SPSCC brings live theater back to campus for ‘I am Nobody’s Lunch’

The South Puget Sound Community College Theatre Collective’s “I Am Nobody’s Lunch” is a play/cabaret whose premise — that finding truth is complicated when everyone seems to be lying — could have been pulled from recent news reports.

But in this time of pandemic, what’s most newsworthy is that the production will be performed live. In a theater. With a live audience.

Of course, “Lunch,” opening Thursday, June 10, won’t look the way plays did in the before times. Both audience members and performers will be masked and physically distanced.

“We are using transparent masks that work well for the performers and almost disappear as you watch,” said Lauren Love, the production’s director and SPSCC’s theater professor.

Timely though it sounds, “Lunch” — which Love calls a “docu-musical” — premiered in 2006 and examines the run-up to the Iraq War and how more-or-less ordinary Americans were feeling about the situation.

It’s the creation of the Brooklyn, New York-based collective The Civilians, known for interviewing a broad swath of people and weaving their words and worries into shows that combine “Saturday Night Live”-style sketch comedy with cabaret-style song and dance numbers.

In a 2006 review, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called the show “a funny, searching, at times plaintive look at the dangerous blurring of fact and myth in American culture and the unease that is its natural byproduct.”

Though he called the show “merrily unserious,” Isherwood noted its serious subject: “the elusiveness of truth in a culture swamped with stuff that looks, sounds and smells like information — but may be something a little more suspicious.”

No wonder the play stood out when Love and musical director John Guarente, a music professor at the college, began looking at several of The Civilians’ works, whose monologue-heavy format makes them a natural choice to work within the limits of social distancing.

“Though the interviews and themes in ‘Nobody’s Lunch’ center loosely around 9/11 and our national response, it really draws on this period to explore the ways humans deal with a saturation of information and misinformation,” Love told The Olympian.

Among the themes of the play, she said, are “suspicion of media outlets and government sources of information, investment in highly personalized sources, belief in conspiracy theories and overall loss of connection to a collective agreement about what is true.”

The cast includes several actors who might look familiar — Heather Matthews, Jesse Morrow, Christine Goode and Mike Gregory — along with SPSCC students Alexis Tisby, Ayu Uematsu and Julian Owen. Live music is provided by multi-instrumentalist Guarante and pianist Art Peterson, and the choreography was created by Nicholas Main, who’s acted in several shows at Harlequin Productions as well as at SPSCC.

Among the characters they play are a policy maker on the verge of collapse, a senior citizen who’s devoted to Fox News, several women who just happen to be named Jessica Lynch, and an alien being channeled by a friend of playwright/director Steve Cosson.

Remember, these characters are all based on real people, though that doesn’t mean you have to believe in the alien, who apparently has advice to share with the troubled people of Earth.

‘I Am Nobody’s Lunch’

• What: The South Puget Sound Community College Theatre Collective’s first in-person production of 2021 is part documentary, part sketch comedy and part cabaret.
• When: 7 p.m. Thursday, June 10 through Saturday, June 12, plus 2 p.m. Sunday, June 13
• Where: The Minnaert Center for the Arts at SPSCC, 2011 Mottman Road SW, Olympia
• Tickets: $10 donation suggested. Reservations are encouraged, as only 82 seats are available for each performance; to reserve, email Lauren Love at llove@spscc.edu.

This story was originally published June 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.