[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Spring 2023 Artist-in-Residence at the Greene Space is the theater company, The Civilians. The troop's work is described as investigative theater. Tonight at 7:00 PM, The Civilians present a showcase titled, Liveness: A Performance Made From The WNYC Archives. Using old school audio, the actors take the audience back to WNYC shows of the '60s and '70s, such as Michael Silverton's series with avant-garde poets and arts forum, which featured monthly interviews by filmmaker Jonas Mekas and film historian P. Adams Sitney.

Throughout the evening, The Civilians will revisit free-flowing 90-minute conversations, artistic thinkers, such as with experimental filmmakers, museum curators, and radical poets. All these conversations are peppered with the gritty sounds of the city from a bygone era. Liveness: A Performance Made From The WNYC Archives, the second of three installments of The Civilian's residency with the Greene Space. Their last show titled Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) featured improvised scenes and music using AI-generated content. Let's take a listen to part of a song that ChatGPT made for The Civilians to perform about ghost hunters.

[music - Ghost Hunters]

With ghost hunters, we're the team

We're the ones who will make you scream

We're here to find the spirits lost

In this abandoned cruise ship, our host.

Here we go

I'm the skeptic, the doubting voice

But I'm here to listen, I have no choice

I'm ready to see what's behind the veil

To uncover the truth and unveil

We're the ghost hunters, we're the best

We'll put our fears to the test

Alison Stewart: Join us today is Steve Cosson, the founding artistic director for The Civilians. Welcome to the studio.

Steven Cosson: Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here.

Alison Stewart: The company's been around for a little more than two decades. When and why did it form?

Steven Cosson: Well, it formed in 2001. I had just gotten out of graduate school and had been in New York for a couple of years and was working with all sorts of wonderful people, mostly in downtown theater. I realized that I wanted to do something different. I had this inspiration from some work that I'd done before that we didn't call it investigative theater at the time. We made up that term a little bit later. The whole idea was to make work by starting with some experience out in the real world, whether it's interviews or travel or immersion in a particular community. In order to do that work, I needed a theater company, so one was born.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Investigative theater, like you said, you made up the term, but it has meaning to you. You know what you're doing when you're making investigative theater. Explain to us what you're doing.

Steven Cosson: Yes. It can take many different forms, but the main idea is that it starts with some outward-looking investigation. Typically, that's interviewing, that's talking to people. Then as the company does interviews, we hear them in rehearsal and find our way into the content of the show by working back and forth between rehearsal and real people. The resulting show can be verbatim. It can be like a documentary where everything is exactly as it was said by the real person. It can also be fictionalized.

We did, as an example, a show about the adult industry in Los Angeles and immersed ourselves in the world of porn for a couple of months. Then a lot of the real stuff we got from those interviews made it in the show, but the writer of that musical, Bess Wohl, and Michael Friedman was the composer, fictionalized it as well and created a world for all the real voices to filter up.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting, and as you were describing it, it made me think of Dana H. or at the [crosstalk]

Steven Cosson: Which we originated.

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes. It's just so interesting, that idea of taking what really happened and then somehow putting it in the hands of actors, of professionals, that can help us understand it in a different way what really happened.

Steven Cosson: Yes, no, the interview with Dana H. was me interviewing Dana Higginbotham, the mother of the playwright Lucas Hnath.

Alison Stewart: That's such an amazing piece.

Steven Cosson: It truly is. I knew that Lucas's idea was to lip-sync from the recording from the beginning. I have to admit I had some doubts as to whether that would really play, and it was extraordinary, especially with Deirdre O'Connell, who won a Tony for lip-syncing to that audio.

Alison Stewart: She was really good in Becky Nurse of Salem. She's an amazing actor. Anyway, I understand that you had an artist-in-residency at the Met?

Steven Cosson: Yes. We were Artist-in-Residence for a year at the Metropolitan Museum. We created three shows over the course of that year that came from interaction with the museum, interviewing people as they were looking at paintings, interviewing curators, three documentary theater musical pieces about the Metropolitan Museum.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn from that experience that you've been able to apply to this artist-in-residency at the Greene Space?

Steven Cosson: I think one thing we learned was that you never know which part of an organization is going to yield up something interesting. I would say for whatever the project is, the investigative theater is in search of something that's going to be interesting and fun for people to have on stage. At the Met Museum, we took on a big project about the American Wing. That was one of the biggest shows that we did.

I find interviews with impromptu, man-on-the-street type things generally don't yield great stuff. I think it's a little bit too short, but the actors who were interviewing the random people walking around the American Wing, looking at art, ended up getting to these- some of them really quite intimate, extraordinary stories. We haven't yet delved into the world and staff of WNYC. As of yet, you guys are safe, but we--

Alison Stewart: Hey, you still have a third installment. There's time.

Steven Cosson: We have one more to do, and for this one, yes, we delved into the archives of WNYC when it was a very different radio station.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Steve Cosson. We are talking about The Civilians. They're the Artist-in-Residence at the Greene Space. Tonight at 7:00 PM, you can see their show Liveness: A Performance Made From The WNYC Archives. What were you looking for in the archives?

Steven Cosson: Honestly, when I began, I was looking for anything that I personally found to be interesting. I gravitated towards this arts forum show from the 1970s because it featured interviews with artists that I like, that have inspired me for whatever reason. I wanted to hear what Kenneth Anger had to say in 1971 or whenever that interview happened. I think it's so fascinating to go back in time and get a sense of what that past world, what the artists and the curators of the early '70s thought the future was going to be.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Steven Cosson: One interview that we picked up that I really like has a group talking about, what will art be in the year 2000? I guess you'll have to come to the show to find out what they said. It was very fascinating and revelatory.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's listen to an example. This is an interview with Kenneth Anger, I'm glad you said that, talking about typecasting Bobby-- Is it Beausoleil?

Steven Cosson: Beausoleil.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. For the role of Lucifer in his experimental short fantasy film, Lucifer Rising. Let's take a listen.

Kenneth Anger: "Bobby Beausoleil was a rock musician who had been with a group called Love, which has since disbanded in the flower children days. And I met him in the mid '60s in San Francisco, where he was playing it at the Glide Church benefit and, um--."

P. Adams Sitney: "That's where the, uh, The Filmmakers Cooperative of San Francisco ultimately-"

Kenneth Anger: "Uh-huh-"

P. Adams Sitney: "-found its home."

Kenneth Anger: "-and it's also the liaison for the- in the Patty Hearst case and it's been used for a lot of bizarre things. And, uh, I thought this-this young man, who was 19 at the time would-- Was the Lucifer I was looking for to play Lucifer in Lucifer Rising. And, uh, he was and is a very extraordinary, talented, young man."

Alison Stewart: What was it about that interview that really struck you, and then how could this be incorporated in the show?

Steve Cosson: I guess one thing that's really important to mention is the performance is created from the actual interviews being piped into the ears of the actors. They had a script that they could use as a reference, but we've put that aside, and they're going freestyle.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Bold.

Steve Cosson: It's amazing actually how quickly they picked it up. We've only been here since Wednesday rehearsing the show, and it really just took a couple of hours. Once they got the hang of it, it's like instant theater. Because the voice of the person, how they talk, what they're talking about, how the idiosyncrasies of when they pause or when they flub things up or mess up the words, it's all in there.

The other thing about Kenneth Anger was interested in artists who made film, who had some visual component to their work, because we are performing this in the Greene Space and we have a great video designer. We'll see various excerpts of the films of the three different filmmakers that are in the show.

Alison Stewart: What was the rehearsal process like? It was interesting you said, so they're sitting, you've only been rehearsing since Wednesday. How are you using the technology? How do you go about rehearsing something that-- I'm just curious of how it develops. I'm trying to imagine it.

Steve Cosson: Sure. Well, let's see. To maybe give a quick background. I wrote the script and made a document with everything edited together in time code and all that. Then our sound designer, who is Ryan Gamblin, took all of that and built the file. Essentially, the whole show, you just could press play and you could hear all these different interviews intercut. We are sending that track into the headphones of the actors. Once the rehearsal process began, they were instantly in character.

Then it's really been like a lot of repetition. Every time they do it, they get a little bit better at it. Then they can start acting more, figuring out what's happening in a little silence before a word, what thought might be gestating. It's the first time that I've actually worked like this. I've done I think pieces with recorded audio. Dana H. was a big one, but I didn't direct that one. This for me has been very much an experiment in how can you play with real audio and earpieces.

Alison Stewart: You said earlier, when radio sounded so much different, what was so different about the way radio sounded as you listened to all these archival clips?

Steve Cosson: Pretty much absolutely everything. These '70s art shows that I found in the archives page, the interviews go on for maybe 90 minutes some of them or an hour. You don't get the sense that anyone's prepared any questions, either the interviewer or the interviewee. In all of the interviews with the filmmaker, I think it must have been the interviewer's toddler was in the room with them.

We aren't using that in the show. We don't have somebody playing the toddler, unfortunately. Throughout the interview, you'll hear some kid make noises and sometimes they start screaming, and just as part of the background. I think some of the things that are said in these interviews, these are some genuine weirdos and in the best possible sense.

Some of the best brilliant weirdos that our culture has produced ended up on WNYC in these interviews. People like Harry Smith and George Kuchar, who's just a wonderful nut and a crazy filmmaker. Then to imagine turning on WNYC and hearing some of these stories and details that they're sharing is a-- If we heard it now, we would be very shocked, I would say.

Alison Stewart: Tonight at 7:00 PM, it is the second installment of The Civilian's residency at the Green Space, Liveness: A Performance Made From The WNYC Archives. I'm going to tell you to break a leg tonight. Also, letting people know on Monday, May 15th will be the third installment. We don't know what that is just yet.

Steve Cosson: No, we're getting very close to figuring it out. We'll have a title very soon.

Alison Stewart: Steve Cosson is the artistic director of The Civilians. Thank you so much for joining us and giving us a preview of tonight's performance.

Steve Cosson: Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[music]

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way. We'll talk to the filmmakers behind the film Judy Blume Forever, and we'll take your calls. That's after the news.

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