As we have just passed the 22nd anniversary of the terrible loss on 9/11/01, I thought about old New York. I was scrolling through social media and saw so many of my friends on both sides of the proverbial aisle (stupid as both sides are) marking their tributes, either with images of the original towers or the building there now.
I suppose we all, unless born after the fact, have a 9/11 story. Mine is perhaps not special, but I began thinking about the place that harbors nearly all the great talent of the theatre and is still, sadly, the only true place where you can make it as a playwright in our country—if you want to be read and performed. I say sad because our country is so vast, it seems wrong that only one town holds the keys to having a career in a certain industry, but what can you do?
I was born in late September and the administrators of Forestdale Baptist School ignored the rules and let me into elementary school a little early, so I was all of 17 when I went to Bennington College, nestled in the Southwest corner of Vermont. My Bennington experience began with tragedy and ended with tragedy. In my “senior” year, we lost four students—some to suicide, others to terrible accidents. But the “freshman” year was marked by one of the darker days of our time.
Preceding the attack, however, my grandfather passed away on the first day of college orientation. It was decided I wouldn’t go home—that mom and dad would take care of all that, leaving me a little earlier than they had planned. Cullen Tittle was an elusive figure in my life—always loving, but seldom there. He was a storm chaser, and, as his hobby would indicate, he lived a mostly solitary existence, a bit aloof from the rest of us. I loved him all the same, but we had already made the 24-hour drive to Vermont from Alabama and it was felt it would be better for me to begin my collegiate experience rather than go home to a funeral. I’m not sure it was the right decision, as I’m still unsure Bennington was the right decision, but it’s a little late for regret.
The first day of school arrived. I had an early class that first morning. In the ‘80s, when Bennington was very wild, the class was called (in the course catalogue) “Sex with Betsy.” By the 21st century, it was now called “Biology of the Sexes” and was still taught by Dr. Betsy Sherman, a much beloved figure among the students who I could not stand. Indeed, in that first class, when she took the time to ridicule religion, I stopped listening to her and I am rather proud of failing what was surely an ideologically driven course, had I paid any attention after that first day.
Immediately after class, I was expected to begin my work-study job, part of my financial aid. I was to be the gopher and office assistant to the Literature, Languages, and Social Science departments. I was heading toward the old Jennings Dairy Barn, where the main offices are, including that of the Dean and Provost, when I noticed people crying in various corners of various lawns. An international student of indeterminate nationality was standing next to his bike outside the Barn. I asked him what everyone was so upset about. “Someone blew up the World Trade Center.” I didn’t respond, but being 17 and having never been to New York, I wanted to ask, “What’s the World Trade Center?” because I didn’t know that’s what those two towers were.
My first responsibility in the office was to put up signs cancelling all classes. I made my way back to the dorm and offered everyone in Franklin House to join my roommate and I as I had a TV. That dorm room had three windows and pretty good reception, so we all sat and watched the footage. One student was crying her eyes out because her parents worked close to there and, of course, the phones were entirely out of commission. We were still in early cell phone days, and I didn’t even own one. Mom, of course, could not check on me. While we were three hours from Manhattan, I’m sure she worried about me anyway.
Back home, my brother was most likely in tears. As a junior fireman, I know he felt for the first responders and his house has always been adorned with some 9/11 memorabilia. I also didn’t know the resulting war would inspire one of my best friends to join the Air Force. Life was about to change for all of us.
In the ensuing days, what were nominal Jewish students were wearing prayer shawls and cantering in the lunchroom, politically active and disgusted students were watching the then King Bush II mutter his ridiculous responses on national television.
Yes, my first day of college was 9/11. Already we wondered how the world would change. My second roommate, and the man who directed most of my resulting work at Bennington, had read an article that folks would probably turn more to non-fiction and documentaries than fictional movies and conjured up tales. Certainly, that was the tack I took in life, but that had more to do with me trying to catch up with the other Benningtonians, who were so much more intelligent than I was.
Eventually, life had to continue. Classes resumed; I don’t think any student lost a loved one in the fray, and I didn’t realize I was about to get my first taste of New York City. But I had to because Bennington has a built-in mini semester called “Field Work Term” (FWT) where, in the dead of January and February, you had to hold down a job or internship in the field in which you’re interested. Being in the Drama/Theatre concentration, where was I going to go but New York?
I had heard the year previous a student had “shadowed” Edward Albee. I doubted this—he most likely worked for his foundation—but I liked the idea of finding a professional mentor and, after a very short search through the Dramatists Guild website, I knew it had to be Tony-winner David Henry Hwang, who I have devoted much time to on this blog and have loved since I was eleven years old.
Having mentored young playwrights before, David’s agent proposed the idea and we set up to meet in January for my FWT, which is usually the time when many of Bennington’s most famous alums never come back, much like Carol Channing who found a job and started a career while on hers. I was probably never going that route. I was a good Southern boy who didn’t do things like that. Still, I cashed in the last of my savings bonds and prepared to meet David in early January in Manhattan, where I would shack up with Alabamians who were studying at New York University, including a friend I had studied with at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). For the first month, I was to have my own room, but in February, I was to be kicked out into an interior hallway with nothing but a futon because his girlfriend moved in.
The winter of 2001-2002 was the winter with no snow. Even Vermont never got a drop, which was never to be the case again while I lived there. So, New York was, obviously, mostly bare, the grey skies casting a pall over everything. I visited Ground Zero, paid my respects. I had taken one of my brother’s fireman patches and swapped them with a group of firefighters I met in the Bowery to bring home to James. But, outside of that, I was too young to be aware how much others were being affected by the whole thing. And I had my internship to do.
David, raising two children, was generous with his time, but I spent most of the time seeing shows—on and off Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, even shows that didn’t fit into any of those categories. I can vividly remember each moment of the first Broadway show I saw, Thou Shalt Not, an ill-fated musical devised by The Producers’ director Susan Stroman and written by my favorite jazzman Harry Connick, Jr., and the librettist David Thompson.
It had its unfortunate opening after 9/11 after Rudy Giuliani encouraged everybody to get back to their daily lives. Being a show about murder and death, it had a morgue scene in the second act, which was truncated after audience members complained that it was tasteless considering the events of the “big day.”
My second day in the city, I picked up an honest-to-God three-inch-thick copy of the New York Times and saw that Thou Shalt Not was having its last performance. I told the cabby (how I thought my money would last taking cabs, I’ll never know) to take me to the Plymouth Theatre. When the cast recording was released two years later, my girlfriend and I listened to it, and I recounted to her every scene, and I still can. I guess you never forget your first Broadway show. And, while a flop, it was generally regarded as an interesting flop, though critics complained of its nude scene and slightly salacious content, being based on Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, but set in post-WWII New Orleans. Being a Tony voter, David got us into see a lot of shows that season and I plopped down change myself to see the New York premiere of Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things and a Jean Cocteau Repertory production of Robert Fagles’ translation of Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex. I kept every program, but I’m afraid they ended up with my girlfriend after our breakup some years later. Ah, well, I couldn’t win her, and I didn’t win those gems either, but what can you do?
I’ll never forget seeing Stroman’s other then-running show, Contact. A jubilant dance musical, I watched the stage action, but I was mostly watching the audience, who were crying their eyes out. They needed to see people up and dancing to forget their worries. It was a beautiful thing. The theatre is full of beautiful moments.
The internship included David introducing me to a frequent Sondheim collaborator, John Weidman (who wrote the scenario for Contact), who bought me some crab cakes and a Coke while we discussed his work with the Master. I also was introduced to Craig Lucas, another favorite of mine, and I’m sure, looking back on it, he hit on me—as did the clerk at the Cast Album store where I picked up a CD of Flower Drum Song (as David was rewriting it at the time)—but I was too green to notice any of this. I was a rube in New York after all.
I can’t say I had the time of my life. At ASFA, I lived off two hours’ sleep per night and this only started to affect me in college. They call NYC “the city that never sleeps,” and I certainly didn’t. I remember one very troubling night when I went to a local Chinese grocery with a kindly attendant who always had a smile for me, and I bought a package of Nyquil, hoping to knock me out.
I went home, popped the pills, and fell asleep. When I awoke, I was hoping I had slept through the night. But, instead, I had only been asleep thirty minutes. I spent the rest of the night crying, and I realized then New York wasn’t the place for me. Being from the South, I must have greenery and distance when I look out a window. How was I going to be a playwright and not like New York? Sure, I loved being in the theaters, the museums, the cinemas, but when I would go back out into the urine-stenched streets, the reality that I didn’t much care for the place set in and I suppose that’s why I’m still not there, living in a furniture-less apartment and hoping to get a play on.
I’ve lost a lot of years. Perhaps when I lost everything at the end of college, I should’ve moved there and put in my time. I might have had a career of some note at this point, but I didn’t. Insomnia filled nights and I don’t get along. Plus, I would have never been home to nurse my dad through his bout with cancer.
I spent one more winter in New York, again with David, attended the opening night of his version of Flower Drum (a real treat), was introduced to other luminaries of the stage, like James Lapine. But, aside from a trip at the end of college to see The Lion King (a great opening number and then the rest of it’s just The Lion King), I’ve never been back, nor cared to. Sure, I would have loved to have seen the 2012 revival of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach or to have seen the most recent revival of Sondheim’s Follies, but I mostly get along without it.
New York is a place I admire without loving. Watching Spike Lee’s most recent documentary masterpiece, NYC Epicenters-9/11-2021½, I admire its people and the way they make it through together in hard times. But it is admiration I can appreciate from afar. Sure, I hope to have a play on there, some day. I’ll make the trip, but I must have my rural home in which to write.
I’m sure this week brought back many terrible memories for its residents. I mourn with them. I think 9/11 has a lot more to do with our current troubles than is immediately obvious. The point of terrorism is to strike at the ideals, the very heart of a country’s people. Now we are a divided mess in another age of mass hysteria. Bin Laden got what he wanted. America has not been the same since and it may take even more time to truly see how that day ricocheted us into our present state, even considering the events that have proceeded. We don’t know who we are anymore. The terrorists won, in a way. I was just too green to see it back then and I’m too old now to help find a way to fix it, if it can be fixed.
New York, New York—keep trudging on. I wish you had a bit of the kindness that we have in calmer parts of the country (if there are any anymore), but I know why you’re so tough and resilient. I know how you can make or break people. It is to be admired and looked at with a bit of a wry eye. The greatest city in the world? I can’t be sure. I don’t much like cities. I’ve seen cleaner ones, I’ve seen worse. I suppose you must be thanked for keeping theatre alive if you can still dare to do it. So, my gratitude and my commiserations on this anniversary of a terrible day in our nation’s recent past.
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