The Guys

Part of this year's play reading is recovering from my theatrical Rip Van Winkle act. 9/11 was a part of those years, so when I started thinking about "The State We're In", I wanted to find a play about that September day. I honestly don't know how theatre reacted. A quick Google search for "9/11 play" pointed me to Anne Nelson's The Guys.

I'd like to look at these plays in a critical vacuum, I really would. It's a lot easier said than done, though. My initial response was so strong, I itched to see what the critical reaction had been, and found universal praise. It was enough to make me pause: Am I just that far off?

I'm sure a great deal of the initial acclaim had to do with the immediacy of the production: premiering at The Flea Theater (only a short distance away from Ground Zero) a mere three months after the attacks, this was an important healing event for New Yorkers. Like Waiting For Lefty, this play can't be disassociated from time and place. It must have been an electric experience, the kind of therapy theatre can create when it allows a community to come together in a time of crisis.

However, I'm reading this play in 2009 Utah: far removed in time and geography.

This simple one-act is based on real events, with the character of Joan a thinly veiled version of the author. The play opens with a monologue where Joan talks about leaving Oklahoma behind to live in the dreamland of New York: a rent controlled apartment "filled with music and books. A husband who liked opera more than football. Two charming children in a good private school." Then, the horrors of 9/11 hit. Through friends, she is introduced to Nick, a fire captain who lost most of his men that day. He needs to give eight eulogies in the coming weeks, and is utterly overwhelmed. She agrees to spend a weekend afternoon using her writing skills to help Nick compose the speeches.

The bulk of the play is a by-the-numbers discussion of Nick's men who died, as Joan teases out specific details and crafts pieces out of them. I really wonder how fictionalized these men are. I've done some research, and can't get further than "inspired by". They certainly don't feel real or closely observed: we have "the average Joe", "the rookie", "the family guy", "the scalawag" in that order. For all the avowed intent to memorialize the individuals that stand behind the numbers, the firefighters never have the shock of the real. A feeling that this was a true memorial (like Mary Dickson's EXPOSED) would really have tempered my feelings towards the play, but they remain ciphers - a pretext for the central theme of the play.

It is obviously a heartfelt reaction by a talented writer. So why does The Guys infuriate me? Because it is ultimately not about the guys that died that day, or their leader who survived. Naturalistic scenes continually break out into direct address monologues that reveal the writer's own anguish and pain. Even within the scenes, she is emotionally shattered and Nick constantly apologizes for ruining her weekend. The only emotional arc is Joan's, as if when thinking about all the people who lost their lives on that day, what should truly concern us is the shattering pain felt by the liberal intelligentsia who had to endure the horrors of writing about it.

I'd like to react to The Guys in a purely technical sense, but I can't get past my own distaste for the play's narcissism. When we talk about The Culture Wars, here is Example A in The People vs. The Smug Self-Centered Lefties. The spine of the play (and of its reception) seems to be this: How are we, as rich, artistic left-leaning New York intellectuals ... how are we affected by 9/11.

Perhaps I'm not all that far from the critical reaction after all. As I was finishing this post up, I stumbled across an otherwise glowing review from the Village Voice:
As time passes, The Guys may come to seem shallow, even clichéd, not because it doesn't deal in authentic emotions, but because it offers little critical distance on them.




(One thing The Guys certainly has going for it is some great monologues for adult women. Those can be hard to find, so it's well worth a note just for that. I'll be keeping track through the year of plays that have good scenes or monologues though Labels.)

Next Week: Black Watch by Gregory Burke

3 comments:

January 12, 2009 at 10:12 AM April Fossen said...

Yeah, I'm trying to get past my distaste for the play to see how I feel about those monologues purely as audition material.

January 12, 2009 at 5:40 PM Melissa said...

I haven't read the play, but I can easily imagine its tone from your descriptions. Here's why: Probably because Impact is in Berkeley, I get wagonloads of plays sent to me with a smug, self-centered leftie pov. I say this with love, as I am a left-leaning individual, but that smug, self-centered, utterly blinkered pov gets right up my nose. For example, since the war in Iraq began, Impact has received, on the average, a play a month about what evil murderers soldiers are, a pov I find distasteful in the extreme, not to mention reductionist, of limited narrative capacity, and lame.

I'm going to send you a play in a bit that has a 9/11 angle that I think you'll like better. It's not about 9/11 as such, but one character is dealing with the aftermath.

January 13, 2009 at 10:37 AM Mark Fossen said...

I don't think The Guys is as vitriolic as what you describe ... but it certainly is navel-gazing and patronizing.

And I speak as an elitist leftie myself. :)

Post a Comment