SOURCE: Horowitz, Simi. “Theaters Begin to Respond to September 11: Drama, Comedy, and Even a Musical Grace the Boards.” Back Stage 43, no. 23 (7 June 2002): 24-6.

[In the following essay, Horowitz presents an overview of the theatrical responses to the events of September 11, 2001.]

Presumption, pretension, and plain old bad taste (not to mention trivialization) are the potential—pitfalls, it would seem, in attempting to dramatize an apocalyptic event like Sept. 11, or, more precisely, responses to it. Nonetheless, the surfacing of plays and performances inspired by the catastrophe were inevitable. Indeed, there have been at least five NYC theatrical productions—two of which have received a fair degree of attention—dealing with the volatile subject matter.

There's social commentary, a la Lenny Bruce meets Woody Allen, in the world of the solo artist, Reno: Rebel without a Pause, Unrestrained Reflections on September 11. And there's realism, admittedly with a dash of lyricism tossed into the blend, from playwright Anne Nelson's autobiographical two-hander, The Guys. The latter (a soon-to-be-released film) recounts the evolving relationship between a female editor and a fire captain who has asked her to help him write eulogies for the many men he lost in the World Trade Center cataclysm The poetical moment, a flight of fancy on the editor's part, occurs when the casual acquaintanceship between editor and fire chief hints at the romantic as the two waltz about the room together; it's a sweet snippet. But, as noted, it is only a fantasy sequence.

On the cabaret front, September 11, 2001 … The Musical Response featured songs written by such notables as Ann Hampton Callaway, Tom Chapin, Kathie Lee Gifford, and Charles Osgood (newscaster on CBS), among others. Pulled together by impresario Erv Raible, the musical revue emphasizes the inspirational aspects of the tragedy, showing through song how people have forged ahead individually and collectively.

At Joe's Pub last January, the doyenne of angst-fueled irony, performance artist Sandra Bernhard, offered her spin on Sept. 11 with Inshallah, a one-woman piece that both mocks the concept of irony and, at the same time, shows just how pointed the irony has become in the wake of Sept. 11 (whatever the trendy topic: fashion, TV, even politics). The freewheeling commentary is interspersed with song—Bernhard is accompanied by her band, The Love Machine—and punctuated with Bernhard's calling-card expression: a large-mouthed, toothy smirk.

And the Present Company, a downtown theatre identified with the New York City International Fringe Festival, has gotten into the act, too. Its Response: Stories about What Happened consists of four short plays that emerge from visions across the stylistic spectrum, including one striking piece, The Uncaring Dog, that examines the almost wordless experiences of a crippled clown living in a Beckettian universe. Not surprisingly, this is a world devoid of rationality or pity.

Dependent on crutches and increasingly entangled (literally) in a dog leash attached to an offstage dog (who makes a brief appearance to perform a soft shoe with its owner), the little buffoon (Janet Cino) futilely attempts to scoop up pooch excrement on the ground. In the end, her efforts come to nothing; still, she is ashamed, guilty; and tries to propitiate the indifferent gods. “I'm sorry!” It's an existential howl to the heavens.

Back Stage talked with several of the players for their spins on what they had written, performed in, and/or directed—the obstacles they had encountered and what they hope they've achieved.

RANDOMNESS

Interestingly, in the program handed out at The Present Company, a storefront theatre on the Lower East Side, each playwright defines his purpose. Leslie Bramm (The Uncaring Dog) writes: “After the events of 9/11, I was struck with how random fate could be … and that life is totally unfair. The characters in the play are all symbols of that gigantic unfairness … man is ultimately God's punchline. Such were the 9/11 victims.”

Bramm is aware that he may be treading mined territory in presenting a horrific event like Sept. 11, with its very real destruction and death and personal loss, as a kind of expressionistic exercise; yet he maintains it may be the most truthful way to dramatically deal with a tragedy of this magnitude.

“When 9/11 was happening, the word you kept hearing was ‘surreal, surreal.’ And so it seemed to me that a play about this event should be surreal to capture it,” he recalls. “I believe my strength as a playwright is my dialogue. Doing a play without any dialogue, just action, was a departure for me. Obviously, the themes in this piece—unfairness, randomness—can apply to life in general, and that's fine. I wanted the play to he more than just about 9/11, although I think most audience members will imbue it with the meaning [lack of meaning] of 9/11.”

In Bramm's second play, Lovers Leapt, he offers a more clearly targeted response to that fateful day in September, while still retaining that element of netherworld.

Here, Bramm considers opportunities not taken and irretrievable loss through two young World Trade Center [WTC] staffers who toyed with the idea of getting together, but never did. They are finally—ironically and tragically—joined as they jump to their deaths, holding hands, from the WTC inferno, 90-plus stories above the ground. On their flight to oblivion, they play out, with each imagining their unrealized relationship, the good and bad times that they might have shared.

Bramm describes Lovers Leapt as an urban legend focusing on two people who are unable to connect, except at the moment when they decide to take their fates into their own hands, e.g., choose how they'll die: through choking on smoke and fumes, burning to death, or free-falling to a cement grave.

“In the end, it is a meditation, a love poem, for the stage,” he says, acknowledging, “When you try to write a poetic piece about something like this—real live people were jumping out of the windows holding hands—you run the risk of being sappy and trite. It is a sentimental story and it had to be handled very carefully.”

Adds Elena Holy, Present Company's artistic producing director: “I believe the piece was ultimately reflective, thanks in large part to the actors and director. But there was the very real danger of that piece being insensitive.”

ABSURDITY

Perhaps nowhere is the issue of insensitivity more pronounced than in a performance that views Sept. 11's barbarism through a comic lens. Is it doable at all? The answer is yes, at least in “Rebel Without a Pause,” the latest solo act from Reno, the edgy performance artist, who prefers the term “social commentator.”

The fact is she seems to have undergone a sea change; her calling-card aggression is not quite as hard-edged as it was in previous shows. Is she kinder and gentler thanks to the events of Sept. 11? Who knows? Perhaps the more centrist politics and genial tone that emerge in her current incarnation (playing Off-Broadway at the Zipper on West 37th Street) are as much a function of the aging process as anything else. Also, more than a decade and a half of performing might have contributed to the shading and nuance that are evident.

One thing is clear: Although the matronly 46-year-old Reno, sporting a shock of curly blonde hair, still engages in her signature stream-of-consciousness screeds while pacing back and forth across the stage, more than a note of ambiguity is at play.

Check this out: Reno, who is strongly identified with left-leaning politics (and she insists that her views have not changed), actually grows teary while playing a particularly corny recording of “God Bless America.”

Reno concurs that the song is hokey, bringing to mind a Hallmark card. She continues to view President Bush as nothing short of a nitwit (“appointed to the Presidency by his brother”), and the policy of bombing Afghanistan while simultaneously dropping over-sweetened foods onto the desert, a study in mind-boggling grotesquerie. “If the bombs don't get them, the sugar will.”

Nevertheless, something has changed. Reno admits how stunned she is at the unexpectedness of her responses to, well, virtually everything—from seeing the American flag (she is moved) to watching Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with a degree of (gulp) sexual pleasure, despite the fact that she (Reno) is gay. And then there's her friendship with cops, at one time an unheard-of prospect.

“9/11 has enhanced peoples' understanding of society worldwide. I can talk to people I wouldn't have talked to before, like cops with badges. I have always had a knee-jerk anti-authoritarian response. That alienation has abated since Sept 11. I make jokes with cops. They make jokes back. We're all in this together. And I love that. It makes me hopeful. An asset has come out of a great liability.”

On the flip side, it should be noted that she also celebrates the increased interest in the Koran—“There have been more sales of the Koran since 9/11 than in 50 years prior to it”—and she is pleased to see growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

Undoubtedly, her views may not be for all tastes, and perhaps off-putting to many in her audience, but her onstage persona—she is downright likeable, if a tad demented—manages to mitigate her politics.

Despite the performance artist-punk sensibility, she is also a kind of throwback: the comic on the bottom of the social heap, puzzling over a world that's inexplicably twisted and perverse.

That having been said, Reno makes it clear she sees her role as that of provocateur, and she maintains that audiences are grateful for, if not relieved at, the freedom she has afforded them. Among other things, she has given them permission to laugh at the un-laughable.

“I've had people thank me for saying what was not necessarily the cool thing to say. One man told me, ‘I didn't realize my wife felt so strongly about any of the issues surrounding Sept 11 until we came to your show.’ Others said that before they saw my show, they were afraid to laugh about anything related to Sept 11.

“Marian Fontana, a widow of one of the firemen, said she found my show healing. I hope that's true. I certainly don't want to alienate or offend anyone who has been personally hit by the tragedy. Look, we're all Americans, even if I'm not in step with Rumsfeld dropping pop tarts onto the deserts of Afghanistan in order to get ‘Afghan brand awareness,’” she quotes a line from her play. “Just because Mrs. Fontana's husband was killed doesn't preclude her from seeing the absurdity.”

GRIEF AND SOCIAL ISOLATION

For first-time playwright Anne Nelson (The Guys), the fear of “self-revelation” was the biggest challenge she faced in writing an autobiographical drama like The Guys. Anything hinting at confession makes her uncomfortable, she points out.

In her “real” life, Nelson is director of the International Program for the Columbia School of Journalism, where the name of the game is objectivity and facts, facts, and more facts. There is little room for personal slants and subjectivity.

“My professional life is devoted to formulating rules. In writing a play, I had no rules. It had no real context for me, which was also freeing. I was able to suspend my self-criticism, which is usually very strong.”

Nonetheless, she concedes there are issues (larger than those surrounding self-display) that come to the fore in The Guys, with questions of authenticity heading the list. In The Guys, the yuppie editor (Nelson's alter-ego) is overwhelmed, transformed by grief in the aftermath of Sept. 11, although she personally lost no one in the terrorist attack. Throughout, the character talks about how her life will never be the same.

But is that really true? Indeed, is it even plausible? Or, is all this chest-beating largely an opportunity for a very comfortable upper middle-class woman to place herself in the limelight, to raise and answer the question: How does all this affect me (when, in fact, this may be the one event she cannot claim as hers at all)?

“The way people deal with grief varies,” Nelson stresses. “It depends on personal history, temperament, and choice. You can choose how much you will allow yourself to be affected or not affected. We have real problems with death and grief in this society. One of the things firefighters told me is how isolated they feel in their grief, and they respond to the idea that on stage and in the audience there are civilians who are with them.”

Nelson emphasizes that the yuppie editor—her genuine transformation notwithstanding—is, at best, a secondary character on stage, a “comic foil” and/or a Greek chorus who functions as a kind of “interpolation.”

But what is the editor's—and, by extension, Nelson's—feeling about the fireman? In this play, he indeed inhabits an alien world, with its own vision and vocabulary. And the editor is nonplussed, at one point noting how stunned she is in the face of the fireman's emotional complexity. Still, the nettlesome issue persists: Is all this admiration a gussied-up form of condescension?

Nelson insists she doesn't see it that way at all; on the contrary, “I find the language of firefighters eloquent. I was astounded at how fresh and musical it was. You go through all these years of education, with its pretentious language. And then you hear natural speech. The play is about dialects, different language, and all the levels of translation. If anything, the play is patronizing to the woman, but never the fireman.”

But the bottom line is that there is no special pleading, she contends. Neither the fireman nor the editor, with their respective views or lexicons—literal or emotional—is the point. Far more important is what they evoke in their coming together.

“In moments of great disaster, it's easy to lose faith in what a human being is,” she asserts. “But if you're willing to look a little below the surface, you will find something good. I'm hoping my play will help people see it.”

The two-character play opened on Dec. 3 at the Off-Broadway Flea Theatre, seven blocks from Ground Zero with Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver. It received a fine review in The New York Times, and has been playing to packed houses ever since, with an array of stars taking on the two leads, including Susan Sarandon, Bill Irwin, Amy Irving, and Tom Wopat, among many others.

As noted, The Guys has been morphed into a film (Nelson wrote that as well) and it will open this fall starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia.

Jim Simpson (Sigourney Weaver's husband), who directed the play and film, says: “The biggest challenge in doing this play was to get it out there as soon as possible. I felt that there was immediacy to this piece and it had to be encountered now. Does it have a shelf life? I believe because it captures the moment, it will stand on its own little feet. But who knows?”

What he does know, however, is that the houses are sold out (a rare occurrence at the Flea) and the unlikely subjects of the play (firemen) love it, he observes. “Their only criticism is that we don't quite capture their sense of humor. One fireman said to me, ‘When kids say, “I want to grow up and be a fireman,” we always tell them that you can't do both.’”

Simpson also recognizes that he has changed in some profound way. At no time has he felt more American than he does now, with his thoughts focused on the terrorist attack, its aftermath, and The Guys—a work that was born in response to it.

“I believe the play puts a human face on the catastrophe. It gives the audience a chance to deal with it in human terms. I hope theatregoers experience the loss of four men they never met and leave the theatre wishing that the men were still here. 9/11 was a tremendous event and we need to let it resonate. It's wrong to just shut it out and move on.

MORE TO COME?

Nelson agrees wholeheartedly and is hopeful that there will be many more plays about Sept. 11.

“We have a diverse culture,” she observes, “and every niche within it will have its own reaction. I expect to see the full range—from beautiful art to kitsch—although we may not know at first glance [which is which] and we should wait to make a judgment. Of course, there's a difference between what will be produced by those who were directly affected by the tragedy and those who were not. But we should remember there is a whole level of art that is about artifice.”

Playwright Leslie Bramm's views the events of Sept. 11 and their potential impact on the arts from a different perspective. “I'd like to see it as a call to arms to theatre groups to reevaluate the work they do and question why they do some things as opposed to others,” he says. “Now is the time for work of importance. I'm very concerned that Hollywood is going to co-opt 9/11 into glossy movies, exploiting the events of that day and what followed.”

Adds Elena Holy: “I don't think we're nearly finished with this subject or the feelings identified with it. What was once normal no longer is. And each new piece of art that emerges from 9/11 will reflect different aspect of the grieving process. As a result of 9/11, and the coming together of local community and local artists that we witnessed down here, we have revised our mission at the Present Company. We now feel our goal is to incite art and create community!”

A group of drama students at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts certainly hope their offering, Project 9/11: Portraits in Shock, does just that. Project 9/11, a series of highly theatrical monologues—some surreal, others confessional—written and performed by half a dozen young actors, will be presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer.

Undoubtedly, there'll be more to come. Stay tuned.