Relocating a 9/11 play in a new haunt

How monologue-style recollections of New Yorkers near ground zero came to be and came to Orange County.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

June 4, 2006

IN the days following Sept. 11, 2001, students from Stuyvesant High School, four blocks from the World Trade Center, were barraged by media interlopers eager for eyewitness responses to the terrorist attack. When classes at the Manhattan magnet school reconvened after a monthlong evacuation, English teacher Annie Thoms quickly learned that the last thing her students wanted to do was to answer more questions about the tragedy.

But Thoms had a more subtle line of inquiry in mind, one that would lead to the evocative documentary play "with their eyes: September 11th — The View From a High School at Ground Zero," playing through June 11 at Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills.

"We met a lot of resistance because students felt like they'd talked about it enough," Thoms explained during a recent visit to Southern California. "But we didn't want to do a 'Where were you on Sept. 11?' rehash. We wanted to ask about what had happened in the couple of months since then, and what does it mean to get back to normal and go on living your life in this everyday sort of way?"

While working on her master's degree at Columbia University in 2000, Thoms had become intrigued by Anna Deavere Smith's interview-based theater pieces. After the terrorist attacks, Thoms realized that Smith's techniques could be used to organize a Sept. 11-themed monologue show for the school's winter drama program.

Ten student actors, chosen on the strength of their audition pieces excerpted from Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles," interviewed students, janitors, cafeteria workers, security guards, teachers and other members of the school's extended community. "At a time when the national dialogue was so much about good and evil," Thoms said, "we had monologues that showed all these different shades of opinion that you could then put side by side."

Anna Belc, an original "with their eyes" cast member who joined Thoms in California last week to check out new versions of the play, admitted she initially had reservations about the project: "I didn't think there was any way to do the show that wouldn't be cheesy — and I wasn't the only one in the cast who felt that way. We thought, 'Oh, great, we're all just going to be crying at every rehearsal.' That turned out to be totally not true."

Belc, who just finished her junior year at Swarthmore College, was surprised by their findings. "When we read the monologues, some of them were really funny. People have written about this project being like a catharsis, but this wasn't about working out our own feelings. It was more of an arm's-length thing, going out and finding people and shaping all this into a play."

Early in 2002 "with their eyes" debuted at Stuyvesant High School. A publishing executive attended the show and offered Thoms and company a book deal. In September 2002, Harper Collins published "with their eyes." Recommended by the American Library Assn. and California Department of Education, "with their eyes" caught the attention of the Chance Theater staff, and last month, the play enjoyed its West Coast premiere under the direction of Christopher Marshall.

"I was really interested in digging out humor and things that might not leap out at first," he said. "It was the little things that were the most interesting to me."

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An ensemble ethic

BUT a big question remained: How best to deal with work rooted in such a particular time and place? "That was a huge discussion with the artistic director, Oanh Nguyen," Marshall said. "I likened 'with our eyes' to an AIDS play done in the '90s like 'The Normal Heart.' Do you memorialize? Do you send us back to that time and say 'This is Sept. 11' or do you approach it as a play five years later in Orange County, Calif.?"

Instead of staging a literal-minded period piece, Marshall assembled a spare set of vignettes modeled on the "View Points" philosophy developed by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki for New York's SITI theater company. "They created a system of reaction-based movement for actors where it's all about kinesthetic response on stage," Marshall explains. "If I move a particular way, how does another actor move in response to that? I wanted to link idea and story and metaphor and shape that comes out language and let the actors work off of each other."

Marshall cast eight actors to play 23 characters, reassigning roles twice during rehearsals. "I was looking for actors who had a nonthreatening, noncompetitive way of relating to each other," he said. "I wanted people who would walk the periphery and listen and work well off of each other."

Marshall's ensemble ethic is evident at the Chance Theater, in a strip mall storefront. On a nearly bare stage furnished with a couple of stepladders, two chairs and a large white feather, actors gathered, dispersed and regrouped as one after another took turns, in character, reciting imperfectly parsed tales studded with telling details: One student who left his lunch in his locker on Sept. 11 remembers how bad it smelled when he returned to school weeks later. A janitor grouses about neighbors he suspects of stealing the school's American flag. A temporarily homeless teenager describes returning to his former apartment, covered in ash and resembling a black-and-white photograph.

"The thing about this monologue technique is that you get an extraordinary specificity," Thoms said. "When you leave in all the 'likes' and the 'ums' and pauses, you really bring across the way someone tells their story and talks around things, not directly at them. The whole idea is that character lives in language."

Marshall's staging of "with their eyes" worked for Thoms. By intermission, she was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. But how did these Manhattan stories play to the Orange County audience?

After the performance, Ryan Esfahani, 15, of Estancia High School proffered a thoughtful thumbs-up. "It's weird," he said, "When 9/11 happened, it felt surreal and seemed so far apart from us. This play helped me a lot to see another side of things because these characters all had such different reactions. I think people could be from all over America and connect to some part of the play."

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'with their eyes'

Where: Chance Theater,

5552 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; 2 p.m. today, next Sunday

Ends: Next Sunday

Price: $25

Contact: (800) 838-3006 or www.chancetheater.com