A scene from the "docu-cabaret" Gone Missing. From left, The Civilians: Emily Ackerman, Stephen Plunkett, Colleen Werthmann, Jennifer R. Morris, Robbie Collier Sublett and Damian Baldet. (Sheldon Noland/ Civilians)

It’s bound to happen. No matter how close an eye you keep on your personal effects, you will lose something. Your wallet. Your umbrella. Your sense of perspective. Even, heaven forfend, your mind.

The musical Gone Missing concerns itself with this very litany of vanished treasures. The glimmering revue debuted in 2002 at a Brooklyn art space, was revived two years later at a converted belt factory, and has just resurfaced as Off-Broadway’s current darling. An engagement at the Barrow Street Theater that was supposed to wrap up this month has just been extended until next January.

The “docu-cabaret” is the brainchild of The Civilians, a New York company that takes an innovative approach to theatre, basing its productions on historical research, media transcripts, and man-on-the-street interviews. Reality theatre is nothing new, of course, but its practitioners have historically gravitated toward in-your-face subjects, such as airplane crashes, death row inmates, and, yes, vaginas.

The Civilians, thankfully, leave hard-nosed politics to others, opting to explore quirkier themes that don’t invite clear-cut interpretations. The group sees its productions as staged investigations, and their collage-like scripts draw from interviews that the company members personally conduct. Since the collective formed in 2001, their shows have centred on topics such as masculinity, the Colorado Springs evangelical Christian community, and how people get their news (in the last case, interviewees included a Homeland Security staffer who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and everybody in the phone book who shared a name with Jessica Lynch, the American soldier whose capture by Iraqi forces was misrepresented by the U.S. government for propaganda purposes).

The subjects of Gone Missing aren’t the most extraordinary bunch. As a loudspeaker announcement informs the audience, the show is the direct result of interviews with “friends, strangers, people we met on the internet and in bars.” A team of about a dozen actors and assistant directors talked to nearly a hundred volunteers, including a stockbroker-turned-pet psychic, a Korean deli owner, and a French lesbian. They were all asked to tell their interviewers about the thing they lost that they miss the most — the one rule being that the answers couldn’t be “a loved one”.

“We were thinking about doing a show about marketing,” says Colleen Werthmann, an actor in the company. “And then Sept. 11 happened and every idea we had seemed completely stupid and irrelevant. We were messed up and demoralized and we felt this tremendous sadness.” Steven Cosson, the group’s artistic director, says examining lost objects was a notion that the group had been kicking around for some time before the attacks. “It wasn’t a direct response, but it took place within a context,” he says. “All of a sudden, the idea seemed to take on a new meaning, it became more interesting and worthwhile.”

After settling on the theme of the show, the troupe approached people at nursing homes, falafel stores, and internet chat rooms. “Everyone had an answer right away,” says Werthmann. “There was a lot of ‘I lost my ring when I went fishing when I was seven,’ but some people got really deep about it.” Werthmann’s interview with her mother inspired the hysterical Midwestern character who lost — and then happily found — a sock puppet named Sniffles.

From left: Robbie Collier Sublett, Emily Ackerman, Damian Baldet (front), Stephen Plunkett, Colleen Werthmann and Jennifer R. Morris in a scene from Gone Missing. (Sheldon Noland/Civilians)

The play kicks off with a peppy title song in which half a dozen actors, all dressed in slate gray suits and jerking about like arthritic members of Devo, lament things lost — a sweater, socks, a sense of humour. The cast members proceed to slip in and out of more than 30 characters, all of whom have little in common except for their trouble with holding onto things. There’s the amped-up woman from Los Angeles who is convinced she left a black Gucci pump in a New York bathroom stall. There’s the World Trade Center security guard who lost his Palm Pilot in the Sept. 11 attacks. There’s the Scottish man who, after going through a divorce, could not remember the word “lamppost.” All of the characters are based on interviews except for one — an invented academic who studies the lost civilization of Atlantis and who provides commentary on nostalgia’s critical role in our lives.

At the outset, director and playwright Cosson’s jumble of mini-tales breezes by at rapid fire, but the production is shot through with melancholy, an underpinning that builds to a head by the finale. “I think it can be strange but ultimately liberating to see the world as a series of losses instead of a series of gains,” says Cosson. “As the show accumulates, it adds up to an experience of the universal nature of change. You stand a little more firmly on the earth when you realize it’s changing and moving around. Things do go away and people do die.”

This meditative sentiment is buoyed by composer Michael Friedman’s songs, which are as plangent as they are playful. In the tradition of the Magnetic Fields, Friedman lifts styles as disparate as salsa, Andrews Sisters’ harmonizing, and Coldplay-esque weepies and attaches to them winsome lyrics (to wit: “Even Barbie had her Ken /I’m left with rien”).

When the show was first staged, it undoubtedly touched on the spirit of New York post-Sept. 11, but by this point it speaks to more universal concerns. The larger questions that the show raises — Who are we without our clutter? Why do we desire things we no longer have? Why do things seem better in retrospect? — are finely balanced out by asides that poke fun at us for trying to ascribe value to every little incident. A man who is talking about the dinner set that he and his three roommates used to have pauses, presumably to hear out an interviewer’s follow-up question. “No, it didn’t make us closer!” he snaps. “It made us eat better.”

Near the end, the show sobers up, ending with a rueful meditation on memory loss. A singer likens his failing mind to a children’s toy — “I’m an Etch A Sketch /And now I’m all shook up” — and then our lost Atlantis expert explains to an earnest radio host that there’s joy as well as pain in nostalgia. Or, as he puts it, “Cookies taste better in the mind.”

The actor Werthmann is reluctant to suggest what other people should take away from the play, though she personally sees it as a meditation on how arbitrary objects have a way of furnishing us with a sense of identity. “I think that’s why people find it traumatizing when they move,” she says. “It’s a jangling moment when they look around at the boxes and they realize that their lives are just a bunch of objects.”

In much the same way, one emerges from this play feeling unanchored. How is it possible that a misplaced sock puppet will reduce an entire family to tears? Why would a reasonable grown-up talk about an old scarf as if it were the Messiah? Are we simply incapable of appreciating what we have, or is something more unsettling at play: that we have to wait until something has vanished before we can attach meaning to it?

It’s hard not to wonder if paradise was quite so beautiful before it was lost.

Lauren Mechling is a New York-based writer.

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