The Civilians have announced the premiere of a new interactive performance series, You Better Sit Down: Tales from My Parents' Divorce at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn on November 12th, 13th, and 14th at 8pm. Created by Civilians actors Matthew Maher, Caitlin Miller, Jennifer Morris, and Robbie Sublett, director Anne Kauffman and dramaturg Janice Paran You Better Sit Down was developed from the actors' interviews with their own parents, exploring their parents' marriages and subsequent divorces. The actors will portray their parents in these live performances, retelling their stories in a unique theatrical event. The performances will also be captured in a high-definition, multi-camera shoot and edited into episodes for online release.
The evening explores each couple's first meeting, the ups and downs of their marriage, their split, and the surprising perspectives on life after divorce. In these alternately funny, devastating, revelatory, and moving performances, the four actors are the conduits of their parents' stories and, inevitably though sometimes inadvertently, also of their own experiences of family division. This provocative show reveals the stories behind the statistics of one of the most prominent social phenomena of our time.
In order to further explore the widespread phenomena of divorce in the modern world, the live show will later be converted into interactive online content. The innovative video series will prominently feature footage from the filmed performances, original music, animation, and audio clips from the actors' actual interviews with their parents. These exciting episodes distributed online will go beyond the live performance to participate in the ongoing dialogue about divorce in our society.
Founded in 2001 by
Steven Cosson, The Civilians is an investigative theater company, creating new work from the creative exploration of real life. The company interacts with the public at each stage of the creative process, drawing the artists into the full complexity of the human experience. Working with this dynamic combination of journalism and art, The Civilians creates theatrical events that promote an inquisitive curiosity about the world and an engagement with the most vital questions of the present. The Civilians' has created nine original works of theater that have been produced Off Broadway, nationally and internationally, at theaters such as The Public Theater,
Center Theatre Group (Mark Taper),
La Jolla Playhouse, A.R.T., HBO's US Comedy Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival, London's Soho Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Fringe First Award, 2006) among many others. Examples of recent work include This Beautiful City, a play with music about the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs which had three regional productions followed by a critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theater in 2009 receiving
Lucille Lortel, Drama League and Drama Desk nominations. The company's long-running hit Gone Missing toured the US and the UK for several years culminating in a seven-month Off Broadway run at the Barrow Street Theater and was cited by The New York Times as one of the "10 Best Plays of 2007."
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