“If a voice speaks to me, it is still my self who must decide: whether the voice is or is not that of an angel… In making the decision, [one] cannot but feel a certain anguish.”
—Jean Paul Sartre
This past September has re-introduced many of us to the concept of anguish. Between the political chaos at home, the political chaos abroad, the FCC flirting with fascism, Ezra Klein falling on the sword of his milquetoast liberalism (for which we thank Ta-Nehisi Coates), dreams of a just and peaceful society seem to be just that, dreams, overshadowed by twin menaces of anger and hatred. And yet, September 2025 would have also seen the 50th birthday of composer, lyricist and eternal Civilian, Michael Friedman, had he not passed away in 2017. Friedman’s mode of operation—capacious and generous and specific—was rare and is deeply missed. He was curious enough about America to write songs about this deeply divided country, using verbatim language from conversations with various constituents, and wild-minded enough to write an emo-rock musical about Andrew Jackson. (I recommend the following song for head-banging purposes). But before all that, was Stranger, an early musical of Friedman’s, conceived and created with close friends/collaborators Trip Cullman and Micah Schraft.
The abandoned musical, which had a reading in August courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, is both delightful and difficult, as good satire ought to be. Beyond its tendency to revel in the worst parts of human nature, Stranger is also quite prescient. Re-visiting the piece, courtesy of a recorded livestream—which you can find here—I find that humming beneath the blood, incest and racism the characters shed, commit, and espouse, is a surgical understanding of whiteness and American nationalism that is perfectly on-time for and in tune with this moment. Stranger, based on the Italian film Teorema, follows the disintegration of a wealthy family after a stranger enters their home, seduces them, then vanishes. As you might imagine, this does not end well for anyone involved; by the end of the musical, three of the main characters are dead.
Before the Stranger’s appearance, Paul, Penny, Polly, and Peter Pierce live a life of medium volume desperation, aided and abetted by pills, obsessions, and astonishing levels of delusion. All are rendered in archetype. The father Paul: impotent, sensitive, lost; Penny, the mother: self-medicated, self-involved, sexually repressed. Polly, the daughter: caustic, cruel, fragile; her brother, Peter: silent, yearning, anxious. And of course, their Mexican housekeeper, Serafina: devout, simmering, lonely—and as we find out later, hiding a terrible secret. In these characters, we find unflattering sketches of human nature created by artists reveling in their powers of irony, but through the critique of a hollow bourgeois “satisfaction”, humanity peeks through.
The Pierces, like many lulled by the promise of comfort and security, have abnegated their responsibility, what Wittgenstein would call the will, to preserve a shell of normalcy with no real meaning. If Sarte could see them, he might say they live in a quiet state of abandonment that begins even before the Stranger’s electric presence crackles through their faulty wiring. Sarte believed that humans feel cosmic abandonment because there is neither God, nor higher power by which we might determine our essence and subsequently, the shape of our lives. “We ourselves,” he writes, “decide on being.” The absence of the Stranger is but a shadow, a foil, and a mirror to the Pierce’s inability to decide on who they will become outside of societal norms and pressures. Their true problem is a failure of imagination, and ultimately a failure of self-definition.
To further underscore this loss of meaning, Friedman’s music only begins about a third into Stranger, once the family realizes that the Stranger has vanished on them. Their consternation and despair opens enough of an emotional window for emotion, and therefore singing, to take place. The characters sing that they are turning into a “pillar of salt,” a reference to Lot’s wife who looks back as she flees Sodom and turns to salt. There’s a whole dissertation someone might write on the significance of this lyric, in the broader context of the Biblical passage; before fleeing, Lot welcomes two angels into his home who are so alluring, the men of the town gather outside Lot’s door threatening to break it down if they are not allowed to have sex with the strangers. But, I will leave such analysis to the video essayists and podcasters among us. What’s important to me about this song, is the contrast between the stranger, porous, sexually fluid, able to leave, and the rest—stuck, frozen, “pillared” by desire with nowhere to go, what some might simply call, grief. When we cannot metabolize grief, Stranger offers, we can’t survive.
The following lyrics, shared between Polly and Paul say as much:
“I hold onto hope, now throw me a rope ‘cause I’m drowning in oceans of nothing / Didn’t work out as planned, we’ve built empires on sand, when the rain comes, we’ll sink down to nothing/ Oh lovers beware and children take care, when you grow up, you grow into nothing.”
It’s not surprising that these two do not survive the play. Neither of them can imagine a future beyond nothingness and see the blank space of life as an abyss, instead of the zero of the Fool card. Penny and Peter, meanwhile, lead dark and crunchy lives on the streets of New York in pursuit of personal pleasures. Serafina becomes a martyr, with a shrine built in her honor. And of the Stranger, we never find out. Was he real? Was he Jesus, a devil? No one says. It’s the kind of absence that doesn’t require solving, one we don’t see any more, in this age where it sometimes feels as though a play is a proof, not an illustration of greater mysteries.
To this point, there’s an interview with Tony Kushner where Friedman plays the interviewer, and seeing Kushner in front of his massive wall of books, thoughtfully answering Friedman’s questions, left me struck with deep nostalgia for the kind of 2000s theater Stranger represents. What drew me to theater initially was the sense that the questions that plague us all, questions around love, sex, death and politics, reasonable, creative and intelligent adults were getting together in a room and having conversations about them. But reflecting on Friedman’s tragic death, it feels that he too was a stranger of a kind, emerging into this tangle with frankness and vanishing as he came, leaving us with more questions than answers. Like the Pierce family, we too have been changed indelibly by this encounter. For that, what else can we say but thank you?
Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.
