| . | 11/05/2007
Crossing Brooklyn
By: Jeannie Lieberman
Jenny Fellner & Bryce Ryness
If you think you have finally gotten over the trauma of 9/11 Laura Harrington (book & lyrics), Jenny Giering (music), Jack Cummings III (director), and a powerful group of singing actors will rip that new scar tissue right away in this most effective and insightful journey into the emotional aftermath of those who lived through it.
Of all the post 9/11 plays this digs the deepest as the public is urged to return to “normal” life, to bury those horrific memories of suffocating ash, bodies trapped in stair wells, elevators, jumping to their deaths. Cars buried under mountains of suffocating ash as people fled.
Significantly, the play opens in the spring after the attack with the wake up radio alarm for Des (played by Jenny Fellner), and her husband, A J (Bryce Ryness), both idealisitic young schoolteachers trying to reach back for that normalcy – but the radio headlines about anthrax discovered in a Philadelphia post office and another attack by insurgents in Timor - sabatoge even his early morning amorous attempts. They argue because Des has not fulfilled her promise to AJ renew her teaching contract.
Des is suffering from incapacitating post-traumatic stress that makes it difficult for her to leave the house alone, subways and bridges are out of the question, and by a dark secret the music alludes to about something she did or did not do when in charge of young children in her class near Ground Zero, most of whom had parents working there, whom she had to evacuate and lead through the rubble amid the chaos of the attack. She cannot leave the safety of her immediate neighborhood and only leaves the house escorted by AJ to a local cafe where the protective owners (Ken Triwush, Jason F. Williams) empathize and provide support and comfort for the long hours until AJ returns from work to take her home.
Her day becomes further nightmarish by the two birdwathing ladies in the park (Susan Lehman & Kate Weiman) who refuse to lend her their binoculars until she goes back to work and the eerie, homeless young man in the park (Clayton Dean Smith) who, in his incoherent rambling, cuts paper into the confetti that filled the air at the site pointing his finger at her “I know what you did” and, even more ominously torturing, “ I know what you didn’t do”.
AJ is cracking under Des’ rejection of both his attempts at recapturing the blissful closeness with the free spirited, fearlessly independent girl he married and any of his well meaning attempts to help her over her fear of returning to their former life. Reaching the limits of his ability to deal with the situation he eventually connects briefly with a young woman in a book shop (Blythe Gruda), also lonely in the post 9/11 atmosphere, and with whom he is clearly compatible, who tempts him with a new environment with no connections to the past.
It is only when be forms a tie with a young student, Kevin (J. Bradley Bowers), the near genius little boy who is losing the memory of his father’s face and voice, who died in the Towers, emotionally abandoned by his mother and her new boyfriend, who explains to AJ the layers of grief, offering a possible solution for them all – building a tree house in which they would feel safe - that AJ learns some heart tugging insights into how to cope and overcome Des’ and his own, and eventually the boy’s emotional boundaries. A long put aside letter from one of Des’ students, finally read, provides the connecting bridge between the dark secret of her past and the chance to mend it in the future.
J. Bradley Bowers, Rynees, Blythe Gruda & Fellner
The production is virtually sung through, the marvelously effective score by Ms. Giering creating the insistent, nervous energy of that world, with fragments of dialogue and music interlacing to the pulsing accompaniment from the small musical ensemble — percussion, cello, bass and guitar - melding seamlessly with Ms. Harrington’s book to reveal the heartbreaking, painful internal emotions and fears of this panoply of bereft characters.
Director Jack Cummings III, who no doubt had many choices of how to manipulate his chorus of actors, chose to make them as robots, between moments that each emerges as a key player, as they soundlessly rearrange set designer Sandra Goldmark’s simple but ingeniously used boxes, with the aid of lighting designer R. Lee Kennedy, moving ever shifting scenes from AJ & Des’ bed, to the park bench, cafe tables, a subway train, the bookstore, delineating each with floor to ceiling cables which create interiors and exteriors.
It is never dull, the emotions continually manipulated by the outstanding cast in constantly demanding roles: the young teacher/wife tormented into paralysis, the husband shut out continually, the young boy so willingly and effective portraying the anguish of a fatherless child (one hopes it will leave his psyche after this role), the grief crazed young man in the park and eventually, in a magnificent finale, the ropes morph into cables of the Brooklyn Bridge across which our young heroine and her devoted husband must physically and symbolically walk.
It is fitting that this play is produced by the special Drama Desk and Obie Award winning Transport Group, a not for profit organization dedicated to developing and producing work by American playwrights and composers with the aim of exploring American consciousness in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“Crossing Brooklyn” continues through Nov. 18 at the Connelly Theater, 220 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101.
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