from The New York Times

Public Lives
July 29, 2003

All the World's a Stage? Let's Research That
by Chris Hedges

It is hard to know what to call it. It is not exactly theater and certainly not journalism. It is meant to be, in the director's words, "an articulation of the time," but its subject matter is often obscure and remote from the swirl of daily events and world affairs. It is a form of expression, certainly, and it ends up on a stage, before sellout crowds, so perhaps theater will do until another word comes along.

Steve Cosson, 34, heads out into the city with a troupe of actors to research the lives of people whom they will then portray on stage, although since he does not take notes, and never uses real names, the end result is one gleaned more from perceptions and impressions than transcripts and strict adherence to fact. He builds each show around a theme, a theme that is often deceptively banal.

"Right now, we are preparing a show to explore how people understand world events," he said. "We want to look at how people know what they know, how they believe what they believe, how they form decisions to act and how they see the world. One actor is calling everyone we can find with the name Jessica Lynch and asking them to relate everything they know about the Jessica Lynch who was captured in Iraq."

This October at the Belt Theater in New York, Mr. Cosson will direct a series of vignettes in a show called "Gone Missing." His six actors play more than 30 characters. The characters, based on interviews, tell stories about things that have been lost. As in all his shows, it is musical, with songs by his collaborator Michael Friedman.

"I wanted to do a play that, after the attacks of 9/11, dealt with loss and what loss means for us," he said. "We build the stories progressively, so that we began with a woman who had lost a favorite scarf and end with an invalid who tells the audience that because of her situation, she has lost all that was valuable to her in life. In the interviews people would weep over objects that we might consider trifles lost often decades ago. Our only rule was that the object must never have been found."

Mr. Cosson, who is unable to make a living producing his plays, earns his keep as a grant writer. He is now working out of space at the Public Theater. He exists on the margins of the theater world, especially given his rather unorthodox approach to his plays. There are some directors, like Moisés Kaufman, who wrote "The Laramie Project," who take real events and produce theater that is tied closely to fact. But for Mr. Cosson, facts sometimes get in the way of the message.

"Everything we do is designed to create a theater that speaks directly to our time and place," he said. "This is our purpose. We want to reveal something about the present. We are not adverse to twisting stories."

The theater was an odd choice for Mr. Cosson, who grew up in a family of lawyers. His brother, father and sister-in-law are lawyers. His grandfather was a lawyer, and his great-grandfather was an attorney general of Iowa.

He was drawn not only to theater as a child but also to directing, getting his parents to act out bedtime stories. He and a playmate in elementary school wrote a play about Persephone's fall into the underworld. He wrote a play for his second-grade class. By third grade, he had won a playwriting competition sponsored by Children's Radio Theater in Washington, not far from his childhood home in Potomac, Md.

"It was agitprop," he said. "It was about an albino eagle whose parents die from DDT poisoning. But they wrote music for it and it was broadcast. It was the coolest thing that happened to me by the age of 8."

He plunged into the usual world of high school theater, although he acknowledges he is a mediocre actor. He perished on stage as Mercutio in "Romeo and Juliet."

"I acted my heart out," he said. "Unfortunately, there was no way that scene was not going to evoke gales of laughter among my high school classmates."

He was in three productions of "The Music Man." But by college, convinced that life in the theater was a hobby, not a passion, he was studying to be a biologist. Unfortunately, he said, he went to Dartmouth, a place where he felt on the margins of campus life.

"I did not know there were people my age that actually supported Ronald Reagan," he said. "It was the height of the culture wars. I had no idea what this New England prep school thing was about. I was confronted with a narrow elitism that drove me back into the theater. By sophomore year, I was a theater major."

He went on to study directing at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and moved to San Francisco to produce obscure productions that he and others wrote.

"These were plays that could not get produced anywhere else," he said of that time in California. In 1999, he moved to New York.

He poured most of his actors into a van when he was told, erroneously, it turned out, that after the Walt Disney Company filmed "Fly Away Home," it abandoned the geese in the film on a lake in upstate New York, where the birds supposedly froze to death.

"We wrote a play that tracks this misled documentary project," he said. "We came into town with one perception and found out our assumptions were false. We wanted to examine this as well."

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