Lansing
At a warehouse converted into a rehearsal space, two actors and various directors hammer out scene after scene as opening night approaches, working quickly to perfect lines, blocking and most importantly, emotion.
They are preparing to perform a play written by a New York journalist about people trying to make sense of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Anne Nelson’s “The Guys” will make its Midwestern debut tonight at Hannah Community Center, 819 Abbott Road, in an exclusive performance for firefighters, police officers and emergency workers.
“It took me three months to get the rights,” director Todd Haywood said, emphasizing his persistence in securing the play for his theater company, Sunsets with Shakespeare. Outing Productions is also working in conjunction with Sunsets to produce the play.
“The Guys” is Nelson’s first play, written in direct response to interviews she did with a fire captain to help him write eulogies for several of his lost men.
The play’s two characters, Joan and Nick, are brought together under unusual circumstances as they try to cope with the attacks on what Joan describes as her “beautiful, gleaming, wounded city.”
“You couldn’t create another sequence for his life that leads to me or for my life that leads to him,” Joan says in a scene. “After Sept. 11, all over the city, people jumped tracks.”
Nelson wrote “The Guys” in only eight days. A Columbia University journalism professor, she was not used to writing stage performances, but she used her news-writing experience to construct a play that has almost no dramatic physical action, with the exception of a brief tango scene.
In December, “The Guys” had its first performance at New York’s Flea Theater, located a few blocks away from Ground Zero.
Following the attacks, the Flea had seen its house attendance drop from 90 percent capacity to only 5 percent full. “The Guys,” which starred Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray, brought packed crowds, and its three-week run - set to close last December - continues today.
“While we’re a year later, I think the emotions are just as raw,” Haywood said. “It lets us heal by showing us the human story instead of the political story.
“That’s what makes this play so powerful.”
The East Lansing production features St. Johns resident Meymo Lyons Sturges as Joan and Lansing resident Mark Zussman as Nick.
“It’s an extraordinary piece of work,” Sturges said. “It’s as truthful as anything I’ve ever heard.”
Sturges, who has returned to the theater after a 12-year hiatus, spends her days as assignment editor for Lansing television station WILX. She said “The Guys” reflects Nelson’s journalism profession in that Joan has also learned to steel herself against emotion.
“She has simply learned to do what you do in the news business,” Sturges said of her character. “She approaches it like she’s approaching a story.”
Zussman, a retired librarian and local actor, found that he empathized with his character as he studied the play.
“I really came to like this guy a lot,” Zussman said. “I feel I have a real sense of his humanity.”
Under other circumstances, Zussman explained that the fire chief would not have been able to show fear. He said the play brings out emotions in the captain that are revealed under the duress of composing his friends’ eulogies.
“It’s not about the consequences, war and terrorists,” Zussman said. “It’s about human impact and how vulnerable we all are.”
East Lansing Fire Marshal Robert Pratt said perspective is important when dealing with the events of Sept. 11.
“After Sept. 11, you’d walk down the street in uniform and people would come up and shake your hand and hug you,” he said. “And that’s good, but we’re only one small part of the whole structure around Sept. 11.
“There were nurses, doctors, ambulance crews and steel workers who worked around the clock, digging through debris - people who weren’t used to seeing mangled bodies.”
And the unity between firefighters and rescue workers was reinforced by Sept. 11, Pratt said.
“It’s the same thing that happens after a line-of-duty death,” he said.
Sturges said the emotions are common to everyone who experienced Sept. 11.
“I don’t think we’re as far removed as you like to think,” she said. “Our memory has already been indelibly stamped with the most horrific action. (The play) doesn’t really require anything else.”
And Haywood agreed.
“We’d like to pretend we’re much further away,” he said. “We can’t have not absorbed what Joan calls the ‘toxins’ of that time.
“The play is incredibly emotional, but it’s healing in its emotions.”
