For one night only, a play that in its own way commemorates the events of 9/11 will be performed in Orlando, 25 years later.
It’s called “The Guys” and it’s written by award-winning journalist Anne Nelson. It’s based on Nelson’s true story about helping a bereaved fire captain write eulogies for the firefighters he’d lost on 9/11, for their memorial services just a few weeks after the attacks.
The performance happening next Friday is a dynamic staged reading at the Mandell Theater inside the Orlando Shakes. It’s presented by a who’s who of Orlando theater – Becky Fisher and Joe Swanberg star as the writer and the fire captain, David Lee directs, and Margaret Nolan, founder of Kangagirl Productions, produces.
Nolan is a research psychologist by day, and she merges her two worlds with an approach to artistic endeavors that she calls “healing theatre.”
But first, she says, to understand the power of the play “The Guys,” we need to understand its writer, Anne Nelson.
Nelson lived in New York at the time of the tragedy, and just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, she was asked to help a fire captain who’d lost eight of his firefighters as they tried to rescue people from the Twin Towers that day. He had to write and deliver eight eulogies. He felt overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. She agreed to help him.
“So, she met with him, and in the course of a long afternoon, she asked him questions about the men, each man, and their stories, their families, a little bit about their personalities,” explained Nolan. “She wrote the eulogies. He delivered them.”
A few weeks later, she recounted her experience to her friend, actor Sigourney Weaver, and Weaver’s husband, an artistic director for a New York theater. From that discussion, “The Guys” was born.
“It was essentially her experience of a writer and a fire captain writing eulogies, but to celebrate the joyful lives that these men had,” Nolan said. “It's beautiful. It's not sad. There are poignant pieces, but it's essentially what I would like to present as much as I can, which is healing theater, theater that can heal.”
“Dance and theater and art has been proven scientifically and otherwise, anecdotally, to be healing for individuals, for a community, for a society,” she added. With this play, “they sort of turned grief and loss on its ear a little bit, where it became this joyous celebration about these men, and their lives in the firehouse, and their lives outside the firehouse.”
