The View from Here

11 artists talk asbout the challenge of putting 9/11 on stage.

compiled by Lenora Inez Brown

How best to mark the one-year anniversary of 9/11 in American Theatre? An examination of how the tragedy impacted artistic programming nationally might prove interesting, but specifics would be elusive. A fiscal analysis of the year could address the current state of giving and fundraising, but too many unknowns still exist. And these approaches would ignore the question so many artists posed to themselves on that day: “What role do I as an artist play in society?”

So we decided to consider 9/11 through the lens of new work. New work has the special quality of being able to simultaneously tap into the what-has-been while looking forward to the what-may-come-to-be. Issues of artistic and social accountability can be encompassed in the discussion. And, unlike many temporal totems that we erect to signify our accomplishments and sense of wellbeing, art lasts.

Numerous companies and individual artists have written (and continue to write) plays inspired by the events of 9/11. Some—such as this month’s complete play script, Christopher Shinn’s Where Do We Live—address the tragedy in subtle ways. Others, like Israel Horowitz’s 3 Weeks After Paradise, track the personal struggle to regain normalcy. Still others express grief or outrage or both, as do Reno’s Rebel Without a Pause, Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events and Anne Nelson’s The Guys. There are elegies like Honour Kane’s autodelete://beginning dump of physical memory//. In their plays created with collaborators, Brian Jucha and Caridad Svich use technology to make sense out of the incomprehensible: Jucha utilizes cockpit transcripts for his We Have Some Planes, while Svitch dips into the virtual world to rebuild reality in her Return to the Upright Position. Some playwrights, such as Herman Daniel Farrell III in Justice and Richard Montoya in Anthems: culture clash in the district, offer social critiques, finding a new balance for artist and activist. Iranian writer Gita Khashabi, Lebanese-American playwright Najee George Mondalek and Canadian auteur Robert Lepage wrote their respective pieces— Chadoor, Me No Terrorist and Zulu Time—long before Sept. 11, but the event transformed their art and the dialogue around it.

Anniversaries do not demand solutions or plans of actions, merely that we take note, move forward and try not to repeat our mistakes. Plays and performance art do the same: While pointing to the possible, they become the permanent record of where we are now and where we might be able to go. 

With Liberty and Themis for All
by Herman Daniel Farrell III

While working on Rome, a new play about the injustice surrounding the election of our current president, I found myself examining the word “justice.” My research set me off on a wonderful journey back to the Greek goddess Themis (Divine Justice) and her daughter Dike (Human Justice).

Then came 9/11.

And thereafter our president and every pundit seemed to be repeatedly evoking that word, that name, that being: Justice.

So, rather than write about this nation’s dangerous turn from a republic toward an empire, I put Rome aside and turned to Justice. I set it in the East Village before and after 9/11. The Greek goddesses of order, justice and peace interact with humans as well as the Roman god Mars, who has come to earth bringing war. It’s a morality play that questions the nature of justice. Is it about revenge, retaliation, vengeance, victory? In my research for the HBO film Boycott, I discovered Martin Luther King Jr.’s exegesis on the subject: Justice, he said, is about transformation.

Before the play’s first reading at New Dramatists, directed by Seret Scott, I wrote this prologue: “Perhaps this is too soon, perhaps this is too close.” Was it appropriate to perform such a play so soon after the gruesome deaths of thousands of human beings? In Rome I will be taking the president to task for showing up at Ground Zero only three days after the destruction and, essentially, holding a pep rally on what was—and still remains—an uneasy grave for scores of souls. Compare his braggadocio to Lincoln’s humility at Gettysburg, where he uttered these solemn words: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

As I critique our president, I know I should be equally circumspect: Is this proper? I didn’t know the answer a year ago, but I do now: Yes. Artists can, should, must weigh in with their words and images, making art that derives from the events of 9/11. No one else on the planet is acting with restraint in their responses to this turning point in time, so why should artists? Now, more than ever, our voices should be heard.

Justice was given a staged reading at New York’s New Dramatists in November.

Tangled Patriotism
by Richard Montoya

Culture clash was already working on a commissioned work with arena stage in D.C. when 9/11 happened. the whole event just sort of took over the research and field work and was just too huge to ignore. six days after 9/11, i was trying to get to washington from the LAX airport. we usually write as a collective, but this time the guys’ wives would not let them travel, so i had to go alone. i had to turn CNN off and travel to that other ground zero in washington.

negotiating the nation’s airports at that time—being a man of color, meeting the sorts of folks i did, walking among the nervous and jittery crowds and, my god, all those waving flags!—i felt like an infiltrator at times. at other times i was just struck by the humanity of people, people i would have never talked to in a million years. while some gave cold glances and wondered (aloud sometimes) if i was Arab, others reached across that divide inspired by fear and prejudice. i was there, like a forensic poet, gathering it all up—from the grief counselors on their way to the Pentagon to the politicians to the old jazz sidemen from the U street corridor. i decided that all of them must populate the world of our theatre piece, Anthems: culture clash in the district.

an overriding theme in Anthems is the search for an anthem for this current time. an old jazzman told me that Billie Holiday singing “strange fruit” at the howard theater in ’58 was an anthem against the violence of racism. for me it was a reminder that in America we have created lots of terror from within.

despite our eagerness as artists and playwrights to console and articulate, culture clash must remain a somewhat detached chronicler of these strange and dangerous times. we may find that anthem, but it may not be a song—it might just be the sound of the metro train or Billie or Miles’s horn.

culture clash is not necessarily trying to counter the ethos of the country for art’s sake. our challenge is to continue to be the social critics, the lefty political artists, that we have always been. to find that balance—it has something to do with not forgetting to honor the dead as well right now—is tricky.

in late november of 2001, i found myself in a rehearsal room in downtown manhattan with the artist’s network refuse & resist. the group was preparing to present a night of theatre titled Imagine Iraq. a brave thing to do at that time. Tony Kushner, Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron, Dread Scott, Reg E. Gaines, Savion Glover and others thought aloud about how we as artists of conscience might present our sometimes politically charged work in these uncertain times. the president may have an 80 percent approval rating, but folks around the country were starting to question. you could feel it. that was our window as artists to move in and not let up. the experience emboldened and prepared me for Anthems more than i knew at the time.

Anthems: culture clash in the district, was commissioned by Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. The play, which opened Arena’s 51st season on Aug. 30, runs until Oct. 13.

Flying Blind
by Anne Nelson

In the course of my career, I had published journalism in many different forms—in articles, books, radio reports and even on a website—but after the attacks of 9/11 I found that these forms didn’t serve my purpose. I barely wrote at all. Why bother? Most of my thoughts were scattered across the pages of the newspapers every day, along with more facts than anyone could absorb.

Twelve days after the attack, coincidence led me to a fire captain who was looking for help in writing eulogies for his men. In him, I heard the voice that had been missing for me in the media representations of the attack: someone deep in shock and grief, yet without hatred or revenge. He was, first and foremost, worried about how he was going to take care of his people—the families of the fallen, the firefighters left behind. This was the spirit of the city I saw around me, and one I wished more people outside the city could come to understand.

About a month later I was seated, again by chance, next to Jim Simpson of the Flea Theater, an Off-Off Broadway theatre that was in danger of closing due to the attacks. He expressed the desire to produce a play that spoke to the moment. I mentioned my experience with the fire captain. Simpson suggested that I write a play. It wasn’t a commission in any traditional sense, just an idea. I wrote it quickly, with no real expectation that it would be produced. It was. My motivations were to release what was in my head onto the page, and to create a small, quiet space that reflected our actual experience, as opposed to the traumatizing images and manufactured emotions dominating our mass culture. My biggest challenge was that I hadn’t written a play before and was flying blind.

I can’t predict the impact of 9/11 on theatre per se—I don’t know enough about it. But I sense—I hope—it may have deepened a niche in our writing culture, one that asks more questions, that demands more emotional authenticity, that takes a little less for granted.

The Guys is currently running at the Flea Theater in Manhattan. Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver originated the roles that a number of actors have filled, including Bill Irwin, Amy Irving, Carol Kane and Stephen Lang. Tim Robbins and Helen Hunt appeared in the Los Angeles production, staged by the Actors’ Gang Theatre. In August, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon performed The Guys at the Edinburgh International Festival and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. An independent film version, directed by Jim Simpson, was being completed this summer. The play will be published as a trade paperback, with additional material, by Random House.

At the Front Line
by Reno

I hope that the boundaries of the Publica Americana crumbled sufficiently on 9/11 and that the recognition of our having become a part of the world’s neighborhood occurred. What I’ve been seeing and hearing in and around the show I’ve been doing, Rebel Without a Pause, hints that this has indeed happened—and that the more responsible position Americans now feel will transfer to the theatre with a demand for more plays that take the big picture into account.

On the other hand, if Americans continue to buy the wrongheaded conflation of our safety with a reduction of our Bill of Rights, then 9/11 will have another kind of lasting effect. Artists are always the first to feel the chill—for our work to be effective, it has to be public, it has to be known and it has to go outside the lockstep to invite censure (unless, of course, you’re doing Noises Off, then you’re o-frigging-k).

My shows are never very far from my real life. What I do on stage is perhaps a more intense version of my everyday life, but it is not an act, if you will. And I get to change it however and whenever it needs to change, based on the events of the day (the news) or on what a particular audience seems to want. Rebel Without a Pause changes with the world events that are the aftermath of 9/11.

In late June I was performing at a beautiful gem of a theatre in San Francisco, Brava Theater Center, and for the first time in a while brought up ex-president Bush’s bullying comments on the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. After the show, as I’m peeling off my sweat-soaked costume, I am spun around into a man’s arms—it’s a hug from John Walker Lindh’s father, who is crying with gratitude that someone is speaking publicly about his son with empathy, not hatred. That’s what I want my performance to accomplish.

I live near the World Trade Center, and I went back down there during the cleanup and presented myself as a volunteer. I think of myself as a 20-year-old boy, but the Ground Zero crew didn’t see it that way. They didn’t give me a pick-axe or a bucket. My show is what I do—it’s my contribution. I am luckier than pretty much anyone else I can think of because I was able to find a way to actively, directly ensconce myself in, around and through this meshugana mess.

Reno was one of the first artists to respond to 9/11 on stage. Rebel Without a Pause has been performed at La Mama and the Zipper in New York and at San Francisco’s Brava Theater Center. It is currently running at New York’s newly renovated Lion Theatre. The proceeds of a recent performance went to the School of Hope, a project to finance the building of a new school in Afghanistan.

Judging a Book by Its Cover
by Najee George Mondalek

9/11 made an indelible impression not only on Americans but on people all over the world. It launched a new era of anti-terrorism efforts that have touched virtually every area of our lives. While it is uncertain at this time if this horrific event will generate a genre of terrorism plays, certain residual effects will be present in the theatre for years to come.

As members of AJYAL Theatrical Group, an Arab-American theatre company, we were caught in the middle of American patriotism and the wave of ethnic discrimination and intimidation that immediately followed 9/11. Me No Terrorist was written, amazingly, in May 2001, well before the bombing of the U.S. landmarks. I wrote the comedy because, prior to Sept. 11, Arab Americans were routinely stopped at American airports and often detained without being told why. The “secret evidence” excuse caused many Arab Americans to feel singled out as terrorists.

So, here was the play, scheduled to premiere on Nov. 11, 2001. Me No Terrorist was the original title. After 9/11, however, the company decided it was not wise to produce—or promote—a theatrical production with that name. I decided to change the title to Innocent...but Guilty. The posters were printed for the Nov. 11 production, but the company ultimately decided it was too early to make light of terrorism.

When we finally premiered the play—under its original title—in May 2002, we hoped to convey a message to Arab Americans to be proud of who they are, and to reject the blanket notion that Arab Americans are all covert terrorists. We are just another ethnic group working hard and paying our share to make this country great. Like so many ethnic minorities before us, we came to America in search of a better life for ourselves and our families.

Me No Terrorist premiered at the Ford Community and Performing Arts in Dearborn, Mich., where, according to the latest U.S. census, the country’s largest Arab-American population resides. The play is written in Arabic with minimal English. AJYAL will remount the production (with English subtitles) in October for a tour of Ottawa, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York.

Internet Explorers
by Caridad Svich

There are 200 people kidnapped every day in Latin America. Suicide bombs and their effect are a fact of life in Israeli streets. Young women are regularly killed along the U.S. border; their assassins are seldom if ever found. Torture, rape, murder, hate and evil are realities in our world.

On Sept. 11, 2001, there was silence. It is difficult to make art when everything around you has been splintered and a great silence lives in your heart. But the possibility of creation, of making something—an offering, if you will—stirs us, nonetheless. A month after 9/11 I asked a group of fellow writers and dramaturgs, most of whom I had worked with on collaborative projects before, if they wished to document this tumultuous, constantly evolving time over e-mail, since we were separated by long distances and the virtual link was the closest one we had. The following artists responded to my invitation: Cusi Cram, Mitchell Gossett, Julie Hebert, Llysa Holland, Julie Jensen, Jennifer Maisel, Julia Pearlstein, Brad Rothbart, Greg Romero, Ann Taylor, Elizabeth Wong, Michael Wright and Alison Eve Zell. The title of the project, Return to the Upright Position, comes from an ad on a New York City billboard, an ad I kept seeing as I walked to and from Ground Zero in September. “Stand up, wake up, move on” is what this billboard communicated to me. The goal of the performance text we have made as a group across cyberspace is to find a place for mourning and mystery, for visions peculiar and disturbed and hopeful, to be shared and witnessed.

It is too early to make work that will truly define what we have been through. But there are stabs of light in the dark. Return to the Upright Position is a text made first as testimony, as a shared expression of turbulence among a group of artists; slowly it has become a piece for performance, an ordered universe on the page reflective of our modern chaos. Tragedy has its measure in art.

Throughout the fall and winter, Return to the Upright Position will be read at a number of theatres, including New York’s Cherry Lane Alternative and Women’s Project & Productions, Perishable Theatre in Providence, R.I., American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, theater simple in Seattle, Rm 120 Productions in Austin and Portland Stage in Portland, Maine. Caridad Svich is a 2002 Bunting Fellow at Harvard/Radcliffe.

Climbing Tuesday
by Honour Kane

I am a writer. But in one searing moment, my whole life changed. I was home on that high-skied, blue-eyed Tuesday. I stood on Greenwich Street and watched the world blast open as dozens of Brooks brothers and sisters came raining down. We stood on that street, hundreds of us. And we could do nothing. Useless in the face of the unimaginable, we could save no one. I watched helplessly as my neighbors to the south began to leap from the windows of those burning towers. One couple held hands as they fell their final mile in this life. A woman clawed her way upward as she plunged, trying so desperately to climb the sky.

For months I couldn’t write. The horrors of that day were too human. It was the day narrative was lost. But my memory of that climbing woman kept haunting me. Finally, after time, I found a way through my work to see her safely home, send her onwards, upwards and amend her brutal end.

I have no interest in adding to the morass of media that does nothing but turn this tragedy into a commodity. I wrote this work as an elegy for my lost neighbors, my lost neighborhood, my lost America.

Autodelete://beginning dump of physical memory// was written while Honour Kane was a Bunting Fellow at Harvard/Radcliffe and during a month at the MacDowell Colony. The play received readings at New York’s New Dramatists, Portland Stage Company’s Little Festival of the Unexpected in Maine and Oregon’s Portland Center Stage.

Learning from Our Children
by Israel Horovitz

My little family was all too close to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. To say that we were traumatized is to say that the sea is wet. During several weeks following the attacks, I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two without having vivid, frightening nightmares, always with the same plot: me, on a plane, wrestling the highjackers to defeat, saving the day. During those first weeks, I had no idea how to channel my anxiety and my anger. Luckily, I learned from my children. My son, Oliver, who was in school just across the road from the WTC (and saw everything) was asked to make a film for his school, Stuyvesant High. As Ollie threw himself into his work on the film and confronted the WTC disaster head on, I noticed that he was becoming much calmer. Ollie’s twin sister, Hannah, was writing an article about the WTC disaster for her high school newspaper, and it was obvious that Hannah, while working, was also much, much calmer.

And so, with no plan beyond writing something in my notebook to calm myself down, I began to create the text of 3 Weeks After Paradise. Two months after the attacks, I had completed a draft of a kind of monologue, which I sent by e-mail to people with whom I’d been working on other projects at the time of the attack. In a way, I was saying, “Here’s why I haven’t delivered my work to you, and this is what we’ve been going through here in NYC.” I also sent the text, by e-mail, to a few theatres that regularly do my plays.

People responded with pretty much the same message: “I’d like to stage the monologue—and, if you don’t mind, I’d like to send it to...” I didn’t mind. And, astonishingly, within a month of my completing 3 Weeks After Paradise, the piece was taken for production around the globe.

I am pleased to have been able to make something solid and loving from something so hateful and destructive. I suspect that people are responding positively to this work because it expresses the emotions of a family, not the politics of a government. It was written from the heart and mind of a father worried about his children and the world they will inherit.

3 Weeks After Paradise has been performed in more than 20 languages worldwide in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Scotland, Iceland and Sweden, as well as at some two dozen theatres in the U.S., including Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum and Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre Company. It is published in French and German translations. All proceeds will be donated to a scholarship fund to help children of the WTC victims pay tuition fees at CUNY. The film version will air on the Bravo Network on Sept. 11, 2002.

Tent, Shelter, Veil
by Gita Khashabi

Lack of cross-cultural awareness between the Eastern and the Western worlds was what propelled me toward creating Chadoor, a performance piece. Chadoor means a tent, a shelter, a veil, in the Persian language. The visual design of my performance piece includes a chadoor (veil) sewn from small American flags.

I come from Iran. The other side of the Zagros Mountains. Where women’s bodies became restricted territories after the 1979 Islamic revolution. As also happened to women in Afghanistan years later, in the worst possible way. Where hair is jailed. Dance banned. And one’s ink becomes a bullet in one’s head. Executed for all reasons. Where women become mountains and movement becomes altered.

Since 9/11, I’ve shared my vision of what makes up cross-cultural identity in a global/personal context. Dealing with ways of landing, readings, TV, concepts, theories, through a complex layering of the personal and the social—layers of memory, politics, war, history, terrorism, desire, fantasy, religion, sex, language and exile.

My art moves toward specifying that when cultures live in political ignorance and don’t cross paths or talk to one another, that is exactly the point when airplanes land on vertical ground. I try to reflect the clashed architectures of day-to-day lives and minds. I deal with the 9/11 issue through a thin layer called exile.

Chadoor was performed by Shida Pegahy at Los Angeles’s Japan American Museum in 2002 and at the Beyond Baroque Foundation and Literary Arts Center in 2001. On Sept. 13, 2002, Chadoor will be performed by its author at the 18th Street Arts Complex in Los Angeles.

Serious Irreverence
by Brian Jucha

I was born and raised in New York City. I was here on 9/11. After the attack, as emergency workers poured into my hometown from around the country, my life as a theatre artist and director seemed absurd. I did not consciously make a decision to respond theatrically to 9/11. My work is always informed by current events, and this material found me.

In early October, I happened upon the transcripts of conversations between Northeast corridor flight controllers and the pilots of the three planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How innocent we were at 8:45 a.m. on that day! Starting at 7:45:48, an hour before the first plane crashed, the transcripts reveal an ordinary day with ordinary people going about ordinary lives. Then things begin to go wrong. American Flight 11 loses radio contact with its controller. For a reader—and ultimately for an audience member—the fate of this NORDO [no radio] plane takes on Hitchcockian proportions: innocent people thrown into an extraordinary situation. It was a theatre piece waiting to happen.

Charles Ludlam says in Ridiculous Theatre, Scourge of Human Folly, “Test out a dangerous idea, a theme that threatens to destroy one’s whole value system. Treat the material in a madly farcical manner without losing the seriousness of the theme. Show how paradoxes arrest the mind. Scare yourself a bit along the way.” Less than two months after 9/11, inspired by this quote, I directed the first of two week-long workshops with Infernal Bridegroom Productions of Houston, for whom I had been working on a piece about unrequited love and loss. I proposed the transcripts as the basis for a new work called We Have Some Planes. With IBP’s daring and passionate acting company and the unwavering faith of artistic director Jason Nodler and my longtime colleague lighting designer Roma Flowers, we went swimming with sharks. The challenge was that this felt like sacred ground. What were the boundaries between sentimentality, reverence, honor and grief and the absurd, ridiculous horror of what happened? In the end, We Have Some Planes turned out to be full of the same themes as the originally conceived work about love and loss. We followed Ludlam’s advice and allowed ourselves to be irreverent without ever losing sight of the seriousness of the material. It was a gamble that paid off. Audiences were enthralled. It was cathartic. They laughed and cried with us, and many of them came back night after night.

On closing night the IBP company gave me a card with a quote by Robert Frost: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” Which is specifically what I was hoping we would say all along.

We Have Some Planes premiered at Infernal Bridegroom’s Axiom Theatre in Houston in April 2002, and is currently touring the U.S. (See Robert Faires’s article about the production on page 28.)

The Question with No Answer
by Craig Wright

I was inspired to write Recent TragicEvents by the deep sense of inevitability that hit me when I logged onto AOL the morning of 9/11 and saw the image of the planes lodged in the burning towers. The situation was interpreted by the media as an event of gargantuan unlikeliness; and yet, all I could think at the time was, “Of course.”

Not that I’m a person of great prescience or geopolitical canniness. But I truly felt like some great sea dragon of determinism had suddenly reared up from the depths of our communal national experience and was suddenly towering there before us, blowing fire in our faces, relativizing our belief that life in America could be understood solely in terms of free will and autonomy. As one of my characters says: “Yesterday, I woke up and thought, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ Today I woke up and thought, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’” That shift in perspective was what I wanted to dramatize.

As a nation, we’re still as addicted as ever to the cult of freedom and autonomy; witness our efforts to place even a portion of the blame for 9/11 within our own security systems, as if knowing that it was partly our fault would be somehow comforting—and it would be comforting to many, because it would shore up the illusion that we’re in a system we can control. But are we?

Of course, that question has no answer. We can’t know if we’re living in a deterministic universe, because we can never live the same moment twice and find out whether it could have been any other way; whether we might have chosen differently; whether the planes might have missed their targets. I wanted to show average Americans, in the wake of 9/11, struggling with these questions; trying to understand and affirm their roles in the already-written play, or unwritten-interplay, of life.

Recent Tragic Events was developed with director Rob Bundy at Houston’s Stages Repertory Theatre and New York’s Rattlestick Theatre. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, in Washington, D.C., produced the play in August.

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