OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

The healing stage: drama helps firemen cope with loss

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Stephen McKinley

The lives of thousands of people were thrown into chaos by the Sept. 11

attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. For many others, lives were

dislocated and changed in unforeseen ways.

One such moment came about when Columbia University journalism professor

Anne Nelson was asked to help a fire captain write eulogies for the men lost

Never miss an issue of The Irish Echo

Subscribe to one of our great value packages.

from his firehouse, which led to her writing a play about the experience,

called “The Guys.”

Subsequently the play, created in a nine-day writing marathon and her

first foray into the world of drama, rescued a downtown theater from

closure, was staged with actors Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver, and helped

some firefighters come to terms with the losses they sustained.

Nelson, director of the international program at Columbia’s Graduate

School of Journalism, described how her encounter with the anonymous fire

captain arose from “a phone call coming in from a friend of a friend of a

friend — it was a total New York thing.”

“The first day, I spent, I don’t know, four, five hours with him,” Nelson

said. The captain had never had to write eulogies before, so she helped him

to talk through the lives of the lost firefighters and to construct tributes

that revealed each man as an individual, conveying his unique humanity.

The experience tranformed Nelson’s perceptions of the firefighters. “They

are incredible, diverse people who have been through a lot of pain,” she

said. Then, after meeting with the fire captain, Nelson encountered Jim

Simpson, artistic director of the Flea Theater in lower Manhattan.

Simpson told Nelson that the Flea’s existence on White Street was threatened

by its location close to Ground Zero. “They were on the verge of

bankruptcy,” Nelson said.

They talked some more, and the result was that Nelson produced “The

Guys,” a play about the fire captain (played by Murray), who lost eight men

on Sept. 11, and the editor (Sigourney Weaver) who helps him write their

eulogies.

Some of the Irish-American firefighters who have seen the play are

themselves “moonlighting actors,” as Nelson described them. This fact helped

confirm to her the sophistication and intimacy of the community she had

encountered because of the cataclysm of events after Sept. 11.

“Often they’ll have a highly technical critique of Bill Murray’s

performance after the show,” she said.

One firefighter who saw the play was Danny Keane, from the Duane Street

firehouse in lower Manhattan. Despite its proximity to the World Trade

Center site, all of the Duane Street firehouse’s firefighters escaped alive

from the collapsing towers.

“[The play] was very intense,” Keane said. “Bill Murray did an excellent

job in an incredibly tough role to play. Even though this is only a

one-and-a-half-hour play, it must have been an incredible drain on the

body.”

For Keane, the play has helped himself and some of his colleagues come

to terms with the Sept. 11 losses. If nothing else, he said, it further

shows a little of what the Fire Department went through, something that

struck Nelson forcefully.

“It’s a very insular community and incredibly self-sufficient and

generous,” she said. “They go through the extremes of tragedy to the

banality of everyday boredom. I can only hope that I have helped express

that.” She recalled her horror at learning that 14 ladder companies alone

lost a third or more of their firefighters on Sept. 11.

In the play, the character of the fire captain, Nick, tells the editor,

Joan, about life in a firehouse — how, when not on a call, the firefighters

spent much of their spare time in the kitchen. The firehouse ritual, where

one firefighter cooks for the others, is recounted, and how often the food

is awful. Small but heartbreaking details are revealed, such as the fact

that one of the dead was still on probation. Another firefighter lived with

his parents and was always failing in finding a girlfriend.

“Not everyone has the same healing process,” firefighter Keane said, “but

this helped. I think they portrayed it in the correct way.”

Although she protected the anonymity of the fire captain and his fallen

comrades by changing significant details of their lives in the play, Nelson

said that many of the firefighters who see the play have told her after that

they are convinced that they know those upon whom the characters are based.

For Keane, who said that he knew the fire captain upon whom the play was

based, it was intimacy of the firefighters’ lives together that causes many

to see their comrades in Nelson’s play.

“It helps,” he said simply.

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese