BACK STAGE WEST
July 18, 2002
at the Actors'
Gang
In her
intentionally maudlin reader's-theatre thingy The Guys, first-time playwright Anne Nelson offers
many post-Sept. 11 eulogies--for heroic individual firefighters, for
once-indomitable New York's fragile state of mind--but the epitaph that's
particularly revealing is her pronouncement that the attacks on the World Trade
Center marked "the end of the postmodern era." Like those who
prematurely predicted the "end of irony" in the immediate aftermath
of our national trauma, Nelson simply spoke too soon; our hall-of-mirrors popular
culture continues to thrive on film franchises, reality TV, musicals based on
films, and borderless, unmediated information exchange; and our chattering
class of pundits and academics seems no less skeptical, self-conscious, or,
well, chattery than before.
It's not fair to
hold a writer accountable for every expired insight, but Nelson's sendoff for
the "postmodern era" is hard to ignore while watching The Guys, precisely because such docu-theatre
events--which blur traditional categories of truth and fiction, reporting and
reenacting, entertainment and storytelling--are nothing if not products of our
postmodern age, in which politics is a TV genre and theatre has proven itself
an essential reporting medium (Twilight, The Laramie Project). But then this confusion of purpose is typical of
Nelson's already dated play, and even more so of this new West Coast premiere
"production" at the Actors' Gang. At $40 a head ($15 for firefighters
or cops), this unremarkable 80-minute piece, featuring two actors on script at
music stands--Tim Robbins and Helen Hunt at opening, to be replaced by other
celebrity actors throughout an indefinite run--is benefit material, the
theatrical equivalent of a commemorative plate. The beneficiary isn't a 9/11
charity or the Red Cross, though; apparently it's the Actors' Gang.
The Guys probably still has some resonance where
it's running (now starring Carol Kane and Stephen Lang!) just walking distance
from Ground Zero at the off-Off-Broadway Flea Theatre, which commissioned this
quickie valentine from Nelson. And it's easy to understand how, just months
after the attacks, its straightforward probing of wounds and heartfelt words of
mourning must have felt like a healing salve. As a time capsule of the strong,
irreducible emotions of that moment, The Guys may be as worthy a document in its own
way as any NY Times "Portrait of Grief," American flag pin, or
celebrity benefit concert.
But I think it's
fair to say that, while none of us will ever fully move beyond the horror of
that instant, irrevocable loss, or can ever repay the debt to those who died in
service on that day, we have moved to the point of asking that any work of art that dares to
deal with Sept. 11, either in its full enormity or in some small personal way,
fulfill some basic requirements of art, even postmodern art: craft,
inspiration, insight, intelligence. Nelson's piece, as narrated by a journalist
called on to write eulogies for a New York fire captain who lost eight men, is
full of first-rate reportage, with many telling details about New York
firefighters and their hearteningly old-fashioned code of honor, their
tight-lipped male camaraderie, their modest but unshakeable faith in their
calling. And it has a few genuine moments of communion, some comic and some dramatic,
as a well-educated Upper West Side writer connects with a plain-spoken Brooklyn
civil servant.
Hunt and Robbins,
under Robert Egan's often over-emphatic direction, make the characters'
give-and-take work well enough, if not exactly spring to life. But Robbins'
character is a cipher--a window through which we see "the guys" but
from which nothing personal or specific reflects. And Nelson gives her
stand-in, the writer, a series of monologues--thoughts about the
inter-connectedness of New Yorkers, cries to God for a reason or redress--that
the rosy-cheeked Hunt gamely plays for all their freshness or revelation, which
is to say she has nothing to play.
It's inarguable
that all of us had deep, profound reactions to Sept. 11; some of us even had
deep, profound thoughts. Indeed, for a while, everything was freighted,
seemingly minted with new meaning; The Guys was conceived and initially offered in
that state of grace. By this point it's clear that such grace and goodwill--not
to mention time and money--is not limitless, but must be saved for the truly
deserving.
"The Guys," presented by and at the Actors' Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Wed.-Sat. 7 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. July 10-28. $40. (323) 465-0566.