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Courtroom

Visit any courtroom in the USA—they are open to the public—and you will find yourself surrounded by theater, politics, history, law, performance, drawing, and community. If you want to understand the community you live in, simply sit in a courtroom and pay attention. For several years, I have been sitting in on court cases making sketches in the tradition of courtroom artists, and writing down verbatim snippets of legal exchanges and conversations during the proceedings. I’ve observed lawyers, judges, witnesses, family members, jurors, stenographers, officers, and defendants as they all pass through the courtroom. My drawings and interviews have captured the range of experiences that can be found in any court: from people facing life-changing decisions to those simply going about their everyday work. The resulting images and text are a portrait of our criminal justice system and, by extension, a portrait of America—how the system treats its citizens and how we treat each other.

Coming Soon// $20.00

Script

Paris Commune

Paris Commune is musical play which brings the explosive events of 1871 to life, as working-class Parisians overthrew the French government, declared Paris autonomous and launched an attempt to radically reinvent society. The show employs a bold theatrical form to tell the story of this first socialist revolution in Europe. It uses found texts and original songs from the time period to tell the story of this extraordinary event in which the Parisian community radically reimagined its entire society. Paris Commune was praised for its “dizzy exhilaration” by The New York Times and called a “wistfully, tunefully scholarly collage” by New York Magazine and “passionate and cleverly constructed” by The Boston Globe. Paris Commune had its world premiere in the 2012 BAM Next Wave Festival and ArtsEmerson in Boston, with previous productions at The Public Theater and La Jolla Playhouse. The album features Kate Buddeke, Aysan Celik, Charlotte Dobbs, Rebecca Hart, Nina Hellman, Daniel Jenkins, Brian Sgambati, and Sam Breslin Wright, with an ensemble including Randy Blair, Ally Bonino, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, and Jonathan Raviv.

Buy Here// $20.00

Cast Album

(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch

(I Am) Nobody’s Lunch, a dark ride through the landscape of American public culture, asks the thorny question — how do we know what we know when everyone in power seems to be lying? Is it possible to know what’s really going on in the world when information is manipulated to serve particular interests? Delving into the politics of information, The Civilians conducted extensive interviews with subjects ranging from a policymaker to a plucky extraterrestrial to soldiers guarding the New York subway. Turning these subjects into a mercurial cabaret-play, a versatile cast inhabits an eccentric cast of characters, all taken from real life. The New York Times hailed the show as “a funny, searching, at times plaintive look at the dangerous blurring of fact and myth in American culture.” Time Out New York called it “an elegant balance of intellectual inquisitiveness, political comment and sly entertainment.”

Download or Stream Here

Cast Album

Paris Commune

Download or Stream Here

Cast Album

The Great Immensity - The Michael Friedman Collection

The Great Immensity, a thrilling and timely production originally presented in association with The Public Theater and Kansas City Rep, is a continent-hopping thriller following a woman, Phyllis, as she pursues her husband Karl who disappeared from a tropical island while on an assignment for a nature show. Through her search, Phyllis uncovers a mysterious plot surrounding the upcoming international climate summit in Paris. As the days count down to the summit, Phyllis must decipher the plan and possibly stop it in time. With a wide-ranging score, the show is a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: how can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us? It was praised for its “enlivening humor” by The New York Times, which added “Mr. Friedman’s limber melodies are the perfect match for his often droll lyrics.” The album features Cindy Cheung, John Ellison Conlee, Dan Domingues, Trey Lyford, Erin Wilhelmi, and an ensemble of Ally Bonino, Erica Dorfler, and Billy Hepfinger.

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Cast Album

This Beautiful City

This Beautiful City, co-written with Jim Lewis from interviews by the original company (Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Stephen Plunkett, and Alison Weller), is a play with music that explores the Evangelical movement in Colorado Springs, its unofficial U.S. capital. While the company was conducting interviews in the city, a battle over gay marriage led to some unexpected outcomes, primarily the revelation about New Life Church’s politically influential pastor Ted Haggard’s secret life of gay sex and crystal meth, which quickly became an international news sensation. The Civilians project looks at this event and others in Colorado Springs as a microcosm of issues facing the country as a whole — the shifting line between church and state, and conflicting ideas of freedom between civil society and religious groups that attempt to shape our world according to their beliefs. The New Yorker praised the show as “Vivid, agenda-free and marked by a benevolent irony.” The album features Emily Ackerman, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Brad Heberlee, Stephen Plunkett, Conor Ryan, and Alison Weller, and an ensemble of Ally Bonino, Ben Moss, Sabina Petra, and Stephen Schapero.

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Cast Album

The Abominables

The Abominables, which opened at Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis in 2017, is a hilarious and satirical musical about the wildly high-stakes world of suburban youth hockey. Mitch has always played on the A team for the Prairie Lake Blizzards. They’ve played together forever, but he’s worried this could be the year he gets sent down to the B team. When a new kid, Harry, who happens to be a Yeti, appears at Bantam tryouts, Mitch’s world—along with his family—gets turned upside down, leading Mitch to undertake a series of progressively dastardly attempts to regain his place in the world. The album features John Behlmann, Audrey Bennett, Gerard Canonico, Daniel Jenkins, Mia Jenness, Alyse Alan Louis, Zell Murrow, Maria-Christina Oliveras, Brian Charles Rooney, and Johnny Shea, and an ensemble of Randy Blair, Jiho Kang, Sabina Petra, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, Curtis Reynolds, Sharone Sayegh, and Stephen Schapero.

Download or Steam Here

Script

The Civilians: An Anthology of Six Plays

Collected for the first time in one volume are six inventive theater pieces created by Obie Award-winning theater company The Civilians. Based on the creative investigation of actual experience, and often intertwined with experimental cabaret, their pieces are boldly theatrical and always unique — from a story about a Hollywood movie and a lost flock of geese (Canard, Canard, Goose?); to a tale about things lost and found, charting a musical landscape of loss (Gone Missing); to a dark ride through the landscape of American public culture, asking a thorny question: how do we know what we know when everyone in power seems to be lying? ((I Am) Nobody's Lunch).

Includes the plays Canard, Canard, Goose? by The Civilians, Gone Missing by The Civilians, (I Am) Nobody's Lunch by The Civilians, The Ladies by Anne Washburn, Paris Commune by Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman, Shadow of Himself by Neal Bell. With a foreword by Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater.

Playscripts // $18.95
Barnes and Noble // $18.95

Script

Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play

Anne Washburn’s imaginative dark comedy propels us forward nearly a century, following a new civilization stumbling into its future.

After the collapse of civilization, a group of survivors share a campfire and begin to piece together the plot of "The Simpsons" episode "Cape Feare" entirely from memory. 7 years later, this and other snippets of pop culture (sitcom plots, commercials, jingles, and pop songs) have become the live entertainment of a post-apocalyptic society, sincerely trying to hold onto its past. 75 years later, these are the myths and legends from which new forms of performance are created.

A paean to live theater, and the resilience of Bart Simpson through the ages, Mr. Burns is an animated exploration of how the pop culture of one era might evolve into the mythology of another.

Concord Theatricals // $19.95

Script

You Better Sit Down: Tales From My Parents' Divorce

Crafted from interviews between the cast and their own parents, YOU BETTER SIT DOWN is a heartbreaking and hilarious account of the parents’ marriages and their subsequent divorces. These delicate parent-child conversations have yielded unique insights into falling in love, falling out of love, and rebuilding a life after the complex experience of dividing a family. The show explores each couple’s first meeting, the ups and downs of their marriage, their split, and the surprising perspectives on life after divorce. This provocative show reveals the stories behind the statistics of one of the most prominent social phenomena of our time.

“In YOU BETTER SIT DOWN the truth about these four defunct marriages is laid bare with simplicity and honesty.” —NY Times.
“Relentlessly entertaining.” —New Yorker.
“[An] uncompromising and funny documentary theater piece.” —BackStage.
“Wryly entertaining…absorbingly candid.” —Village Voice.
“Riveting confessional theater.” —Variety.
“A fascinating chronicle of relationships and families.” —Flavorpill.com.

Dramatists Play Service // $10.00

Script

(I Am) Nobody's Lunch and Gone Missing

This latest creation from award-winning New York company The Civilians asks the thorny question: how do we know what we know when everyone in power seems to be lying? Featuring an eccentric cast of characters, plucked from real life and served in The Civilians’ signature style, (I am) Nobody’s Lunch is the finest example yet of this ground-breaking company’s dazzling new form.

Gone Missing: Stories of things lost and found… This critically-acclaimed hit brought The Civilians onto the international theatre scene, with performances in New York, California, at the HBO US Comedy Festival and London’s Gate Theatre in 2004.

Strand Books // $14.95
Oberon Books (UK)// $18.50

Script

This Beautiful City

THE STORY: THIS BEAUTIFUL CITY investigates the growth of the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs. While The Civilians were conducting interviews with people involved with or affected by the mega-church movement and the battle raging over gay marriage, the scandal broke about New Life Church pastor Ted Haggard, which shook the entire city of Colorado Springs, providing the play's creators with an unprecedented opportunity to capture an important event as it was taking place, and providing the people of Colorado Springs with the opportunity to express their opinions and concerns as those events unfolded. THIS BEAUTIFUL CITY is a fascinating and timely look at faith and how it affects the American landscape.

Dramatists Play Service // $12.00

Script

In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards

THE STORY: IN THE FOOTPRINT tells the story of Brooklyn's largest development project in history. The play examines the conflicts that erupted in the case of Atlantic Yards through to their current resolution in an attempt to discover how the fate of the city is decided in present-day New York and what can be learned from this ongoing saga of politics, money, and the places we call home. The play is constructed from interviews with real-life players in this Brooklyn epic, including local residents, business owners, opposition leader Daniel Goldstein, political leaders such as Letitia James and Marty Markowitz, activists, union members, and community leaders.

Dramatists Play Service // $12.00

Script

Gone Missing

THE STORY: A wry and whimsical documentary musical of loss devised from interviews with real-life New Yorkers by The Civilians, the acclaimed New York-based company. This collection of very personal accounts of things "gone missing"-everything from keys, personal identification and a Gucci pump to family heirlooms, your dog and your mind-creates a unique tapestry of the ways in which we deal with loss in our lives. A flexible company of six performs more than thirty characters, intertwining these stories of lost objects with tales from some unusual "finders," ranging from a retired NYPD cop to a pet psychic. Set against eclectic and tuneful songs by Michael Friedman, GONE MISSING is cabaret-theater about the little things in life seen largely.

Dramatists Play Service // $12.00