Theatergoers who venture to Actors Theater of Louisville to catch the incredibly gifted, serio-comic New York troupe called The Civilians during its limited run are not likely soon to forget this dazzling experience. In Gone Missing, written and directed by Steven Cosson from interviews conducted by the company, the wide-ranging theme of loss -- innocence, jewelry, pets, cell phones, shoes, toys, husbands, eyeglasses, self-worth, life itself -- is treated with humor, poignancy, anger, and resignation in witty indelible sketches and song. These six versatile actors with their marvelously expressive faces, razor-sharp timing and nimble way of transforming into various characters are breathtaking.
Their overlapping tales cover the macabre (a talkative cop obsessing about all the dead bodies found in New York), the shallow (an actress who can't find a lost shoe), the protectively parental (a father who forages through a dumpster to retrieve his daughter's lost sock doll), the foolishly erudite (a professor's hilariously glib discourse on Freud, eel testes, lost Atlantis, and the wide Sargasso Sea). Michael Friedman's music and lyrics (some in Spanish, French, and German) cleverly underscore the topic under discussion. Alison Weller's rueful "Hide and Seek" with its childhood memories, and Emily Ackerman's haunting "The Only Thing Missing is You" are wonderful, as is the company-sung "Etch a Sketch" about how minds once sharp can weaken.
One by one, at show's end, the actors in shadow fade from the stage, leaving their coats hanging from where they stood and giving instant, intense meaning to nostalgia.
