Variety: Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On the day after those 9/11 assaults, Variety ran the headline “The Mourning After,” with multiple stories about the shocked and horrified reactions from New York, D.C. and around the globe.
One New York-based exec said the city was in “a state of silent shock.” However, he added, “Amid all the chaos, there was a gentleness”; volunteers rushed to the scene, neighbors were helping each other, and even subway riders showed quiet good manners.
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Coming from Brooklyn, NY, 9/11 was undoubtedly an extremely influential event that occurred in my lifetime, even if I was only 2 years old. It was so shocking and one of the most violent events in recent history. Although it happened 15 years ago, the issue is still prevalent to us today, even if we are techies. Besides a city-wide cancelation of shows for the following week in the heat of the moment, Broadway was negatively affected by the attacks for the years to come. Instead of producing a steady flow of funding for art & recreation, the U.S. government began to pump money into national security. The recession didn’t help either and the two events combined are the result of lower budgets in the theater industry today.
Who are we as artist to have the right to represent a group of people, a general view or an opinion that shakes an entire country. We have no God given right as artist to help people and show opinions and make a change in the world through our work, yet we have the responsibility as artists to take the terrible and the unimaginable and help people to see and understand and process that. When 9/11 happened the world really was shocked in silence. Business and artist alike were completely frozen and unable to do anything while the grief of a nation in the air. When a country is in such a mourning loss they look to what is normal and relatable. To current America that is the idolization of the entertainment stars of the world. People look to television and theatre to help them through the grieving process after the shock has faded away and we come to the terms that we were hit by a terrorist attack. Because of this, we as artist have the responsibility to allow the audiences of our work in this time to grieve and find relief and hope in such a dark time. This reminds me so much of what was said on the Chosky stage just a week ago today about what happened this summer. What are we going to do in theatre?
The Full Monty was in performances during 9/11 and Patrick Wilson said that when performances were resumed the whole company was worried about how audiences would respond. There is a song in the show that they talk about suicide and of course at that time people were still finding out who of their family and friends had died in the attack so no one wanted to talk, especially joke, about death. However, they still went on to do the performances and surprisingly people still laughed and enjoyed the show. Why is that? How could they laugh during those instances?
I am so thankful to be in theatre for those instances where life is so chaotic and devastating that you need to disappear from your world even for only a few hours and so people go to theatre. I think that is what happened during these performances. The outside world was in such chaos and mourning that people needed a place to disappear for a moment to let out their emotions and live through another story. I’m sure that not everyone who came to see the show was happy during that song but even if one person whose life was destroyed during 9/11 giggled a little bit then the art has done its job.
"How showbiz went into mourning..." The title of this article is discusting. What they are trying to say is that 9/11 had an effect on showbiz. Well, duh. Everyone and every industry felt terror and mourning and confusion after. For the journalist to title this How showbiz went into mourning, to me sounds like it was this great period of depression for exclusively artists 15 years ago, maybe it was even pre planned? Then at the end they tack on the date 9/11. This is such click bait. They needed a title that stood out to get more traffic to their website, and this is not something that you should be using for profit. Any theater nerd would be interested in a period of mourning and what the cause was and will it return, but not everyone would want to read about 9/11 and the effects it felt. The terrorist attacks was felt around the world, and all you had to do was title the article with the 9/11 attacks as the subject, not the showbiz. The writing in the article it self was well done and explained some feelings and happenings in the entertainment industry afterwards. I think that the idea of click bait and catchy headlines is so terrible now that journalists and news companies are so reliant on them for profit that they are getting away with saying such awful things. But then when I read a title that makes me angry, I open the article up right away, and their tactic worked. 9/11 effected my family and my theater family, but I am so against the way of exploring these events as means to get more readers.
A couple years ago, some random organization donated a collection of screen-printed documents entitled "The Freedom Shrine" to my high school, and the entire student body was packed into the Ruth Denney Mainstage Theatre to watch a presentation by one of their representatives. No one really cared - we were a liberal art school, patriotism really wasn't our thing. But when the representative's speech was over, our assistant principal stood up and asked that we reconsider our obvious indifference. I remember very clearly him saying to us, "There's a lot of freedom involved in what we do here. Think about that." His worlds shifted my entire perspective. That is what I think effected show business so poignantly about 9/11. Of course, all Americans would ideally understand and appreciate that we have a lot of freedoms and rights that people in other countries don't - but art in itself is a celebration of those freedoms that goes beyond the daily, expected privileges of everyday life. It's hard to censor someone for the thoughts in their head. Artists expose themselves to the possibility of opposition by expressing those thoughts out loud in a way that is uniquely powerful. That is the extra bit of privilege that show business understands. That is the side of freedom that they felt attacked for when the World Trade Center came crashing down. And that is what entertainers mourned when this tragedy struck.
This article reminded me of a video I saw on facebook a few days ago. The video showed the unreleased cut of the movie Lilo & Stitch before 9/11 happened, and the theatrical cut that was shown in theaters after 9/11 happened. In the unreleased cut, an airplane was shot down and crashed into a city. After 9/11, they changed the airplane into a spaceship and the spaceship crashed into a grassland instead of a city. We often hear the phrase "we're in theater, not curing cancer", and I definitely agree that theater isn't even comparable to finding a cure to cancer, but theater is important in a different way. If theater didn't serve a purpose, it wouldn't still exist today. Shows and movies are very powerful because they are, especially in times when terrible things happen, what people go to for a temporary escape and hope.
I was very young when the planes hit in 2001 but my uncle who worked a few blocks away walked through the Lincoln Tunnel for over an hour to my house from his job and I will never forget him covered in dust walking in my front door. It is the only thing I remember from that day. It is enough. People of the entertainment industry it is our duty to adjust to the feelings of the people we perform for. We will never be successful if we do not do that, I watched a really interesting documentary about New York City show business post 9/11 and I believe we were very successful in how we handled everyones emotions while still using art to push us forward and help us get over the tragedy. I think Sophie really hit the nail on the head by saying that we aren't curing cancer, that is true, but we do lift people up, we give them a life they are happier living. We make them laugh and cry and give them an outlet and a way to escape, especially after such a tragedy. Even though I was not a part of the artistic community at 4 when the twin towers collapsed I am proud of those who were. They handled themselves with such grace and power, and recognized that at that time art was not the most important thing, but that it was the thing that was going to get people through.
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