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.