So baby gimme dat "Toot toot"

Illustration

Image hosting by PhotobucketSo on Friday night Sari and I attended the premiere of The Civilians’ Nobody’s Lunch, and I finally got to see the promo postcard I did. Turns out they also used my art for the posters advertising the show (one of them was five feet high!), and for the program. And perhaps the biggest compliment of the evening was finding out afterward that one of the show’s key props — the “suspicious package” — was based on my drawing!

The production itself was amazing. Nobody’s Lunch is a plotless cabaret-style fragmented mirror image of our current society. We all know we’re being lied to — by the government, by the media, by our own families — and yet we don’t care. Plus alien remote viewers and lizard-men! It’s scary, depressing, funny, and entertaining. The songs were great, and the cast of six wowed us with their performances. Sari & laughed our butts off, and then had a lot to talk about afterwards. (There’s a pretty insightful review in today’s Times that pretty well echoes my thoughts on it.)

I’m tickled to be associated with The Civilians — especially now that I’ve seen one of their productions — and I encourage you to see the show yourself before their limited New York run ends.

Nobody's Lunch

Illustration, Work

The Civilians — an interesting New York-based independent theater company — contacted me about collaborating with them earlier this year. Their mission is to “develop original projects based in the creative investigation of actual experience.” Right up my alley. I’m working on a two-pager comix adaptation of a monologue from a previous show, Gone Missing, which I gather was well-attended and critically acclaimed. I hope to post that collaboration soon.

In the meantime, Civilians artistic director Steve Cossen asked me to draw the announcement card for their next show, (I am) Nobody’s Lunch (A Cabaret About How We Know What We Know When Nobody Knows if Everyone Else is Lying and When Someone or Something Wants to Have You for Lunch). Whew! (The show will run Jan. 19 – Feb. 6 at 59E59 in NYC before moving on to Philly and Cambridge, MA.)

As Steve put it, “The show is about the floating fear and paranoia in post 9/11-America, and that while the show’s subject is dark, our approach is eccentric and well, funny… So as our main marketing piece, the card should encourage someone to come have a good time watching a show about bad things. Basically — creepy in a fun way.” And then he mentioned that he wanted the card to feature a suspicious package, and a bartender who turns into lizard. (That’s a theme of the play, which I read and is AMAZING.) No problem! Oh, and the card is almost a foot long (and, yes, it’s supposed to be cut off like that.)

So here’s what I came up with:

Nobody's Lunch