Review: ‘Gone Missing,’ Now a Poignant Reminder of a Life Cut Short

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WELCOME
To
STEVE COSSON
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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 shows composer,
Michael Friedman, who died a year
ago from AIDS-related complications. Which makes
Gone Missing an accidental and indispensable
elegy.
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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.
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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.
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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 Garcias
choreography decidedly low profile and Mr.
Schmolls direction affectionate and barely
there. The actors still carry scripts, though
that is no bar to Mr. Macs dangerous enthusiasm
or Ms. Blackwells mild-mannered insanity or Ms.
Celiks infectious disdain.
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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 hadnt
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. Macs
dangerous enthusiasm or Ms. Blackwells
mild-mannered insanity or Ms. Celiks infectious
disdain.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times
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This is a thing about Friedmans compositions. In
the moment, they can seem disposable pastiche.
But their lightness is indelible. Theres
surprise in the way that the recognizable
signatures play against the brainy, wrong-footing
rhymes.
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That said, the songs dont sound the same. Were
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.
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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 dont 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.
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I heard something else in that song, a rhymed
chorus that didnt really rhyme Im an Etch a
Sketch (But now Im all shook up)/ Im a piece of
wax (But now the imprints lost.) That slant
rhyme makes the song deliberately unfinished.
Its up to us listeners to make it whole.
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There was audible sobbing during Etch A Sketch
and more during the final song Stars, which has
a verse so apt its pretty much unbearable So
when I leave you, youll know, Im just a shadow,
an echo/ You never possessed me/ Never possessed
me. That song ends in a half cadence, forever
unresolved. Heres another thing I hadnt 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 its Friedmans too-short life
all the things he didnt do and all the scores he
didnt write that fleshes out Gone Missing,
deepens it and gives it context.
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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. 
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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 Hells 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.
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The groups 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), HBOs 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/)
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For More Information Visite The Link
https//www.stevecosson.com
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Thank You
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