The Guys at Lakewood Playhouse
by Alec ClaytonOriginally published in The News Tribune (Tacoma), September 19-24, 2004.
One writer, two actors and one horrific event. "The Guys" by Anne Nelson is one writer’s response to the tragedy of 9/11. The play opened in the Flea Theater, a tiny theater seven blocks from ground zero, just three months after the attacks.
Locally, the Lakewood Playhouse will present a three-nights-only performance of "The Guys" Sept. 10, 11 and 12. It is directed by Suzanne M. Cohen, managing artistic director of the Mirror Stage Company in Seattle, and stars Christie Flynn as Joan and Jim Winkler as Nick.
Anne Nelson is an editor and former war correspondent. On Sept. 11, 2001, she was working as a journalism professor at Columbia University in New York. A little over a week after the attacks she learned of a New York City fire captain who needed a writer to help him write eulogies for eight of his missing men. She called the fire captain and arranged to meet with him. Shortly afterwards Jim Simpson from the Flea Theater asked her to write a play about the attacks. She had never before written a play, but she was driven to do this one. Writing almost non-stop late at night, she completed the play in less than a week. It is a two-person play about Nelson (renamed Joan) and the fire captain (called Nick in the play), working together on the eulogies, with periodic interruptions as Joan steps offstage to talk to the audience about her thoughts and feelings.
I got to see an early rehearsal – so early that the actors were still working with script in hand and the stage and set were delineated by tape on the floor. I was prepared for bathos; I was not prepared to see the tragedy that affected a nation played out in such simple, unassuming reactions of two very believable characters.
The play opens with Joan sitting on steps in front of the stage, talking to the audience. She introduces the events leading up to her meeting with Nick, the fire captain. After she sets the scene, Nick knocks on the door, and the play begins. She offers him coffee. He tries to tell her about how he has to write the eulogies and doesn’t know how. Three hundred and fifty men were lost. "In a bad year, six. But this was in one day, one hour," he says.
She tries to draw him out, to get him to talk about the men: what they were like, what their families are like. He repeatedly says he should leave; he doesn’t want to impose on her. She struggles to contain her emotion and remain professional.
Both actors were so believable in their roles that even in a rehearsal with breaks to discuss blocking or motivation with the director, I almost forgot they were actors playing a part.
Portraits of the missing men emerge as Joan gradually gets Nick to open up. And as she scribbles rough drafts of the eulogies and then gets him to read them to her, we gain amazing insights into the writing process. Then she steps offstage to talk to the audience again, divulging in a series of monologues feelings that she does not divulge to Nick.
Near the end of Joan’s first monologue, Nick picks up his coffee cup and takes a sip. Throughout her monologue he had been out of sight, although in full view onstage, but with this little gesture he signaled to the audience that they are about to leave the symbolic realm of the monologue and rejoin the play in progress. It is little gestures such as these that make the play real and attest to the professionalism of Cohen, Flynn and Winkler.
Joan’s monologues create an eerie yet natural feel to the play, allowing for a smooth flow back and forth between the concrete reality of their conversation and the understandably disturbed meanderings of the writer’s mind. Just one monologue, in which she talks about brain cells under trauma, seemed discordant and pretentious. They make up for that with a playful interlude where Nick teaches Joan to tango.
"The Guys" will soon be a major film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia. But don’t wait for the film, see it at the Lakewood Playhouse.
© 2004 by Alec Clayton