February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Now, however, in the most modest of productions, and in the least imposing of venues, there is a brief, imperfect play that deserves attention as putting the agony of the twin towers into perspective.
The play is “The Fallen 9/11” and it is being given a bare bones production at the Producer’s Club at 358 West 44th Street, in a boxlike auditorium termed “the Grand,” a description apparently devoid of humor.
The author of “The Fallen 9/11” is Robert Marese, a native of Park Slope, Brooklyn. The writer’s previous plays, to judge by their titles — “If God Were a Guido,” and “Cocktales” — wouldn’t appear to indicate the excellence and depth of feeling that floods through the best parts of his new play, to which the word “inspired” is a not altogether inappropriate.
The core of “The Fallen 9/11” deals with two New Yorkers caught up in the day’s tragic events. One, Michael Sinclair, is an ambitious lawyer, initially waiting impatiently for the elevator that will take him to an “important” meeting high in the North Tower. The other, Terry Rourke, is an Irish-American fireman who comes to the rescue of the not-entirely-likeable lawyer, who is trapped by a fallen girder and has suffered a shattered leg.
The men, both from Brooklyn but from widely variant social, educational and economical levels, talk, bicker, argue and generally come to know each other, their mutual volubility largely a result of the firefighter’s attempt to keep the stricken lawyer awake in order that he remain alive.
The dialogue given both men, particularly the fireman, is so completely convincing, as unpretentious as it is genuine-sounding, that it’s tempting to suspect that Marese, son of an Italian father and an Irish mother, is himself a former firefighter, or at least the son of a retired FDNY member.
Neither, as it turns out, is true. Marese, rather, is a 41-year-old financial consultant with a Baruch MBA. But he is also a writer in the grip of a valid idea, and equipped with the tools to bring it to successful fruition.
“The Fallen 9/11” has the considerable benefit of a truly exceptional performance from the little-known actor who plays Terry Rourke. Every word Timothy Davis speaks, and every move he makes, as Rourke tells his story in a fervent attempt to prolong the lawyer’s life, is subtle, credible, convincing and surprisingly moving. Davis’s performance is so utterly truthful and so unselfconscious that it’s almost as though he’d wandered into the theater after his shift at the firehouse on Eighth Avenue.
From the way he thinks, speaks and moves, to the manner in which he wears his turnout coat and his bunker pants, standard FDNY issue, everything Davis does is precisely, resoundingly right.
He is, of course, a member of the Actors’ Studio, a performer whose New York career is just beginning and of whom more will no doubt be heard.
As the starchy lawyer, reflecting an annoyingly believable sense of entitlement, the lanky Kent Giltz, making his New York stage debut, matches the remarkable Davis almost line for line and moment for moment.
These two promising actors are, of course, playing men who, in the course of their normal lives, would never meet, much less get to “know” each other as well as they do in the brief running time of Marese’s earnest 70-minute play.
“The Fallen 9/11” lives and breathes when Davis and Giltz are holding the stage. Unfortunately, playwright Marese had something else in mind, something wholly apart from the bond that builds between Rourke and Sinclair.
There are two other characters, Barbara, played earnestly by Heather McHugh, and another fireman, Vinny Kehoe, who arrives in the play’s final moments to deliver the plot twist meant to turn “The Fallen 9/11” into a kind of contemporary “miracle play,” a crass emotional manipulation that not only doesn’t work, but comes dangerously close to canceling out the excellent work that precedes it.
The Belfast-born Tony Norney, like McHugh a veteran of the now defunct Macalla Theater in the Bronx, is literally a late arrival to the role of Kehoe, having taken over a few hours before the production’s first preview performance.
Director Dunsten J. Cormack has done wonders, particularly with Davis, who moves around the stage moving “heavy” obstacles and literally hanging from the ceiling, as though he were actually occupying a dangerously rubble-strewn and fragile disaster site.
“The Fallen 9/11” will be at the Producer’s Club through Sunday’s matinee. The end of this brief run shouldn’t mean the end of the play, if playwright Marese can master the determination to do some rewriting aimed at concentrating on its strong central section and eliminating the sentimental framing device that turns his potentially powerful play into a tired clich