The Guys at GableStage

By Tony Guzman

 
Patti Gardner and Gordon McConnell

Coming on the heels of the one year anniversary of September 11, Joe Adler has launched GableStage’s 2002-2003 season, fittingly, with the Florida premiere of The Guys, a low-key but moving memorial to the New York City firefighters who gave their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center towers. The Guys is closely modeled upon a real life encounter between the playwright, Anne Nelson, a distinguished career journalist who had never written a play before, and a NYC fire captain she volunteered to help in preparing eulogies for fallen members of his command. The play alternates between spotlit monologues by Joan, the Nelson character, in which she ruminates on the experience and import of 9/11, and her interaction with Nick, the captain, as she helps him assemble and structure his memories and insights into the characters of the fallen heroes into simple and straightforward – but all the more eloquent for being so – tributes. 

During the course of The Guys, we come to know, appreciate and admire a sampling of the sort of courageous “regular guys” who were thrust into grandeur and immortality on September 11. There’s very little in the way of theatrical artifice or augmentation on view, nor is it needed. Many of Nelson’s meditations, via Joan, on September 11 are illuminating and intriguing. Perhaps her deepest insight is expressed when she has Joan say of the terrorist attack: “That moment marked the end of the postmodern era.” Both obviously and subtly, the insidious anti-Americanism and moral relativism of postmodern theory that loosed upon us what Robert Hughes has dubbed “the culture of complaint” indeed began to crumble irrevocably and finally in the light of the uncomplaining heroism of American firefighters climbing the tower stairs to save their fellow citizens’ lives.

As Joan, Patti Gardner struck me as a tad too emotionally distanced in the early going – not vulnerable enough, not sufficiently rubbed raw. But I came to see hers as a smooth, savvy performance: she left herself someplace to go emotionally. Gordon McConnell is dead on and utterly convincing as the self-effacing, bereaved captain.

To “review” The Guys, it seems to me, would be to miss the point. Rather, Anne Nelson’s memorial tribute should be seen as a facilitating communal act in the context of the double process of grieving and making sense of it all. Here’s to “the guys.” May we be worthy of their sacrifice. 

Through October 13 at GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Performances are Thursday, Friday & Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 & 8 p.m. 305-445-1119.