Nonfiction theater best captures 9/11

When 65 alumni died at the World Trade Center, the faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice gathered students to talk about their reactions. The result was "What Happened," a testimony drama based on those interviews.

A decade later, the childhood memories of current students of that Upper West Side college and police academy have been shaped into a parallel docudrama, simply titled "We Were Kids."

Both pieces are part of "The 9/11 Performance Project," an ambitious four-day program (Sept. 8-11) of panels, oral-history dramas and fictional plays that Seth Baumrin, professor of communications and theater arts at John Jay, believes essential because "theater is more than a humanity. It is a social science." (ticketcentral.com, 212-279-4200)

Indeed, soon after the unthinkable we call 9/11, those of us who think about such things started thinking about the impact of such a catastrophe on the theater. What kind of plays, we wondered then, would rise from the shock, fear and sorrow? How soon would we be able to see with new eyes a theatrical counterpart to Picasso's "Guernica" or be taken into the hell of political prisoners with drama as potent as Beethoven's "Fidelio"?

Whatever else the past 10 years have shown us, they have taught us that war art -- the great kind that tells us more than we already know -- cannot be rushed. Thus far, at least in my experience, made-up stories feel trivial compared with the raw images of reality.

What has flourished, and what will be showcased in many places around the anniversary, is nonfiction theater -- docudramas built around personal stories from people here and the Middle East.

On Sept. 8 and 9, a starry cast (including Samuel L. Jackson, Kathleen Turner and Jeremy Piven) will be at NYU's Skirball Center to read "110 Stories," which playwright Sarah Tuft based on conversations as a volunteer at Ground Zero. (skirball center.nyu.edu/calendar)

At Playwrights Horizons on Sept. 12, young people between the ages of 9 and 23 will present "Ten Years Later," a piece they created about coming of age in a post-9/11 world. As cast member Emily Rupp puts it, "My first view of the Manhattan skyline was without the towers. . . . I tried to imagine what it could have looked like." Try to imagine that. (ticketcentral.com.)

For the grown-ups, the first attention-getting theater was "The Guys," Anne Nelson's two-character play about a fire captain enlisting a journalist to help him write eulogies for his lost men. In December 2001, Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray opened the play at the Flea Theatre, the endangered Ground Zero theater run by Jim Simpson, Weaver's husband.

For months, other big-name actors took turns playing characters based on Nelson's own ghostwriting experience with a still-anonymous FDNY captain. For the anniversary, Weaver and Tom Wopat will perform the piece privately for invited guests at the Goldman Sachs headquarters, then twice at the Museum of Jewish Heritage -- Sept. 7 for the families and the public, Sept. 8 as an FDNY benefit. (theflea.org.)

Nelson told me last week that performances are scheduled in 74 cities around the country and that the show has been running "almost continually through the United States in the last 10 years. It absolutely astonishes me." Nelson, who was director of the international program at Columbia's journalism school at the time, explains how, as a journalist, she had always been "really uncomfortable as an activist. So I tried to describe, not exhort."

She was careful to protect the privacy of the firemen, "who were really suffering from people sticking mics in their faces to make them cry on camera." She nixed a "medium-budget movie," full of "Hollywood scenes -- sex between the two characters and people covered with flames and dust." The movie made with Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia was "low budget" and respectful of the trauma.

At 7 p.m. on Sept. 7 and 8, Joan Allen, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and other major actors will perform "A City Reimagined" at The Greene Space at 44 Charlton St., to be aired on WNYC/93.9 FM and WQXR/96.3 FM. This is a piece drawn from an interview project begun within days of the attacks by Columbia's Oral History Research Office.

But the project at John Jay dares to include three new plays -- wildly varied works of fiction -- with the mix of expert discussions and oral history. "Demolition of the Eiffel Tower" is a tragicomedy about the French laws against face covering, written by Jeton Neziraj, a playwright from Kosovo, and performed in Albanian with English supertitles. "The Domestic Crusaders," by San Francisco attorney Wajahat Ali is described as a "no-holds-barred depiction" of a Pakistani-American Muslim family since 9/11. "Another Life," by New York playwright Karen Malpede, is a satire about a mogul and his daughter through the decade.

Baumrin sees testament plays as "the natural first step" after the trauma. But with distance and time, "really good poetic minds, thoughtful writers, can look at the subtler issues. But nothing can be resolved with easy propaganda."

Plays written soon after 9/11 tended to be small, cautious or gimmicky, clearly sensitive to a kind of post-traumatic flinch factor in audiences. Neil LaBute wrote "The Mercy," about a guy who runs away with his lover by letting his wife think he died. In "WTC View," Brian Sloan wrote about a gay man looking for a roommate in a classified ad on Sept. 10.

In "Sweet and Sad," an of-the-moment family drama that opens and is set on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 at the Public Theater LAB, Richard Nelson may well break out of what a TV executive once called the need for "emotional correctness." (publictheater.org)

Are we beyond all that? All I know is that Broadway just had a serious, provocative, entertaining new play, Rajiv Joseph's "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," that took a satiric and devastating look at the Iraq war. Not even Robin Williams as a tiger could make people want to go there.