15 years ago...

I posted what I wrote 15 years ago - well for an event a week later at The Present Company Theatorium - when it was the 10 year anniversary and was published in a literature/social studies book by Prentice Hall here.

I will post it again this time around. This anniversary is hitting me hard. I am struck by our vulnerability - as in all of us - our fragility as human beings, and the lack of control we have over so much of our lives in reality.

I will be reading this as part of a remembrance ritual we will be doing on Governor's Island. The piece I have written that will be performed in the house next week - and we are rehearsing this week - is 'Merde!' that I wrote in response to the anxiety I could not shake after the terrorist attack in Brussels earlier this year. You can read my interview about it here.

In my experience these events shake us to our core, without our permission.

I hope to share one of these days with you as we explore that territory further...in the best way I know how, together in a room that we inhabit and bear witness to one another...

But for now, here is what I wrote 15 years ago. I cannot believe it has been that long. But it has.

No Words:September 11, NYC

Julia Lee Barclay

(written for reading at The Present Company on September 18, 2001)

T.S. Eliot’s words in Four Quartets:

“Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.  And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feelings,

undisciplined squads of emotion.  And what there is to

   conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot

    hope

To emulate - but there is no competition -

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under

   conditions

That seem unpropitious.  But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business.”

Someone else’s words.  That’s what I thought the flyer for this event said.  If you want to read someone else’s words.  And I was relieved, and thought, of course, someone else’s words.  Not mine.  Who has words for this?  I don’t.  I flipped through T.S. Eliot, some of it held, but not all.  Flipped frantically through Yeats, and most of that didn’t hold either.  I looked through my library last night of poems and plays and fiction and remarkably, none of it held.  I thought, that’s it, it’s all done.  We have to start from scratch.  I’ve never felt that way about any other event.  The words don’t hold up.  Ancient words even.  Not a dent.   I so wanted to find someone else’s words, to comfort, soothe, explain, reconcile, anything.  I don’t want to be left here typing electronic dots on a screen.  There is only one phrase from Yeats that keeps racing through my mind “the best lacked all conviction and the worst were filled with passionate intensity”.  And then I don’t know where I stand in that dialectic either.  I confront my own self-righteous indignation at other people’s self-righteous indignation.  My friends and I make cookies for firemen.  Singing in the Rain seems like the best film ever made.  Then I talk Middle-Eastern politics and think I’m enlightening people.  Then I see a wall of hand made fliers with pictures and names of the missing, thousands of them, on the walls of Bellevue from the M15 and cry, having just given a plate of cookies to a rescue worker who’s been at ground zero for four days and is hungry.  He is talking to the bus driver about being called up to serve as an army reservist.  His eyes are moist with exhaustion.  He is absurdly grateful for cookies.  I am absurdly grateful he took them.  I look away and have no words to say to him but “thank you.”  I fear he will die.

All the stories, endless stories - I saw it on television, I saw the gray cloud coming towards me, I saw it on a roof, from the train, from the bridge, from the Promenade, from the Avenue, heard it on the phone, felt it in my building, was covered in ash, surrounded by midnight, pushed down the stairs by the blast, knew someone, know someone who knows someone who.....

Then the theories, endless theories - this means global capitalism will prevail, this means we will be nuked, this means “they” must pay, this means we are finally paying, this means we will be better people, worse people, more scared, more strong, more something - always different from what we were on September 10.  We now supposedly love more, hate more, are in shock, are grieving, need counseling, don’t need counseling, should not watch TV, should watch TV, should talk to people, don’t have to talk to people....

Then the first reactions - need to see people, wish we were in love or are glad to be so, cling to the familiar, attack Muslims for no reason, protect Muslims from those who attack them, yell at our credit card companies, go to work, stare at useless letters typed onto useless computer screens, understand people in Beirut who stayed in their bombed out city and cling to New York City as home, flee the City and wonder why anyone stays, try to get back to the City from out of town, cry, panic, feel comforted, pray, meditate, do yoga, go to church, go to AA meetings, drink ourselves silly, scroll through email, talk on the phone, wonder when to breathe, tell jokes, cry, hug people for dear life, listen to stories, tell stories, look into people’s eyes, stranger’s eyes, for the first time...

“Slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.” (Yeats)

“And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.” (Eliot)

At least there are clues left in the books, a burnt and charred map, some of it obsolete but not all.  I hope to scratch through this maze with all of you here now, make tunnels, chart through the tunnel, rebuild the next world, not throwing away all of the old but letting go of what no longer fits.  We aren’t alone.  We never have been, and I am not alone and never have been, because where I am is where I am not.  And where we are is where we are not.

Why you should help John Clancy and Nancy Walsh right now

I very rarely do this, in fact I think I have never done this on this blog, but I'm going to make a pitch here for why you should help two artists/producers, John Clancy and Nancy Walsh, who were seminal in making a whole downtown NYC theater scene explode into consciousness in the 1990s and 2000s.

They were two of the people, along with Elena Holy, who formed The Present Company in the 1990s. At first they worked out of a space in Hell's Kitchen, but in the late-90s, after having launched the first FringeNYC festival (which is now a NYC institution run by the indefatigable Elena Holy), they decided they needed a theater space so bought what had basically been a garage/crack den on Stanton Street and converted it into The Present Company Theatorium.  This was a crazy idea built on little more than a dream, when the Lower East Side was still dangerous, especially East of Essex.  This now seems like a joke, I know, but believe me back in the 90s, it was not overrun by expensive widgit shops and artisanal cafes.

They made it work, just…and at a certain point it stopped working as a space, but the Fringe kept going and John and Nan decided in 2001 (right before 9/11) to do more independent producing and Elena held down The Present Company fort, eventually transitioning to offices in midtown with other artists and focusing primarily on FringeNYC.

OK, so those are the base facts.  But why help John and Nan now?  Well, here's why I did (and versions of my story can be told by many other artists who they nurtured at crucial times in their creative careers).

Back in the same 1990s, I was transitioning from running a theater company to doing my own exploratory work in a lab with some brave actors from that company (Fred Backus, Chris Campbell, Renee Bucciarelli and Dan Berkey primarily).  I was paying for space to do this, having no idea where this work was going, all of us following impulses like so many human divining rods.  Enter John Clancy.  He decides to pop by and see this lab.  Originally, we had rented space at the old Present Company and he'd seen some of the work we had done with Monkey Wrench Theater.  So we knew each other.

He sits watching a lab wherein I think we were exploring the idea of the gender grid.  This meant somehow creating scenarios about gender and following them wherever they went.  Sometimes these workshops got very weird and conflicts arose between all of us that were in relation to the work but also each other.  The idea of the 'grid' is the rules of the room, so we were tapping into stuff that was pretty deep at times.  Like I said, I had no idea where this was going.

John watched one of these workshops and got very excited by it, because he's like that, fearless - likes stuff that's alive.  He said, why don't you guys come over and work in our new space?  For free.

So, just like that, we had free rehearsal space in NYC.  This is rare and invaluable.  Granted the space was the back room of a dank theater space where sometimes we had to choose between heat or light because the electrics were so bad, and the idea of lying on the carpet was - well - probably not very wise.  But, we had space.  And more than that: we had the confidence of a peer.  We went from exploring on our own to exploring within the context of a larger community.

John, Nan and Elena then accepted my proposal to direct a show, Gorky's Wife written by a friend of mine, Greek playwright, Elena Penga.  They produced this show.  In the course of that experience, we all made plenty of mistakes, it was one of those 'learning experiences' you wish you didn't have to have.  But in the midst of it, John once again proved himself the mensch that he is.  First, we lost an actor right before opening and John, summer stock vet that he was, memorized the role overnight and performed in the play.  Consequently, he also helped us deal with the issue of the large rat that kept popping up in the dressing room and once even on stage (only in NYC: diva rats).

After this show, we all sat down to talk about what went wrong.  This conversation alone was a minor miracle (because it was civilized and constructive not blamey and weird).  We all had stuff to answer for and we all knew it  In the midst of that conversation, John turned to me and said: write down what it is you really want to do and give it to me.  We'll see what we can do.

What I wrote in response to that request in 1999 remained my mission statement for many years, was the centerpiece of my PhD thesis in 2009 and the mission of Apocryphal Theatre.  It is still a guiding document today.  Though I am in a deep period of introspection, having such a specific document is valuable even if it shifts because it points to where I've been and may go.  The larger point is: from a pretty crappy situation, John requested something of me that has been invaluable.

The lab went on to show experiments at the Theatorium, we taught workshops at FringeNYC, one of which led to my being asked to teach in London at Chisenhale Dance Space in 2000 - which led eventually to my being in London for 8 years, running a theater company, doing a PhD, etc.

But wait there's more…In the midst of the 1990s period, I wrote a text.  Something I wasn't sure what it was, but that became Word to Your Mama (my first stage text).  I had never written a professional stage text before and was directing it for the briefly incarnated yet wondrous Screaming Venus Kallisti Festival.  I had no idea what I was doing.  (Translation: I was very scared and very happy - these are Always the times I'm happiest and usually do my best work but at the time am terrified.)  We were having a great time.  I was working with Nicole Higgins, Kate Ward and Monica Sirignano, while we stumbled through how to make this into something that could go on stage.

Before anyone saw it, I asked John to come to a dress rehearsal.  The first run through had been painful and slow and I was nervous about what he would see.  I became very ill the night before with food poisoning (or fear depending on your POV) and could not make it to that rehearsal.  My ADs (Carolyn Raship and Julie Blumenthal) were there to lead the run through.  I was suffering on the sofa, unable to move my body when the phone rang.  I let the answering machine get it (remember: old fashioned answering machines?!) and heard John's voice talking about how great he thought the piece was and how it should be in the Fringe and just babbling goodness on the phone.  (John and I share this enthusiasm gene: when loving something, we really love it - and yes the opposite also applies.)

Perhaps needless to say, I suddenly felt much better, rose from my bed and walked and we had a great run of the show, both at Kallisti in midtown and downtown during FringeNYC 2000.  The play was published by Martin Denton his New York Theatre Experience series in Plays & Playwrights 2001.  John has since selected it for a syllabus called Indie Theater 101, which is or will be available soon on  indietheaternow.com.

I have not mentioned Nan here, but she is equally important.  She was somehow always there, with a supportive word, or helping out by acting in a reading of a new piece.  Her presence is essential as an actor and human being.  She is grounding, has a wicked and wonderful sense of humor and a no BS New England sensibility.  We all spent ages in their apartment in the Lower East Side either plotting new theater schemes, shooting the shit, suffering through the 2000 election or mourning 9/11.

Their apartment on the Lower East Side.  This apartment has been a focal point for many people to crash, hang, get their support or just fucking freak out.  And it is this apartment they are in danger of losing.  For the first time I remember ever, John and Nan are asking for help, and it is to keep this apartment.

They have given and given for years, even as Nan has struggled (with astonishing resilience) since 2002 with brain tumors.  They have brought their own and others' work to Edinburgh, produced countless shows downtown and started numerous helpful organizations to promote the whole downtown theater community.

But even more than that: they are human beings, who have shared their human-ness with so many.  Now it's time to give back or if you don't know them, pay it forward.

I urge you to help them in their campaign by clicking here: Indiegogo