From Variety
While
television and other media scale down their Sept. 11 remembrances this
year, Gotham is hosting a trio of Off Broadway plays -- "Omnium
Gatherum," "Recent Tragic Events" and "Portraits" -- that explore
various aspects of the tragedy. All three begin previews within a week
of the attacks' two-year anniversary. Until
now, only two high-profile New York plays have taken on the events
directly: Anne Nelson's "The Guys," about a journalist helping a fire
chief write eulogies for his men, and Neil LaBute's "The Mercy Seat,"
about a man who spent the attacks at his lover's apartment instead of
the World Trade Center, and contemplates pretending to be dead and
leaving his family. This season's
new wave comes at Sept. 11 from softer angles. They largely involve
characters peripheral to the events, and the distance allows for
comedy. But it remains to be seen whether theater audiences are still
interested in the subject matter. Both "Guys" and "Mercy Seat" were
notable for their starry casts: Sigourney Weaver appeared in both, as
it happened, playing alongside Bill Murray in the former and Liev
Schreiber in the latter. What's more, both were done at small
not-for-profit theaters. Theresa
Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros' "Omnium Gatherum," by
contrast, is a full commercial production bowing at the Variety Arts
without a single star name in its cast. And it's been a tough couple of
years for commercial stagings Off Broadway -- the Variety Arts itself
hasn't seen a hit play since Donald Margulies' "Dinner With Friends." But
"Omnium," which begins previews Sept. 9 and opens Sept. 25, has a
couple of things going for it: It was the darling of April's Humana
Festival in Louisville, Ky., and its cast of characters will be
suspiciously familiar to Gotham's glitterati: The play takes place at a
surreal dinner whose guests bear certain resemblances to such boldface
names as Martha Stewart, Tom Clancy, Christopher Hitchens and Edward
Said. "(Sept. 11) is so big and our
response is so small, and that's the joke of it," says director Will
Frears (himself the son of movie director Stephen). "There's a moment
when the characters are arguing about the rightness of military action
and one of the other characters yells, 'But what about me, what about
my feelings?' The joke is that we can't get past ourselves to get to
the world." But "Omnium's"
producers, perhaps wary of turning off audiences with the potentially
somber subject matter, aren't exactly playing up the 9/11 aspect; the
show's advertising campaign and press materials certainly don't mention
it. The relatively unknown
"Portraits" is another a commercial production without a big-name cast.
It begins an open-ended run at the 499-seat Union Square Theater Sept.
9, after just a few perfs at the Ridgefield Playhouse in Connecticut
last September. After the attacks,
playwright Jonathan Bell compulsively collected Sept. 11-related
articles, which he later adapted into six monologues. One, for example,
is about an EMT who rushed to the city after the attacks, while another
is about an upstate New York busybody who inquisitively calls her own
phone number in the 212 area code. Bell
structures these speeches around a painter presenting his portraits.
Though this narration conveys his experience as an artistic outsider
reacting to a catastrophe, "It really wasn't about me going through
this catharsis," says Bell, who instead wanted to "help people have
some kind of remembrance and resolution to the whole thing." Lead producer Vincent Curcio and his investors will donate profits to charity. The
starriest production is the one being produced in the relatively safe
confines of the not-for-profit world. Craig Wright's "Recent Tragic
Events," opening Sept. 28 at Playwrights Horizons, marks the Gotham
stage debut of Heather Graham. Her character lives in Minneapolis and
goes through with an awkward blind date on Sept. 12, 2001, complicated
by her quirky neighbors, a drinking game, musings on fate and news that
her sister is missing in Manhattan. "Along
with the grief and the shock and horror was a sense of optimism that
went along with the terror and sense of unity and a sense of community,
or at least a hunger for community and people wanting to be together,"
says Playwrights artistic director TimSanford. Does
the two-year delay suggest Gotham theater previously was more wary of
the subject, or that artists have taken two years to "process" the
events? Not necessarily: Sanford
points out that these three plays all were written within months of the
attacks, premiered regionally last season, and are now arriving in New
York -- the typical multiyear journey from page to Gotham stage.
("Events" first went up last September at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in
Washington, D.C.) And Sanford predicts the end of the "Sept. 12 play." "No
one's going to write that play now because it's two years ago," he
says. "They're going to write about Iraq, or have flashbacks to (the
attacks). Oddly enough, producing a play that was set two years ago
feels like a period piece. Two years later, I don't see the same hunger
for unity; I see divisions, I see more danger."
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