The Guys at the Flea

Heading down to Walker St. to attend a performance of The Guys at the Flea Theater last month, I thought I was on my way to see Bill Murray reunited with Sigourney Weaver in their first professional collaboration since the Ghostbusters movies.

The Guys is the two-character, three-hankie play that Jim Simpson, the Flea's founder and artistic director (and Weaver's husband), commissioned from a Columbia journalism professor named Anne Nelson in October of last year, after meeting her at a dinner party and hearing her talk about her experience helping a fire captain to write a series of eulogies for the men he had lost at the World Trade Center. Simpson had been looking for a way of simultaneously addressing the subject most on everyone's minds just then and getting his 75-seat theater out of debt. (Like so many small-scale enterprises in Lower Manhattan, the Flea had been hit hard by Sept. 11.) He asked Nelson if she'd like to try turning the incident into a play.

Nelson, who had never before written a play, has said that she composed The Guys in a little over a week, sitting up late at the computer after her children had gone to bed, and having finished it, sent it to Mr. Simpson, who took it as-is. In December, Simpson mounted a production in the form of a quasi-staged reading, with Weaver playing the journalist and Murray the firefighter, and it ran for a couple of weeks to sold-out houses. Then last month the play reopened for an indefinite run. The idea is to keep it going for as long as possible with different well-known actors appearing in the roles for a few weeks (Anthony LaPaglia and Susan Sarandon are performing until March 5 and March 14, respectively) before ceding them to someone else?a system made possible partly by the fact that the actors perform with scripts conveniently parked on nearby music stands. Casting, no doubt, will be partly a function of who (if interested in the project) happens to be in New York with a little free time, as plane tickets are not factored into the budget.

Most of this was covered in a review that ran in the Times when the play reopened. But I never read reviews until after I've seen a play. I'm far too easily influenced. I always clip them and read them later. So I had no idea, as we made our way down to Walker St., that we were going to see Bill Irwin perform, not Bill Murray. I mention this because this business of presenting plays with rotating casts?which I happen to think the best new theatrical invention since Aeschylus came up with the idea of the second actor?leaves a reviewer in a tricky position. On the one hand, you don't want to make too much of a performance your readers are destined not to see, or (worse) engender the fear that what others are seeing might be only second-best. On the other hand, if someone's performance has moved you, you want to say so. You want to pay tribute in some way.

We were completely blown away by Irwin, who gave, that night, one of the most extraordinary miniaturist stage performances I've seen. But I think it's a role that somewhat fosters beautiful small-scale acting, which is one reason among several why actors should?and probably will?want to take it on.

Reviews of the play have tended to sniff delicately around the issue of its non-literary status?the fact that it was written quickly, under great pressure and by a non-playwright. But theater really has very little to do with literature, when you come right down to it, and nothing at all to do with fancy writing. Even in great plays?for all the immortal verbiage they contain?the lines and tropes we carry away with us (which can just as easily be experienced privately, in the solitary discourse of reading) exist primarily as a housing for great scenes?scenes that, when given life with the illusion of spontaneity, create a visceral moment that can only be experienced communally, in a theater. The fact is that Nelson's play, for all its simplicity, is built around a powerful mechanism. It gives us a chance to see something created out of nothing?out of worse than nothing, out of catastrophe.

It's partly about an aspect of Sept. 11 that doesn't get talked about much:the way it divided the city into two groups?those who had suffered personally and those who had suffered only by proxy. Emotions at the time ran so high and deep that for a while, at first, the difference didn't seem to matter. As time passed, though, an element of class guilt began to set in. You began to hear people talking about how helpless they felt. Actors were endlessly quoted talking about how"marginal"they felt, and what they really meant was that they felt guilty for leading privileged, autonomous lives.

The people who died in the towers, most of them, hadn't had an awful lot of autonomy in their lives. They were ordinary folk with unglamorous, humdrum jobs, just trying to get by and make a better life for themselves and their loved ones. An article in the Times "Styles" section about what image-conscious people were doing with those pesky identification badges prompted the thought that most of the lost and missing had probably worn security badges for years without giving it a thought. It was guilt by disassociation: a sense that if those suffering from proximate grief could do nothing for those who had suffered more directly, it was because the two groups had never had much to do with each other before.

Nelson's play posits a meeting between representatives of those two camps, a man who can't express himself and a woman who feels she can do nothing else. Actually, the fire captain is representative of both camps. He's in the same position that we were all in vis-a-vis the actual events of the day. (He was off-duty and doesn't know what finally happened to his men. Hauntingly, he keeps saying that he can't find anyone who saw them.) But he has to find something to say about them.

It seems an impossible task. Of the four men whose memorial services are imminent, the first is a man he can't describe, the second a guy he hardly knew; the third his closest friend, and the fourth one, well?"everybody loved him." Each subject presents its own set of problems. Over and over we see the same thing happen between the two characters: he talks about how difficult it is, she asks questions, and he answers them. The questions are sometimes idiotic and banal, but they get him talking, and while he talks, she writes. After a bit, she gives him something to read, and we see his reaction.

The first time she gives him something to read, it's a surprise. It's never occurred to us that she was composing on the spot. When he reads what she's written, we're surprised to find how simple and undramatic it is?almost banal (again)?and that it moves us anyway. Of course, it moves us because it moves him. What we've seen is a process of creation, an alchemical transformation of ordinary, base material into something like gold.

One of the canny things about the production is the way it sidesteps theatrical convention. There's no set to speak of, not even a stage, really. The acting area consists of a few pieces of living room furniture and a rug set out on a bare floor. (When Weaver pours "coffee" we can see perfectly well that the carafe contains nothing but water.) Apparently, the staged-reading-with-scripts approach is a regular component of productions at the Flea. It's particularly useful here as a way of offsetting the "living newspaper" quality of the piece. There's so much reality on hand already.

Chiefly, what realism there is in the production belongs to the acting, or, more properly, the timing. As Simpson has directed the play?and this seems to me rather brilliant?it's performed in real time, something you hardly ever do with live theater. The two extraordinary aspects to the performance I saw (apart from Irwin's exquisite underacting) were Weaver's evocation of someone composing a piece of prose on the spot and Irwin's of someone reading something aloud that he's never laid eyes on?that didn't exist a moment or two before?and being moved by it.

And it's at this axis that the play becomes eloquent. Ultimately, it's the play's very awkwardness and lack of finesse, which we see mirrored in the blunt and unremarkable tributes whose genesis we're witnessing, that make it so potent, because it's there that the play's real message?about the heroism of getting the job done as applied to the friends and families of the lost?resides. Fundamentally, this is a play about the difficulty of processing material?on the one level to the degree that we all had to "process" the events of that day, internalizing and interpreting them, but on another, more important level, to the degree to which those directly affected by Sept. 11 have to figure out a way of going on with their lives. And the writing is what it is, which is what it needs to be. Once or twice Nelson does some unnecessary editorializing, making explicit something that was already inherently clear in the play, riding the word "tools"a bit too hard and self-consciously, but this is just a neophyte playwright thinking she has to be writerly. There are some nice apercus: a description of cataclysmic grief ("'Heartbreak' sounds too delicate, too pretty, too fragile for this sensation"); an insightful point about the schadenfreude of foreign intellectuals.

As the journalist sits, taking notes, writing and rewriting, erasing, making us wait while she finishes scribbling a phrase or a word, we see behind her the shadow of Nelson herself, who, at Simpson's behest, was having to fashion, under great pressure and out of the unmalleable materials of tragedy and bald fact, something stopgap and functional that would do the trick. This in itself would be trivial?self-congratulatory and narcissistic?if the play didn't also carry the suggestion that going on with life in the face of catastrophe is a form of creativity and (therefore, by extension) a brand of heroics.

To the extent that the play is being self-referential, it seems to be the phenomenon of Theater more than the figure of The Writer being celebrated. What we've witnessed, over and over, by the end of the evening?in the effect that the simple, unremarkable tributes have on the fire captain, and in the effect of the play on us, and finally in the artistry and ingenuity with which Simpson went about rehabilitating his theater?is something about the restorative property of art.

I was thinking that it might not be a bad idea if Simpson set out a big urn full of those little packets of kleenex for people to take with them into the theater. Perhaps he could get one of the big paper-goods manufacturers to donate a supply.

Flea Theater, 41 White St. (betw. B'way & Church St.), 206-1515.