Nelson - The guys: a play

The real achievement of Ms. Nelson's play is that it gives credible and powerful voice to a very specific kind of pain that we crave these days to understand but from the outside seems only blindingly enormous and beyond sharing. Perhaps the keenest message to emerge from The Guys is the assertion that writersand actorshave a serious role to play in a grieving society.

The New York Times

The kind of quiet hybrid that the situation and the times an era of a million pithy sound bites, booming rhetoric, and the numbing repetition of the CNN loop that followed the attacksseemed to demand. A small jewel of a play.

Chicago Tribune

A generous, sad, touching play about the braveries of grief.

New York Post

A courageous and riveting play that tackles the horror of September 11 with an intimacy that's both unsettling and healing.

The Christian Science Monitor

A memorial to the shattered psyche of post-September 11 New York.

Newsday

An instance when theater actually returns to its communal, cathartic origins.

TimeOut New York

The Guys creates a welcome space of tenderness and honor.

The Village Voice

A NNE N ELSON was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and graduated from Yale University. She is currently the director of the International Program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York, where she also teaches international reporting. Her articles and photographs on the wars in Central America appeared in numerous publications in the United States and Canada. She continues to write and broadcast on international affairs, and lives in New York City with her husband, author George Black, and their two children, David and Julia.

To the Captain, and to the guys.
And to all the captains, and to all the guys.

Landscape plotted and piecedfold, fallow, and plough;
And ll trdes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

from Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Guys is based on a true experience.

I teach at the graduate school for journalism at Columbia University in New York, and I oversee some thirty international students. On the morning of September 11, 2001, we had sent them out, along with their American classmates, to cover the mayoral primary. It would be days before we knew that all of them had survived.

I had learned about the attack on the World Trade Center in a call from my father in Oklahoma. I watched the images on television until the second tower went down. Then, numb, I turned off the television, voted, and went to my office. I remember taking out my calendar and looking at it, wondering which of the events I had planned, if any, now had any meaning. I walked over to the hospital on the next block to donate blood. The emergency personnel turned me away. They were kind, but they wanted to keep the hospital clear for the wounded. They looked over my shoulder as they talked to me, searching the traffic lanes down Amsterdam Avenue for ambulances bearing victims of the attackthose ambulances that would in fact never arrive uptown. There were far fewer wounded than anyone expected. Most of the casualties were dead.

Twelve days after the attack, my husband and I took our children to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Brooklyn. Families in New York wanted to huddle, to eat together, and to talk quietly. A friend of my sister's called, looking for my brother-in-law, Burk Bilger, who is also a writer. The friend had met a fire captain and wanted to find someone who could help him. Burk was working on deadline, so I said I would help. The captain came over that afternoon. Once he got there, he told us his story: He had lost most of the men from his company who had responded to the alarm at the World Trade Center. The first service was only days away, and as the captain, he had to deliver the eulogy. But he couldn't find a way to write anything. Burk put aside his project and joined us. He and I reassured the captain and started to work. Together, the three of us spent hours producing eulogies. Burk and I worked in shifts, one of us interviewing the fire captain while the other wrote. It was clear to us that the captain, like many New Yorkers that month, was quite literally in a state of shock. Suddenly, a significant number of the people he was closest to simply weren't there. Yet in only a few days he was supposed to get up and speak before hundreds of mourners, to put something into words that would reflect their loss, as well as their esteem and affection for the fallen man.

Through the strange mathematics of chance, neither my brother-in-law nor I had lost anyone close to us in the catastrophe. But like most New Yorkers, we were stunned, grieved, uncomprehending. That afternoon turned into evening, and at last we finished the final eulogy for the services that had been scheduled. The captain thanked us, several times, and then said, You should come to the firehouse and see what I'm talking about.

I did, a few days later. Like most civilians, I had never ventured beyond the firehouse doors. I saw the environment described in the playthe kitchen, the tool bench, the black boots set out on the floor ready for the firefighters to jump into at a call. I saw a long row of names written in chalk on a blackboard, which listed men as missing even though, since it was two weeks past 9/11, those men were surely lost.

The captain and I kept in touch. More services were scheduled. He came uptown, and together we wrote more eulogies. He delivered them at the services, and I would call to find out how they went. I could tell that every step was an ordeal for him, because he, utterly unreasonably, felt responsible. Like fire captains across the city, he wanted to take care of the families of the survivors, to compensate for their loss in a way no one possibly could. He would do everything for them he could remotely think of, and then berate himself for not doing enough. At the same time, he had to look after his men at the firehouse, whose world and whose way of life had been instantly and permanently changed.

The captain impressed me deeply. I thought that I had never met anyone so generous. I realized that generosity was the essence of the joba firefighter's work was about saving lives, and the more often and effectively he did it, the happier he was. I also learned that like many of his counterparts, the captain had a boundless curiosity toward the world around him, including a fresh and eager appetite for the arts. That first meeting in September opened a door to the world of the firefighters, and as I continued to learn about them, my admiration grew. Over the coming weeks I read reams of press coverage on the aftermath of 9/11, but I felt as though my experience had given me a glimpse into another dimension. Three hundred and forty-three firemen lost is a number. I had had the privilege of being introduced to mentheir qualities, their families, their daily lifein a way that made them real to me, and allowed me to mourn them and the others who had died.