Marc Wolf premieres his new play about 9/11 at McCarter Theatre’s Rehearsal Room.
By: Matt Smith
In the weeks and months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, many Americans felt compelled to make pilgrimages to New York. Some ventured to Lower Manhattan, getting as close to the devastated former World Trade Center site as possible. For others, contemplating the eerily incomplete skyline was enough or all they could bear.
Actor-playwright Marc Wolf, a New Yorker, was 3,000 miles away that dark Tuesday morning. He was on the West Coast performing his one-man show about gays in the military, Another American Asking and Telling, meaning he could not possibly come home until Halloween, when he finished a run in Seattle. Mr. Wolf decided to make his return to the city an actual pilgrimage spending all of November and December 2001 on the open road.
"I had a two-month window," says Mr. Wolf, at the time in search of a subject for his next play. "I had to be in Providence Jan. 1 (to perform ‘Another American’) and I was done in Seattle on Oct. 30. I took the back roads and just started talking to people I bumped into. The whole trip was about, ‘Oh, should I have stopped for that person? No, you can’t stop for everyone, you have to keep going.’"
He was urged on in his journey by Emily Mann, artistic director at McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Ms. Mann had been so taken by Mr. Wolf’s tour-de-force, Another American, which he performed at McCarter in January 2001, that she had commissioned his next work and was discussing various forms that might take when Sept. 11 happened.
"It seemed that his world had changed," says Ms. Mann, "and maybe he should take the long way home and find out how he felt about what was going on, what America was all about post-9/11. It sounded like a good thing to me, to not know what it was about, but to really just take a pulse of both himself and the country."
Now, some two years later, comes Getting Home, on stage in the Rehearsal Room of McCarter Theatre’s new Berlind Theatre Feb. 5 to 22. Ms. Mann directs Mr. Wolf in the one-man-play-in-progress, featuring 23 characters ranging in age, ethnicity, gender and geography. Introduced by first name only, each is based on someone Mr. Wolf met on that late-2001 trek. However, notes the playwright during a backstage interview alongside Ms. Mann, he was often the interviewee during these encounters.
"It’s not a journalistic interview," Mr. Wolf says, "it’s a conversation I have with somebody… It’s not about getting facts, it’s about getting stories, and me telling them stories too, because in some ways I was more interesting to these people because I was a New Yorker and I had a story going home to whatever I was going to find. They were often interviewing me on these tapes."
"These interviews were often looking for an ‘aha’ moment," adds Ms. Mann. "When the curtain drops and they reveal something about themselves they don’t even know they have revealed. In certain kinds of conversations, you can allow a safe-enough space where things can happen that are surprising to them and you."
While a sense of unity pervaded the country those months, Mr. Wolf says people’s responses to 9/11 were as all over the map as their hometowns. "A lot of people, it just convinced them to think more the way they were thinking already," he says. "It was proof of the way they’d lived their lives. For other people, it was a total explosion of what they thought the truth was. In general, it was a window of opportunity when people were more in touch with what was going on or not going on, or maybe more in touch with not knowing."
There are no costumes or sets in this production of Getting Home, save a couch here or a chair there, giving it what Ms. Mann aptly calls a "rehearsal-room aesthetic." "It’s a great opportunity for people who don’t know how plays are made and built to come in during our process and see how we’re working," she says.
Mr. Wolf has been laboring on the play since finishing his commitments for Another American in mid-2002. "I don’t know why it’s been as much work as it has," he says, sounding a bit weary as he fights the effects of a cold. "It has continually changed. I’ll bring stuff in and take stuff out. I’ve been working on the characters for months. It’s a very, very, very long process to do something like this."
"And it shows," reassures Ms. Mann.
When finished, Mr. Wolf hopes to tour Getting Home, as he did with Another American, and does not envision a place in the country or perhaps the world that was not affected by Sept. 11. He is particularly looking forward to playing in New York.
"It’s about New York but it’s also about America," he says. "It’s really about America looking at New York through a New Yorker’s eyes. It plays back and forth between where I was in America and New York. I think people not close to the city will respond to it, but for me it was what I brought home for my home. This play is my present for New York after I was away for so long. So, I think it is very immediate for New Yorkers, and people here (in central New Jersey) too, because this community also experienced that tragedy."
Getting Home, written and performed by Marc Wolf and directed by Emily Mann, plays in the Berlind Theatre Rehearsal Room, McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, Feb. 5-22. Performances: Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Tickets cost $10, $7.50 subscribers, $5 students. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org