Nick, a rumpled New York City fire captain, is sitting in the Upper West Side apartment of Joan, an elegant editor, telling her anecdotes about a few men from his ladder company, and looking slightly uncomfortable. He stops himself for a moment, though; smiles a wry smile.
“These guys,” he says, staring into space and shaking his head, “you just wouldn’t believe these guys.”
Bill Murray delivered that line to Sigourney Weaver a few nights ago in a small jewel of a play, “The Guys,” that has become a surprising balm for New Yorkers.
It’s a line full of just the kind of slightly embarrassed affection you’d expect from a man in Nick’s business. But it’s also unbearably heartbreaking.
Just about everyone in New York has a story about something that helped them pull through the dazed weeks that followed Sept. 11. For Anne Nelson, the author of the play and the director of the international program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, that thing was the experience that became “The Guys.” She sat down with a man she’d never met before — a man whose very different path she probably never would have crossed otherwise — to eulogize the lives of eight men she’d never get the honor of knowing.
For the tiny Flea Theater in Tribeca, it was Nelson’s play that put the venue back on its feet (most performances have been sold out) after being brought to its knees, along with so many other businesses and cultural institutions.
“Everything stopped,” says Jim Simpson, the Flea’s artistic director and Weaver’s husband, of Sept. 11. “We were completely shut down for days, and afterward Tribeca was still like a ghost town.”
Not that the city didn’t try to remind natives and visitors of the area’s vibrancy. Zagat published a special guide to attractions, and signs in the subway reminded straphangers of the appeal of an area that had never needed any help before.
But the spectral image of those streets, covered in white ashes, was hard to erase from people’s minds. And then, there are the reminders of death.
The play deals with them directly. The men Nick is talking about aren’t back at the station; they’re dead, firefighters lost trying to save other lives during the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mirroring Nelson’s experience, Nick has come to Joan, a stranger, looking for help writing eulogies for his fallen men.
“See, I just don’t know what to do,” Nick tells her when they meet, looking, with his sweet hound-dog face, like a man who has just lost a hundred sons.
“These guys … the call came, and they went off, and … they haven’t found them yet but … some of the families, they want to have the service now so they can try to move on. I’ve got to get up and talk in church … I’ve been sitting down in front of a piece of paper all day, and I haven’t been able to write one sentence. Not a thing. I keep going into a clutch.”
Had been on a roll
For Simpson’s Flea Theater, just 12 blocks north of the World Trade Center, the tragedy had an immediate impact.
“We had 17 performances scheduled during the week of the 10th,” says Simpson of his 75-seat theater, which has made a name for itself and drawn packed audiences over the last five years with a brand of serious but charmingly schizophrenic repertory that reflects the joys of off-off-Broadway
“We were really hitting our stride,” he says.
After the area was opened up again to the public, though, attendance at the Flea fell to an astounding 5 percent.
“It wasn’t just that the entire area had come to a standstill,” Simpson admits. “Suddenly all of our work seemed to be irrelevant.”
Then one night in mid-October, Simpson found himself seated next to Nelson at a benefit for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (her husband is a writer for them; Weaver is a member of the board).
“Jim told me he had this great little theater that may have to close its doors because of 9/11, and that they were looking for a play, something journalistic, that spoke directly to the issues surrounding that day,” says the 47-year-old Nelson, a soft-spoken former war correspondent who covered El Salvador in the early ’80s.
Nelson was inspired, but as the two corresponded by e-mail over the next few days, none of her ideas struck Simpson as viable — until she mentioned her work with the fire captain. She offered to send him a eulogy.
“I was knocked out,” Simpson says. “This was our play.”
Nelson had never written for the theater before, but like the trained journalist she is, she penned the two-person play in nine nights, after putting her kids to bed.
“I was so driven to communicate the story that the critic on my shoulder shut up for a while,” she says.
When Nelson talks about the afternoon she and the fire captain spent together, trying to write the eulogies under the pressure of the upcoming funerals, you can imagine just how intense a time it was.
“But way beyond the experience,” she says, “was this extraordinary personality of the captain, and the incredible generosity that he had — and has.”
“I keep thinking about what I thought the fire captain represented, and the way he thought about his men, and it struck me as very beautiful. And I said, `OK, someone sees a beautiful sunset, they paint it.’ I just wanted to try to record that essence and share it. So I made the leap from journalism to quote/unquote art.”
“I was down in the basement of the Flea on Oct. 30, and I got this e-mail from Anne with the play. I just started to bawl,” says Simpson. “On the other hand, I also thought `we can do this, and we have to get it out as soon as possible.'”
And they did. He showed the play to Siggy, as he calls his wife, who was so taken with it that she asked her friend Murray to play the fire captain; he read it and signed on right away. By Dec. 4 the show had begun performances for its initial two week run.
This whirlwind explains what the critics have rightly noted as the play’s rough simplicity — as well as its immediacy and resonance. (Bruce Weber, in The New York Times, wrote that no one “would describe it as an artful or literary piece” but that it has “the impact — half relieving, half-agonizing — of a chill salve on an open wound.”)
But audiences who may have been drawn downtown by the star power of the cast, the possibility of something sensational, or something “artful and literary,” have found instead that “The Guys” is not about any of those things.
It’s not Broadway, it sure isn’t Hollywood. It’s a slice of real life that begged witnessing, and it’s playing just blocks away from Ground Zero.
No end to funerals
It’s true that “The Guys” is light on action and production values and heavy on talk: Joan addressing the audience, Joan and Nick’s conversation as she draws out of him the details of the lost men’s personalities, their families, the things that they loved to do in their spare time. With a pad in hand, she listens, then turns those details into small stories that bring the men heartbreakingly back to life for the captain, and for the audience. It’s the kind of quiet hybrid that the situation and the times — an era of a million pithy sound bites, booming rhetoric, and the numbing repetition of the CNN loop that followed the attacks — seemed to demand.
“We needed a play that put a human face on the thing that we are mourning,” says Simpson.
Before she had written a word, Nelson asked the fire captain for his permission to use their story. And like Nelson, he knew that he wanted to preserve and share with other people their rare experience together. But for the most part, he has asked to remain anonymous, and he has not seen the play. There’s no need: he’s still dealing with the same sad experience that the play deals with, and there’s no end in sight to the funerals.
But other firemen have come. “We had a talk-back after a performance with some of them. The play doesn’t address this, but some of them said that the sense of celebrity that surrounded them now is something they really resent. One in particular was quite angry. He said `I like to do my work anonymously. I don’t like being portrayed as a hero because they are characterizing it wrong.’ Who knows how all of this has affected him.”
“This hero stuff, like they were some guys in a movie,” Nick tells Joan at one moment in the play — his guys just aren’t like that.
So she helps him find the words to tell the truth about his men, do their real lives justice. As it has it turned out, audiences in New York need to hear it.
———-
“The Guys” has an open-ended run at the Flea, 41 White St., in New York. Bill Irwin has replaced Bill Murray. Susan Sarandon might replace Weaver.
