Left to right: Angela Pierce, Robert Cuccioli, Irungu Mutu and Richard Topol. Photo: Carol Rosegg
Everyone has a story about 9/11, people who lived in the neighborhood close to Ground Zero more than most. Thomas F. Flynn, a former CBS news producer, raced down to the Twin Towers on his bicycle after he watched the first plane hit from his roof garden in the Village. “Bikeman,” his epic, narrative poem about that the experience, is now playing in an ambitious adaptation at Tribeca Performing Arts Center in the shadow of the new World Trade Center.
It’s a moving retelling of that day but the play’s greatest strength may be the conversations it sparks. Be sure to take a handkerchief.
“I find that after this play, people want to sit and talk,” said Michael Bush, who adapted and directs Bikeman, in a question and answer session after a recent performance. “I was wondering if New Yorkers would have an aversion to seeing a play about 9/11,” he said.
Bush was moved to put the poem on the stage because he feels that we may not have had the dialogue about 9/11 that we need to heal.
“A woman came recently who had no idea what the play was about until she opened the playbill,” he said. “She decided to stay anyway.”
A lack of foreknowledge would soon be redundant as the play plunges straight into the horror of the day with only a rather stiff video preamble from Dan Rather, Flynn’s former boss. Robert Cuccioli plays Tom, the fictional Flynn, with a consistently ominous tone and wild eyes. He uses his reporting skills to capture terrifying details but soon crosses the journalistic line and becomes part of the story himself.
Borrowing from the traditions of ancient Greek tragedy, Tom’s experiences are echoed and amplified by a strong four-voice chorus of fellow witnesses—ostensibly a cameraman, a businesswoman, an ambulance driver and a mother.
While the play sometimes waxes slightly grandiose in tone and leaves many questions unanswered, such as why Tom clings to his bike throughout and who the other characters are and what happened to them afterwards, it deftly strikes a nerve and confronts the pain and suffering of the events of 9/11.
At a recent performance, sniffling started among audience members soon after the beginning of the play and grew to sustained sobs as Tom described seeing people jumping from the buildings. The “dense cloud of sighs” Tom hears from fellow survivors seemed to resonate in the auditorium.
Projected on a backdrop of video screens on three mobile units, designed by James Noone, are suggestions of the towers and the vast clouds of smoke and dust.
There must have been a temptation to use documentary images to reinforce the story but thankfully the production lets well enough alone. In contrast, the beautiful music created by Jonathan Brielle seems superfluous to the realistic sound effects that boom through the theater.
Michael Bush is hoping that “Bikeman,” both in its original form and as a stage play. will have staying power. But he doesn’t just mean a long run at Tribeca Performing Arts Center.
After the show, he mused that in a hundred years’ time, this might be the telling of 9/11 that endures. Audience members commented that they found something Shakespearean about the play. In the canon of writing and firsthand accounts that have accumulated around these momentous events, “Bikeman” delivers a unique perspective, but that may be its weakness, too, in that everyone has a tale to tell about that fateful day. As Bush said, “It’s the personal tales that live on.”
“Bikeman” by Thomas F. Flynn is at The Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers St, through June. Tickets at Tribecapac.org/bikeman.