Nobody's Lunch: What's Eating at America?

Let's just say, as an experiment, that your name is Jessica Lynch. You're not Jessica Lynch, but you're, ya know, Jessica Lynch. And you're minding your own business out in Oregon or Arizona or wherever and one day you get a phone call from a complete stranger who's a member of an Obie-winning New York theatre company and he/she wants to ask you what you think of the whole Jessica Lynch situation. For no other reason than the fact that your name is Jessica Lynch. Oh, and what you say might be included in their new production at P.S. 122.

That's a little bit of the inspired madness of The Civilians' Nobody's Lunch, an eccentric performance piece written and directed by Stephen Cosson (with songs by Michael Friedman) constructed from interviews with average and not so average Americans.

Part play, part cabaret, part revue, the subject of Nobody's Lunch is information; how we get it, what we do with it and if we trust it. A talented cast (Damian Baldet, Daoud Heidami, Christina Kirk, Alix Lambert, Caitlin Miller, KJ Sanchez and Baron Vaughn) plays a variety of roles, each popping in and out throughout the text.

A homeland security worker tells of defects in a student visa tracking system while an Egyptian grad student expresses fear of the suspicion his presence in this country arouses. An advertising executive explains the racially based statistics she uses in product promotion. A freelance writer travels to the Ivory Coast to do a feature for the New York Times on child slave labor. When she's asked to find one child to focus on, she the combines the experiences of several young boys into one in order to create a more interesting story. And of course, several women named Jessica Lynch, including Miss New York 2003, are randomly called.

Musical theatre aficionados will appreciate a Gershwin parody, "Someone to Keep Me Warm", sung by a woman who claimed to have once been a 19-year-old sex slave for the CIA ("Not just some stage door John / Who'll venerate me. / The one I'm set upon / Will dominate me.") and the outstanding Kurt Weill/Bertold Brecht inspired "Song of Progressive Disenchantment". ("Johnny, take that f-ing Nicorette Gum out of your mouth, creep.") The latter song gets the benefit of a splendid comic turn by Caitlin Miller (the politically minded Tammy from Off-Broadway's Debbie Does Dallas). Miller's dexterity with verbal humor makes her scenes the highlights of the piece.

Although funny and/or thought-provoking throughout, Nobody's Lunch suffers from a lack of dramatic structure, which can wear on you as the scenes follow one after another in a seemingly haphazard fashion. But just when things start to grind a bit, someone makes an absurd comment or calls to mind a tragic situation to perk up your attention, especially when you keep in mind that everything said was once spoken by a real-life person in earnest.

For more information visit ps122.com

 

For Michael Dale's "mad adventures of a straight boy living in a gay world" visit dry2olives.com

To post a comment, you must register and login.