Eyes Wide Shut

A daring Houston production evokes 9/11 before and after

By Robert Faires

 

We Never Saw What Was Coming

As an observation on the events of Sept. 11, that may sound excruciatingly obvious, but it is a truth that tends to get lost when we look back at that day. What we see are jets slicing into metal and glass, towers collapsing, apocalyptic clouds of smoke and ash, loss of life on an incomprehensible scale, uncommon acts of selflessness. Looking at that day is like staring into the sun; the horror and heroism are so enormous, so powerful, as to obliterate our view of everything around them.

What we don’t see is ourselves in the moments prior to the catastrophes, going about our everyday lives: pouring coffee, gazing at a computer screen, sitting on a bus or subway, telling a joke, hitting the snooze alarm (again), bitching about the boss, being absorbed in our own personal dramas. Not seeing what was coming.

Blindness is the take-off point of We Have Some Planes, the dance-theatre work conceived by Brian Jucha in the wake of 9/11 and developed under his direction with Infernal Bridegroom Productions in Houston, where it premiered in March. A woman wearing a blue blindfold wanders into the performance space, groping her way to a pillar at the edge of the stage. She’s the literal embodiment of our condition that day, unable to see the devastation mere minutes ahead—and we in the audience know precisely how many minutes, because a digital clock above the stage is ticking away the moments as they occurred that September morning.

Jucha drew his text for We Have Some Planes from transcripts of conversations between flight controllers and airline crews starting at 7:42:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, and his actors deliver it in real time. The device hurls us back to zero hour, reawakening our physical responses—the tension and the dread—to the unfolding tragedies. Although we are months and thousands of miles from that day, we feel muscles tighten in apprehension of the onrushing calamity. The production takes advantage of the fact that now we can see what’s coming.

But to their credit, Jucha and company veer away from the kind of docu-dramatization that would play on easy sentiments regarding 9/11. The tower-to-jet dialogue is virtually all there is that’s linear and representational; its accompaniment is an impressionistic barrage of sounds, images and generally unrelated activities performed by a band of restless, nameless government drones. They might be civil servants dredged from the deepest bowels of bureaucracy—white shirts, black suits, ID badges, expressions of bitter disdain—as they take seats behind a 25-foot-long table with microphones into which they periodically deliver jargon-salted instructions to pilots (“American 11-heavy, taxi to the bravo hold point”). But these snippets of actual dialogue seem to be distractions from the characters’ true interests: smoking, dancing on the table, playing hide-and-seek, spying on each other, performing pop songs, riding skateboards, soliciting phone sex, literally blowing smoke up each other’s asses. It’s a funhouse vision of the workaday world—the office as circus, with each employee in his or her own ring, all performing simultaneously.

For a work about one of the most sobering events in recent history, this unexpected approach may seem bizarre, but it’s also darkly hilarious and compelling. The play—and the day—take on the character of a dream: familiar yet strange, empty of logic yet full of meaning. And because every action is performed with commitment, because every second of the show’s 75 minutes is filled with purpose, it’s like the best of remembered dreams, where what happens is immediate and vivid and its symbols exert a pull on us.

In the first act, “Innocence,” brand-name products proliferate and the ’70s novelty hit “Gimme That Thing” loops endlessly, like the national anthem of our consumer culture; in the second, “What Happened Next,” a bouquet of flowers becomes a spanking toy in a sex game, and a man rubs his exposed belly while mouthing come-ons to the audience. We see ourselves in these figures, frantically pursuing obscure objects of desire, desperately seeking satiation for ravenous appetites. It’s not a pretty sight, especially when the take-off of a jet (represented by an actor guiding a toy airliner slowly through the air above the audience’s heads) jolts us back into the 9/11 time frame.

When the clock reads 8:25 a.m., an actor’s simple recitation of the words of a hijacker caught on tape—“We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay”—sends our stomachs into free-fall. As the show clocks through crash after crash, things turn more surreal: Whenever the word “plane” occurs in the transcripts, the actors replace it with “shark,” as in “We have an unconfirmed report that a second shark has hit the World Trade Center.” We’re progressively, hilariously submerged in shark imagery—an inflatable beach toy, the strains of “Mack the Knife,” video clips from nature documentaries, dialogue from Jaws—and compelled to face not just our 9/11 fears but the unsettling question of whether fear itself is all we have to fear.

Then, when events are grimmest, the actors make themselves up to look like clowns—not the ghoulish act of mockery it might seem but another reflection of us, perhaps our feelings of inadequacy in the face of cataclysm, our foolishness in the pursuit of happiness at the expense of life and liberty.

Once the clock has passed the moment when Flight 93 was lost in Pennsylvania and the actors have movingly recreated the calls made by passengers on cell phones—a jumble of voices trying to squeeze in final expressions of love before oblivion—the door in the stage’s back wall opens and the cast wanders out into the night. Some climb into cars and drive away; others walk dazedly with faces cast upward, as if they might be seeing the world outside for the first time. With We Have Some Planes, Jucha and the extraordinary Infernal Bridegroom company have given us a way to open our eyes.

Robert Faires is the theatre critic of the Austin Chronicle.

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