Laurie Anderson’s funny, moving, and curious new monologue-in-progress is called Happiness, yet it began a week ago last Saturday at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with a dark overture. Anderson played a violin electronically doctored to cover the range of viola, cello, and bass with the added wallop of a synth string section on its low end. Although her light snatches of melody were joyful, the mood was colored by the broad strokes of foreboding dissonance she drew with her bow. Thus began a string of linked narratives that seemed to make the argument that "happiness" is simply a matter of the degree to which we’re able to survive and adapt to our world.

Not a cheery notion, but certainly appropriate to a time when diminishing fortunes and the escalating threat of war are setting the tone of American life. Indeed, even the tone of Anderson’s work. When we’d spoken the week before, she had said she was considering removing references to the September 11 terrorist attacks from Happiness. Yet they governed its beginning, as she recounted the way trucks full of rubble moving past her Lower Manhattan residence had changed her perception of her neighborhood. As she spun tales — many plucked from her own life — Anderson wove a constant, light gauze of electronic keyboard and rhythm sounds beneath her words. The music, mostly nondescript except for several captivating violin breaks, worked as glue as each vignette subtly or dramatically unfolded into the notion of survival. There was her account of her stay with an Amish family driven by anger and resentment, and how she endured what was supposed to be a silent Buddhism-inspired trip down the Green River after it was ruined by the presence of a shrill support group.

Anderson also probed the idea of how we edit reality to make the past or present tolerable. She talked — in a low-key but melodic fashion — about the long hospital stay she endured after breaking her back at age 12, and how she’d told the story many, many times in a fairly blithe manner until, recently, her memory was jogged and she recalled the buried truths — how the ward stank of burned flesh and echoed with crying children at night, and how many of those children died. She also used the current presidential saber rattling to illustrate how we can be led from the truth, making the point that, "in the end," figures like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are often "not even vaguely the one you’re looking for."