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. https://www.stevecosson.com/the-civilians-tv-pilot

1. STEVE COSSON

3. 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.

5. 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.

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

9. 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 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.

10. 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-

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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.”

15. 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.
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.

17. 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

18. 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 and
gives it context.

19. Set in the high-stakes world of Minnesota suburban youth
hockey, the Munson family revolves around their hockey-playing
oldest son Mitch, now 12 (even though there are two other
siblings, Tracy who also plays hockey, and youngest Lily). Mitch
has always played in the top tier and he must keep his place on
the A Team in this ever-so-critical last year of youth hockey if
he’s to have any chance of advancing in high school and beyond.
Mitch’s life is ruined, however, when a new kid, who happens to
be an exceptional player, beats him in tryouts. The new kid,
Harry, also happens to be a yeti, adopted by his exceptionally
adventurous and high-achieving mountain climber parents, Hank
and Judy. Over the course of hockey season, Harry leads the
Prairie Lakes Blizzards to greatness, possibly even to a victory
against the undefeatable youth hockey team of Thunder Bay in
Canada. Mitch, meanwhile, embarks on a mission to expel Harry

21. 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/)

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