The Guys: A Play - Softcover

Nelson, Anne

 
9780812967296: The Guys: A Play
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812967291 ISBN 13: 9780812967296
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

First performed in a hit off-off-Broadway production, and soon to be a film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, The Guys is a timeless drama about the surprising truths people can discover in ordinary lives, and the connections we make with others and ourselves in times of tragedy.

Paralyzed by grief and unable to put his thoughts into words, Nick, a fire captain, seeks out the help of a writer to compose eulogies for the colleagues and friends he lost in the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001. As Joan, an editor by trade, draws Nick out about “the guys,” powerful profiles emerge, revealing vivid personalities and the substance and meaning that lie beneath the surface of seemingly unremarkable people. As the individual talents and enthusiasms of the people within the small firehouse community are realized, we come to understand the uniqueness and value of what each person has to contribute. And Nick and Joan, two people who under normal circumstances never would have met, jump the well-defined tracks of their own lives, and so learn about themselves, about life, and about the healing power of human connection, through talking about the guys.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne Nelson is an author and a playwright, and teaches at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1989 Livingston Award for international reporting. Her books and articles have been published widely, and her play The Guys has been staged throughout the world. As a war correspondent in El Salvador and Guatemala from 1980 to 1983, Nelson published reports and photography in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

First performed in a hit off-off-Broadway production, and soon to be a film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, The Guys is a timeless drama about the surprising truths people can discover in ordinary lives, and the connections we make with others and ourselves in times of tragedy.
Paralyzed by grief and unable to put his thoughts into words, Nick, a fire captain, seeks out the help of a writer to compose eulogies for the colleagues and friends he lost in the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001. As Joan, an editor by trade, draws Nick out about "the guys," powerful profiles emerge, revealing vivid personalities and the substance and meaning that lie beneath the surface of seemingly unremarkable people. As the individual talents and enthusiasms of the people within the small firehouse community are realized, we come to understand the uniqueness and value of what each person has to contribute. And Nick and Joan, two people who under normal circumstances never would have met, jump the well-defined tracks of their own lives, and so learn about themselves, about life, and about the healing power of human connection, through talking about the guys.

Aus dem Klappentext

First performed in a hit off-off-Broadway production, and soon to be a film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, The Guys is a timeless drama about the surprising truths people can discover in ordinary lives, and the connections we make with others and ourselves in times of tragedy.

Paralyzed by grief and unable to put his thoughts into words, Nick, a fire captain, seeks out the help of a writer to compose eulogies for the colleagues and friends he lost in the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001. As Joan, an editor by trade, draws Nick out about the guys, powerful profiles emerge, revealing vivid personalities and the substance and meaning that lie beneath the surface of seemingly unremarkable people. As the individual talents and enthusiasms of the people within the small firehouse community are realized, we come to understand the uniqueness and value of what each person has to contribute. And Nick and Joan, two people who under normal circumstances never would have met, jump the well-defined tracks of their own lives, and so learn about themselves, about life, and about the healing power of human connection, through talking about the guys.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Preface

The Guys is based on a true experience.

I teach at the graduate school for journalism at Columbia University in New York, and I oversee some thirty international students. On the morning of September 11, 2001, we had sent them out, along with their American classmates, to cover the mayoral primary. It would be days before we knew that all of them had survived.

I had learned about the attack on the World Trade Center in a call from my father in
Oklahoma. I watched the images on television until the second tower went down. Then, numb, I turned off the television, voted, and went to my office. I remember taking out my calendar and looking at it, wondering which of the events I had planned, if any, now had any meaning. I walked over to the hospital on the next block to donate blood. The emergency personnel turned me away. They were kind, but they wanted to keep the hospital clear for the wounded. They looked over my shoulder as they talked to me, searching the traffic lanes down Amsterdam Avenue for ambulances bearing victims of the attack–those ambulances that would in fact never arrive uptown. There were far fewer wounded than anyone expected. Most of the casualties were dead.

Twelve days after the attack, my husband and I took our children to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Brooklyn. Families in New York wanted to huddle, to eat together, and to talk quietly. A friend of my sister’s called, looking for my brother-in-law, Burk Bilger, who is also a writer. The friend had met a fire captain and wanted to find someone who could help him. Burk was working on deadline, so I said I would help. The captain came over that afternoon. Once he got there, he told us his story: He had lost most of the men from his company who had responded to the alarm at the World Trade Center. The first service was only days away, and as the captain, he had to deliver the eulogy. But he couldn’t find a way to write anything. Burk put aside his project and joined us. He and I reassured the captain and started to work. Together, the three of us spent hours producing eulogies. Burk and I worked in shifts, one of us interviewing the fire captain while the other wrote. It was clear to us that the captain, like many New Yorkers that month, was quite literally in a state of shock. Suddenly, a significant number of the people he was closest to simply weren’t there. Yet in only a few days he was supposed to get up and speak before hundreds of mourners, to put something into words that would reflect their loss, as well as their esteem and affection for the fallen man.

Through the strange mathematics of chance, neither my brother-in-law nor I had lost anyone close to us in the catastrophe. But like most New Yorkers, we were stunned, grieved, uncomprehending. That afternoon turned into evening, and at last we finished the final eulogy for the services that had been scheduled. The captain thanked us, several times, and then said, “You should come to the firehouse and see what I’m talking about.”
I did, a few days later. Like most civilians, I had never ventured beyond the firehouse doors. I saw the environment described in the play–the kitchen, the tool bench, the black boots set out on the floor ready for the firefighters to jump into at a call. I saw a long row of names written in chalk on a blackboard, which listed men as “missing” even though, since it was two weeks past 9/11, those men were surely lost.

The captain and I kept in touch. More services were scheduled. He came uptown, and together we wrote more eulogies. He delivered them at the services, and I would call to find out how they went. I could tell that every step was an ordeal for him, because he, utterly unreasonably, felt responsible. Like fire captains across the city, he wanted to take care of the families of the survivors, to compensate for their loss in a way no one possibly could. He would do everything for them he could remotely think of, and then berate himself for not doing enough. At the same time, he had to look after his men at the firehouse, whose world and whose way of life had been instantly and permanently changed.

The captain impressed me deeply. I thought that I had never met anyone so generous. I realized that generosity was the essence of the job–a firefighter’s work was about saving lives, and the more often and effectively he did it, the happier he was. I also learned that like many of his counterparts, the captain had a boundless curiosity toward the world around him, including a fresh and eager appetite for the arts. That first meeting in September opened a door to the world of the firefighters, and as I continued to learn about them, my admiration grew. Over the coming weeks I read reams of press coverage on the aftermath of 9/11, but I felt as though my experience had given me a glimpse into another dimension. Three hundred and forty-three firemen lost is a number. I had had the privilege of being introduced to men–their qualities, their families, their daily life–in a way that made them real to me, and allowed me to mourn them and the others who had died.

In early October, some Argentine colleagues asked me to appear on a panel in Buenos Aires. It was my first time out of the country since 9/11, and it made for a rough trip. The journey was a bizarre inversion of the time I had spent reporting from Latin America in the early 1980s. Now the airport that was filled with soldiers and submachine guns was in the United States–JFK. When I got to Argentina, I stopped at a corner bar for an empanada, and the waiter blithely informed me that “an anthrax bomb was just dropped on New York.” He had gotten the story wrong, but it was a horrific half-hour before I found that out, a half-hour in which my only thought was that I should have been in New York with my children.

Over the next few days, I learned that the Argentines had their own perspective on the attack–or, rather, many different perspectives, ranging from the humane empathy of the many to the callous satisfaction of the few: There were some people, in some parts of the world, who saw the attack on the innocents of the World Trade Center as retribution for actions of the U.S. government. In the following days and weeks I learned, with the help of my international students, that each culture brought its own idiosyncratic interpretation to the event. Those interpretations made a jarring addition to my twenty-five years of experience in the fields of journalism, human rights, and international affairs. In my mind, the trip to Argentina came to illustrate the negative perception of Americans in other parts of the world, something Americans have difficulty understanding.

On October 18, shortly after I returned to New York, I attended a benefit dinner for my husband’s organization, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Sitting at my right hand was a pleasant-looking man named Jim Simpson, who was married to a Lawyers Committee board member, Sigourney Weaver. Jim and I were on duty as spouses, and over dinner, the conversation quickly turned to September 11. He told me that he had founded a small theater and repertory company in TriBeCa, just seven blocks from the World Trade Center. The Flea Theater had been flourishing but was now in danger of going under. Because of the attack, the area had been closed off for weeks, and once it became accessible, audiences avoided it because of the smoke and debris, as well as the general pall of disaster. Businesses all over the neighborhood were dying. The Flea Theater continued to operate, but the company was playing to empty houses. One of his young actors, Jim said, wanted to do a play that spoke to the situation directly. But what could that play be?

“Antigone?” I suggested. Maybe...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812967291
ISBN 13 
9780812967296
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
128
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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