Robbie Collier Sublett, another performer. “You can’t twist somebody’s arm about it and sometimes they stop going with it three-fourths of the way through.”\nThe play, born in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, has been staged in Tennessee, New England, California, London, Kentucky and Colorado. This is its second time in New York\n“The running gag is it’s the show that won’t die. It’s been around for a long time,” says Sublett.\n“It’s our ‘Fantasticks,’” jokes actress Colleen Werthmann.\nThe Civilians, who take their name from an old vaudeville term for people not in show biz, is the brainchild of artistic director Steven Cosson. A 38-year-old graduate of the University of California at San Diego, Cosson asks his 28-actor company to conduct interviews themselves and capture their subjects on stage.\n“The first thing that hooked me on talking to real people as a way of making theater was just wanting to speak to people in the first place. Making theater was just a secondary bonus,” Cosson says.\nHis philosophy – based on techniques formulated by Les Waters at London’s Joint Stock Theater Group – encourages portraits of people saying extraordinary and ordinary things.\n“It’s like an intuitive impression,” says Plunkett. “It’s hard to articulate, but you just sort of listen to someone and give yourself to them. It does something to the inside of you.”\nWerthmann, Damian Baldet and Jennifer R. Morris were in the play’s debut in 2002, which means they did the original interviews. They estimate audiences are seeing only about 30 percent of the material culled. Actors new to the show have either studied the original performers on DVD or gone back to the subjects in person to learn their inflections and mannerisms firsthand.\n“It’s like a true oral tradition,” Werthmann says.