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West Coast Premiere!

with their eyes:

September 11th - The View from a High School at Ground Zero

edited by Annie Thoms
Directed by Christopher Marshall

L.A. Times Critic's Choice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THEATER REVIEW

Youths confront 9-11 demons at close range
'With Their Eyes' tells tale of students two blocks from WTC attack.
by Anne-Margret Bellavoine, Anaheim Bulletin

May 2, 2006

"With Their Eyes" is the eye witness testimony of students and staff at "Stuy," the high school a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center. We all have our crystal clear memories of the initial shock of that day, but for those impressionable youths, these images are even more searing.

Yet, their voices, painstakingly culled by creative editor Annie Thoms, echo the poignant drama enfolding within eyesight with banality as well as immediate intimacy. Even in the face of the worst atrocities, life has an imperious way, and impervious need, of going on in all its petty routines.

The cast of eight, performing from two to four roles each, includes Matthew Alan, Clarissa Barton, Alex Bueno, Kelly Huddleston, Eric Lieberman, Casey Long, Sarah Moreau and Kristin Norris. Most are incarnating teens, but some characters are teachers, and other school personnel, with quick costume changes done during passing period at the lockers.

Director Christopher Marshall, also Drama Teacher at Sage Hill School in Newport Coast, faithfully observes adolescents with all their impetuous mannerisms. The testimonies are interwoven and staged using the Viewpoints movement ensemble technique, adding choreographic interest and symbolism in the manipulation of two simple ash-covered step ladders replicating the twin towers.

Masako Tobaru's set features jagged wood structures which resemble the ghostly felled remnants after the collapse. Alia Amaya's costumes are in sober and somber browns and blacks.

With the five year anniversary approaching, the Moussaoui trial and the release of the movie "Flight 93," it is time to collectively reflect on the meaning of that day, how it defined each of us in unique ways and possibly changed the course of our lives. For teens, this brush with the unfathomable potential of mortality may be the most important truth.

The Department of Education placed the piece on its recommended reading list, and the play will be sure to intrigue Orange County students.

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THEATER ARTICLE

"WITH THEIR EYES: SEPTEMBER 11TH - the view from a high school at ground zero"
Fullerton Observer

May 4, 2006

This play created by Annie Thoms tells the real story of students at Stuyvesant High School who returned to their building in lower Manhattan after 9/11 and began interviewing students, faculty, and staff who related their stories through their eyes. The piece of theatre that emerged is a series of twenty-three different stories, performed by eight actors.

As director Christopher Marshall discovered, "with their eyes is no always what you expect - all of us have our own stories about that terrible day, but these are from four blocks away and through the eyes of mostly young adults, who are trying to contextualize, trying to make sense of a tragedy that invaded their lives, displaced them from their school, made their home a tomb and a memorial. I am constantly struck by the language that these students use - 'ummm, like, etc.,' and how they pepper these stories with items that can ground them in the normal, the everyday: a sandwich, their bike, the dust on their shoes."

This profoundly poignant work has received award recognition from the New York Public Library and is on the California Department of Education recommended reading list.

Also playing is "Never In My Lifetime," a Romeo & Juliet love story set against the backdrop of the Irish and British conflict.

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THEATER REVIEW

A youthful view of Ground Zero
'with their eyes' is a 2001 collection of interviews about 9/11
Eric Marchese, Orange County Register

May 4, 2006

You'd hardly think that a play composed of interviews with the students, faculty and staff of a lower Manhattan high school could capture the confusion, disorientation or any other of a dozen emotions of those inadvertent witnesses to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks upon the World Trade Center - especially when that play has virtually been compiled and edited by one of the school's teachers, not penned by a professional playwright.

With the play "with their eyes," though, teacher Annie Thoms has done exactly that.

Subtitled "September 11th - the view from a high school at Ground Zero," the play, which had its West Coast premiere at The Chance Theater, echoes the Anaheim troupe's powerful 2005 production of "The Laramie Project," a similarly multicharacter collection of monologues based on reality and written in documentary style.

As surprising as the efficacy of "eyes" is how soon after 9/11 it came together. As early as November of 2001, Thoms instructed her Stuyvesant High School students to begin interviewing each other and various faculty, administrators and staff. She then edited their work into a series of 23 discrete story lines for performance by an ensemble of eight actors.

The perceptions of the teens interviewed are often skewed by youthful enthusiasm and a nascent consciousness of the world around them, making "eyes" a mosaic that's frequently, even surprisingly, funny in addition to its more sober moments. Yet while it's true that many of the firsthand comments, whether of self-absorbed teens or blatantly honest adults, elicit our laughter, much of the text yields profound insights that serve as a Rorschach for a nation scrambling for psychological footing in those first weeks after the terrorist attacks.

The script captures the realistic sound and texture of unvarnished everyday speech, with characters expressing the surreal feelings, and sense of mortality, the attacks brought home. As directed by Christopher Marshall, the Chance staging offers the perspective of observers on the periphery of a catastrophe - not those in the Twin Towers or the planes that hit them, but everyday New Yorkers whose psyches changed forever. Marshall's blocking makes the theater's reconfigured seating, now in three-quarter-round, into an asset, playing to all three groupings of audience members. The cast, Marshall and the show's production team also do something crucial to such an endeavor, generating visual interest and texture into what is essentially static, verbal material.

With dialect coaching from Glenda Morgan Brown, Marshall's versatile octet of Matthew Alan, Clarissa Barton, Alex Bueno, Kelly Huddleston, Eric Lieberman, Casey Long, Sarah Moreau and Kristin Norris flashes in and out of numerous characters - not just students of varying ages, ethnicities and maturity levels but the adults in their orbit; not just speaking roles but the many and various non-speaking characters.

Each cast member has key moments, including Alan as a student sickened at a request by tourists that he snap their photo in front of the rubble, and describing the painfully thick Ground Zero air as "collecting on your esophagus and lungs"; Norris as a male student who sees as "heartless" his fellow students' "laughing off" of tragedy and death; Long as a good-natured custodian who pitches into rescue efforts; and Lieberman as a student who accurately describes the tragedy and its aftermath as "thus far in my life the most pivotal event in the world."

Contributing to the sense of a living nightmare are Masako Tobaru's scenic design; Alia Amaya's costume scheme; James Jones III's harsh lighting; and Long's sound design of sirens and chaotic crowds. The sum total of text and staging yields tales told by observers who witnessed the unthinkable, said, "There but for the grace of God go I," and inadvertently stepped into history.

Freelance writer Eric Marchese has covered entertainment for the Register since 1984. CONTACT US: emarchesewriter@gmail.com

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THEATER REVIEW

An insightful, moving take on 9/11
'with their eyes' cast deftly portrays students and staff from a high school at ground zero
David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times

May 6, 2006

Unwavering candor illuminates "With Their Eyes: September 11th - The View From a High School at Ground Zero." In its West Coast premiere at the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills, this compelling collection of personal accounts by Stuyvesant High School students and staff teems with acute authenticity and assured theatricality.

Four blocks from the World Trade Center, magnet school Stuyvesant had barely begun its 2001 fall semester when the attacks occurred. After evacuation, Stuyvesant became a triage unit/command center for the rescue efforts. Students and faculty temporarily relocated to academic rival Brooklyn Technical High School on Sept. 20, until Stuyvesant reopened Oct. 9.

Then-theater advisor and English teacher Annie Thoms proposed a performance piece, for which student cast members conducted interviews with peers and faculty about their experiences and feelings, inspired by the techniques of Anna Deavere Smith. The resulting work premiered at Stuyvesant on Feb. 8 and 9, 2002, appearing in published form later that year.

Although "With Their Eyes" loses some fluidity on the page, it is a magnificent eyewitness document - funny, angry and moving - and it plays like gangbusters. The 23 "poem-monologues" drift into each other as organically as the symbolic white feather that hangs over Masako Tobaru's minimalist set floats to the stone-painted floor at the opening.

Under Christopher Marshall's brilliant direction, "With Their Eyes" avoids teen imitation and easy histrionics. Placing the audience on three sides of the playing area, Marshall zeroes in on the specifics of response with invisible control. His inspired use of the jagged wooden grid upstage benefits from a stunning light plot by designer James Jones III and subtle sound effects from designer-actor Casey Long.

The ensemble is seamless in multiple roles, some turns indelible (students from Newport Beach's Sage Hill School perform the piece on May 28 and June 4). Sarah Moreau's pregnant teacher is deeply poignant, Alex Bueno's upbeat Latino earns guffaws and Kelly Huddleston makes her Christian dining hall worker an early standout. Eric Lieberman's pragmatic swagger is vividly apt, while Clarissa Barton radiates tense concern as the building coordinator.

Matthew Alan fully inhabits his enervated senior, and Kristin Norris' Muslim student and Long's heartbreaking custodian have breathtaking commitment. Their invested unity realizes the creators' intent to hauntingly resonant effect, making "With Their Eyes" a must-see experience.

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CRITIC'S CHOICE

With Their Eyes
David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times

May 10, 2006

In its West Coast premiere, this compelling collection of personal Sept. 11 accounts by Stuyvesant High School students and staff teems with acute authenticity and assured theatricality, which Christopher Marshall's brilliant direction and seamless ensemble realize to hauntingly resonant effect.

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THEATER REVIEW

With Their Eyes
Eric Marchese, Back Stage West

May 11, 2006

Those expecting this play, subtitled "September 11th-The View From a High School at Ground Zero," to be unremittingly somber should realize that the perceptions of adolescents and teens are often skewed by youthful enthusiasm and a nascent consciousness of the world around them, making this work a mosaic that's frequently, even surprisingly, funny yet also moving.

The play's "editor" (not playwright) is Annie Thoms, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, who two months after the 9/11 attacks shepherded her students to interview fellow students, faculty, and staff at their school, then edited their work into a series of 23 discrete story lines for performance by an ensemble of eight actors.

The West Coast premiere proves thought-provoking, offering the perspective of observers on the periphery of a catastrophe-not those in the Twin Towers or the planes that hit them, but everyday New Yorkers whose psyches were forever altered. Like The Laramie Project, this production has the feel of a documentary-an unvarnished series of monologues drawn from firsthand research. Director Christopher Marshall, his production team, and a versatile cast breathe life into the script, generating visual interest and texture in what is essentially static material. One has to laugh at the comments of some of the more self-absorbed teens. By the same token, other teens, and a few of the adults, offer profound insights and commentary that serves as a Rorschach for a nation scrambling for psychological footing.

Matthew Alan, Clarissa Barton, Alex Bueno, Kelly Huddleston, Eric Lieberman, Casey Long, Sarah Moreau, and Kristin Norris convincingly essay a broad sampling not only of youngsters of numerous ethnicities but also of the teachers, assistant principals, building superintendents, custodians, and others in their orbit. Glenda Morgan Brown coaches a raft of distinctive, spot-on dialects from the cast. Masako Tobaru's scenic design features metal scaffolding, stepladders, and chairs serving as windows, student lockers, and the twisted wreckage at Ground Zero, aided by Long's sound design, James Jones III's harsh lighting and Alia Amaya's purposely drab costume scheme to create a living nightmare world.

Presented by and at the Chance Theater, 5552 E, La Palma Ave., Anaheim. Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2 p.m. Apr. 27-Jun. 11. (800) 838-3006 www.chancetheater.com.

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THEATER REVIEW

With Their Eyes
Fullerton Observer

May 11, 2006

Stuyvesant High School in New York City is an academically superior educational institution that requires gifted student applicants to take a competitive examination for admission.

The school was named for the crusty Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant. Why was he so honored? Surely it wasn't because of his lesser known pronouncements such as:

"The attack did not succeed as well as I had hoped, no small impediment having been the loss of my right leg." Or, "Our little force will march on tomorrow... or the day after." Or, what surely would be politically incorrect today, "I value the blood of one Christian more than that of a hudred Indians."

Is it too much of a stretch to find any relationship between those words, said more than three hundred fifty years ago, and the tragic events of September 11, 2001.

Stuyvesant High School is situated in what might be considered an odd location. The school is in lower Manhattan adjacent to the financial district and, until September 11, 2001 in the shadow (literally) of the World Trade Center. On that fateful day the students of Stuyvesant witnessed, up close and personal, the horror of that catastrophic event. Subsequently, the school was closed and classes suspended. Then, about a week later, while the school building was being used as a command center for search and rescue operations, classes were resumed, but at another school, Brooklyn Technical High School.

In Novemeber of 2001, after being allowed to return to their school building, Annie Thoms, an English teacher, and eight of her students began interviewing faculty, classmates and staff about their experiences on September 11 and in the weeks following the attack. Those interviews were used to create a book and the book was used to create a unique theater experience.

Christopher Marshall, making his Chance Theater debut as a director, guides eight young actors through mostly monologues in which they tell twenty-three different stories. These are eyewitness accounts of the sights, sounds and smells of the attack, collapse and subsequent search of the remains of the twin towers. The performance might be considered part poetry reading and part ballet. The choreography contributes mightily to the telling of the stories.

Most Americans probably remeber where they were and what they were doing when they first learned of the September 11 attack. The performance of "with their eyes: September 11 - The View from a High School at Ground Zero" provides a different perspective. It is compelling theater.

The play runs at The Chance Theater until June 11.

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THEATER ARTICLE

Relocating a 9/11 play in a new haunt
How monologue-style recollections of New Yorkers near ground zero came to be and came to Orange County.
Hugh Hart, Los Angeles Times

June 4, 2006

In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, students from Stuyvesant High School, four blocks from the World Trade Center, were barraged by media interlopers eager for eyewitness responses to the terrorist attack. When classes at the Manhattan magnet school reconvened after a monthlong evacuation, English teacher Annie Thoms quickly learned that the last thing her students wanted to do was to answer more questions about the tragedy.

But Thoms had a more subtle line of inquiry in mind, one that would lead to the evocative documentary play "with their eyes: September 11th - The View From a High School at Ground Zero," playing through June 11 at Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills.

"We met a lot of resistance because students felt like they'd talked about it enough," Thoms explained during a recent visit to Southern California. "But we didn't want to do a 'Where were you on Sept. 11?' rehash. We wanted to ask about what had happened in the couple of months since then, and what does it mean to get back to normal and go on living your life in this everyday sort of way?"

While working on her master's degree at Columbia University in 2000, Thoms had become intrigued by Anna Deavere Smith's interview-based theater pieces. After the terrorist attacks, Thoms realized that Smith's techniques could be used to organize a Sept. 11-themed monologue show for the school's winter drama program.

Ten student actors, chosen on the strength of their audition pieces excerpted from Smith's "Twilight: Los Angeles," interviewed students, janitors, cafeteria workers, security guards, teachers and other members of the school's extended community. "At a time when the national dialogue was so much about good and evil," Thoms said, "we had monologues that showed all these different shades of opinion that you could then put side by side."

Anna Belc, an original "with their eyes" cast member who joined Thoms in California last week to check out new versions of the play, admitted she initially had reservations about the project: "I didn't think there was any way to do the show that wouldn't be cheesy - and I wasn't the only one in the cast who felt that way. We thought, 'Oh, great, we're all just going to be crying at every rehearsal.' That turned out to be totally not true."

Belc, who just finished her junior year at Swarthmore College, was surprised by their findings. "When we read the monologues, some of them were really funny. People have written about this project being like a catharsis, but this wasn't about working out our own feelings. It was more of an arm's-length thing, going out and finding people and shaping all this into a play."

Early in 2002 "with their eyes" debuted at Stuyvesant High School. A publishing executive attended the show and offered Thoms and company a book deal. In September 2002, Harper Collins published "with their eyes." Recommended by the American Library Assn. and California Department of Education, "with their eyes" caught the attention of the Chance Theater staff, and last month, the play enjoyed its West Coast premiere under the direction of Christopher Marshall.

"I was really interested in digging out humor and things that might not leap out at first," he said. "It was the little things that were the most interesting to me."


An ensemble ethic

BUT a big question remained: How best to deal with work rooted in such a particular time and place? "That was a huge discussion with the artistic director, Oanh Nguyen," Marshall said. "I likened 'with our eyes' to an AIDS play done in the '90s like 'The Normal Heart.' Do you memorialize? Do you send us back to that time and say 'This is Sept. 11' or do you approach it as a play five years later in Orange County, Calif.?"

Instead of staging a literal-minded period piece, Marshall assembled a spare set of vignettes modeled on the "View Points" philosophy developed by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki for New York's SITI theater company. "They created a system of reaction-based movement for actors where it's all about kinesthetic response on stage," Marshall explains. "If I move a particular way, how does another actor move in response to that? I wanted to link idea and story and metaphor and shape that comes out language and let the actors work off of each other."

Marshall cast eight actors to play 23 characters, reassigning roles twice during rehearsals. "I was looking for actors who had a nonthreatening, noncompetitive way of relating to each other," he said. "I wanted people who would walk the periphery and listen and work well off of each other."

Marshall's ensemble ethic is evident at the Chance Theater, in a strip mall storefront. On a nearly bare stage furnished with a couple of stepladders, two chairs and a large white feather, actors gathered, dispersed and regrouped as one after another took turns, in character, reciting imperfectly parsed tales studded with telling details: One student who left his lunch in his locker on Sept. 11 remembers how bad it smelled when he returned to school weeks later. A janitor grouses about neighbors he suspects of stealing the school's American flag. A temporarily homeless teenager describes returning to his former apartment, covered in ash and resembling a black-and-white photograph.

"The thing about this monologue technique is that you get an extraordinary specificity," Thoms said. "When you leave in all the 'likes' and the 'ums' and pauses, you really bring across the way someone tells their story and talks around things, not directly at them. The whole idea is that character lives in language."

Marshall's staging of "with their eyes" worked for Thoms. By intermission, she was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. But how did these Manhattan stories play to the Orange County audience?

After the performance, Ryan Esfahani, 15, of Estancia High School proffered a thoughtful thumbs-up. "It's weird," he said, "When 9/11 happened, it felt surreal and seemed so far apart from us. This play helped me a lot to see another side of things because these characters all had such different reactions. I think people could be from all over America and connect to some part of the play."

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