A way to remember... and to forget

By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com

Published Monday, September 9, 2002

It was the need for connection, the ache for loved ones in the aftermath of a tragedy, that led Anne Nelson to her sister's home in Brooklyn 12 days after the World Trade Center's twin towers went down last September.

It was coincidence that brought a grief-stricken fire captain to her sister's door that same day.

Through a long afternoon and evening, Nelson helped a man in shock shape eulogies for some of his men, guys who were lost when they answered terrorism with heroism. And, 12 weeks to the day after Sept. 11, from the intertwining of horror and hope and from a mixture of grieving and solace, a modest little play with an enormous impact was born.

Nelson's The Guys, which will open the season at GableStage on Sept. 21, illuminates the personalities of several dedicated men who left one firehouse on that sunny September morning and never came back.

It also saved a tiny New York City theater and went on to become an international phenomenon. And, in ways both small and profound, it affected the life of its author, a first-time playwright and award-winning journalist who heads the international program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

"This hero stuff, trying to turn the firemen into marble statues, doesn't do any good," Nelson, 47, says. "We need to look at their values, at how they live their lives. . . . The firemen who have seen it have said they appreciated its not being one more disaster story."

That, GableStage's Joseph Adler says, is what drew him to the play.

"We have a renewed appreciation for the values espoused by firemen, policemen, military people," he says. "The men in this group have a devotion to one another. They want to be part of a team, to pull together and look out for each other.

"The play is . . . not manipulative. By keeping it the study of two people and the writing of four eulogies, by keeping it simple, it pays tribute to the men who lived it."

"It's a beautiful piece of theater, almost like a sacred text," adds actor Gordon McConnell, who plays the fire captain in GableStage's production. "Nothing I've seen so far has come close to making the human beings who lost their lives seem so familiar. When you see this, you feel: I know this guy. And now he's gone."

HAPPENSTANCE

The meeting that led to the play, Nelson concedes, was "total happenstance."

While she, her husband and their two children were visiting her sister on that late September day a year ago, a friend of her sister's called looking for help from Nelson's brother-in-law, who's also a writer. The friend had met a fire captain who was struggling to come up with eulogies -- too many eulogies -- for his men who died on Sept. 11. The captain himself was in shock. He couldn't find the words. Could they help?

Nelson, who had been turned away when she tried to give blood at a hospital near the Columbia campus on Sept. 11, seized the opportunity. She and her brother-in-law helped the captain shape the eulogies and figured that was the end of it.

Then, while attending an Oct. 18 benefit dinner for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights with her husband, Nelson found herself sitting beside Jim Simpson, artistic director for the tiny Flea Theater, an Off-Off-Broadway company seven blocks from ground zero. Simpson, married to Lawyers Committee board member Sigourney Weaver, told Nelson about his theater's struggle to survive amid the smoke and rubble and fear and said he was looking for a play that would somehow speak to people's feelings of loss.

Soon, Nelson told Simpson about her experience with the fire captain and he encouraged her to try turning it into a two-character play. After getting the captain's approval, she did.

For nine nights, after teaching all day and spending the early evening with her husband and kids, Nelson wrote, drawing from her conversations with the captain as well as her research into firefighters and the tragedy itself.

By Nov. 1, she had e-mailed a script to Simpson. And, after minor tinkering -- "I would change words to ones that would sound better, that would be more musical," Nelson says -- Weaver and Bill Murray premiered The Guys at the Flea last Dec. 4.

Their limited run sold out even before it opened.

CELEBS STEP IN

Since then, numerous celebrities have stepped into the roles of Joan, an editor, and Nick, the captain who must speak of fallen men who range from a new guy he barely knew to his own best friend.

Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins did the play in Ireland and at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia made a Simpson-directed film version that is to premier at the Toronto Film Festival. And Nelson's script has just been published (Random House Trade Paperback, 87 pages, $9.95).

On Wednesday, the anniversary of the tragedy, Weaver will give a free performance of The Guys at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Manhattan while radio versions of the play are broadcast in Canada and Ireland.

Nelson is, of course, gratified by the response. But her most significant feedback, she says, has come from firefighters -- including the captain, now a friend.

"They told me, `You really got it. How did you know that stuff? Do you have relatives on the job?' " she says. "I tell them journalism does have its merits: You should be able to report accurately."

Nelson, however, isn't simply a gifted journalist who got lucky the first time she tried playwriting. She fell in love with theater and music while growing up in Oklahoma and Nebraska and, as an undergraduate at Yale, acted with the likes of Meryl Streep -- and Weaver -- and soloed in a production of Leonard Bernstein's Mass that toured Europe.

Yet, when she found herself in an opera "in a hoop skirt and ringlets," she mused: "Is this really what a '70s feminist should be doing with her life?" So she turned to journalism, winning awards for her reporting from danger zones in Central and South America.

Writing The Guys, she says, has changed her.

"I've done a lot of legalistic writing, with footnotes, trying to go head to head with people in academia," she says. "This is like putting roller skates on: telling a simple story that's true and focusing people's attention on it."

Patti Gardner, who plays Joan (in essence, Nelson's stand-in voice) at GableStage, has found in The Guys the same thing Nelson did: a way to connect to an unfathomable tragedy.

"It's an amazing piece of writing. It's cathartic. It's sometimes tough," Gardner says.

"I'm a former New Yorker, and I felt so far away from it. This is my way of connecting. It's about the connection of people through tragedy."

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.