Plays, movies, songs pushed out for poignancy after Sept. 11 attacks

After the first read-through of "Vienna Notes" — the play McCarter Theatre originally planned to open on Oct. 16 — McCarter artistic director Emily Mann left the room to meet with the theater's dramaturge, managing director and resident producer. She later came back and tearfully announced to the actors and the production team that she had decided to cancel the play.

As a result of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she had found the read-through painful.

"Sometimes you sit through things that are painful and they take you to another place," Mann said, but after Sept. 11, " this play didn't do that."

Many publications have examined the relationship between entertainment and the terrorist attacks, including issues of escapism, sensitivity, the dismal state of New York City tourism and the possible death (and subsequent rebirth) of irony.

The "Vienna Notes" cancellation is Princeton's own example of the way in which the attacks have forced artists and audiences to reinterpret certain works of the past.

Mann said the decision was the toughest she has ever had to make as artistic director.

"I can't think of another play that I would have cancelled," she said. "It would be unfair and callous — cruel, even — to produce that particular play" at this time, especially since many McCarter subscribers had lost friends and family in the attacks.

The play, written by Richard Nelson 25 years ago, centers on a self-absorbed senator who is constantly dictating his detailed thoughts and emotions to his secretary in preparation for future memoirs.

Ironically, before Sept. 11, part of the play's appeal was, in fact, its topicality — its narcissistic hero, a senator, almost won the presidency in a close election.

When a terrorist attack disrupts the senator's visit to a Vienna house and kills the hostess' husband, the senator responds unsympathetically by focusing on his public image and how the memoir will portray him in this time of crisis.

The hostess, at first shocked by the senator's heartlessness, eventually joins in by thinking about how she might display her emotions in a way that will be most impressive to posterity.

"I don't think the audience would be able to hear the play as intended by its writer," Mann said.

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"The terrorist attack was a metaphor for all sorts of societal ills that the senator was ignoring or didn't comprehend," and his unsympathetic reaction was a satire of politicians in general, she continued.

Mann feared that a post-Sept. 11 audience, however, would see the terrorist attack as more literal and would be appalled by the senator's insensitive reaction to an violent event much like the real-life tragedy still in the front of our minds, Mann said.

Consequently, the play's cynicism regarding politicians would not come across or would strike a sour note at a time when politicians have been notably selfless.

So far, Mann said, reaction to the cancellation has been positive.

"It's been 90 to one thanking me for making that decision," she said.

Coincidentally, Mann has a great deal of affection for "Vienna Notes" in particular, as she was one of its original nurturers.

When Nelson wrote the play, Mann was the one who chose to produce its premiere at the second stage of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

Christine Jones, the set designer for the production, talked to a group of theater students about "Vienna Notes" at 185 Nassau St. on Monday afternoon.

Jones, who has taught set design in Princeton's Theater Program, said she supported Mann's decision, but was disappointed by the fact that terrorists had stopped her art from reaching full-bloom.

But she was grateful that the production got as far as the read-through, an experience that helped her deal with the attacks.

Since Sept. 11, she said, " we've all been asking ourselves why we do theater. Being a theater artist felt meaningless, you felt you wished you were a doctor or welder or something. I felt gratuitous.

"But that day, being in that room and listening to these actors felt so wonderful . . . I do this not for what happens on stage, but for the day to day interactions with people in the room."

Jones also commented on other interesting ways in which the attacks gave the play and its characters new meaning.

"Before September 11, you were horrified by [the senator's] arrogance," she said, but "after September 11, you were moved by his insecurity, his aloneness, and his vulnerability and fragility."

Jones thought that perhaps there was a parallel between the way the characters in the play evaluate what emotional response to an attack was best for their image, and the way certain reactions to Sept. 11 came across as better than others. On the actual post-attacks television news, for example, interviewers tried to bring out heartfelt sorrow and tears from the witnesses and the bereaved.

Another play being noticed for its newfound ultra-topicality is Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul," which will premiere at the New York Theater Workshop in December.

The play, written before the attacks, deals with Afghanistan and the Taliban and contains several eerie similarities to Sept. 11 and its aftermath.

For example, a character in the play warns that the Taliban is "coming to New York."

In a Sept. 22 Los Angeles Times interview, Kushner said there had been talks about delaying or canceling the project, but that the play will go up as planned.

In addition, producers postponed the opening of a Broadway production of "Assassins," Stephen Sondheim's 1991 musical about real-life attempts on the lives of U.S. presidents.

The darkly comic, semi-sympathetic treatment of plots to kill the commander-in-chief, along with lines such as " I'm gonna drop a 747 on the White House and incinerate Dick Nixon," now seem much more disturbing than they did before.

Because old plays are performed over and over again, theater is particularly suited to historic events affecting the interpretations of past works. But Sept. 11 prompted reinterpretations in other media as well.

For example, the attacks led to an increase in rentals of terrorist films such as "Die Hard," "Executive Decision," "True Lies" and "The Siege" and infused them with greater patriotic undertones.

Pilots of new television shows "The Agency" and "24" will have to be modified, as they involved Osama bin Laden and a terrorist blowing up a plane, respectively.

In the days after the attacks, Clear Channel Communications, a company that owns 1,213 radio stations nationwide, sent an e-mail to the stations' program directors containing a list of songs to avoid playing.

The list seemed to include any popular song containing a reference to death, fire, flying, New York City, Islam, Tuesdays, or the apocalypse, including such newly-perverse tunes as Dave Matthews Band's "Crash Into Me," Tom Petty's "Free Falling" and Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leaving on a Jet Plane."

The list included Neil Diamond's "America," a celebration of the U.S. melting pot containing the lyrics, "On the boats and on the planes / They come into America."

After Sept. 11, the song has changed people's responses from patriotic to paranoid.

Though using historical events to re-construe artistic works can involve a bit of interpretive whim, the cancellation of "Vienna Notes" was a very serious matter to everyone who had worked hard to prepare for the play.

But McCarter's season will go on, as "Vienna Notes" is replaced by "Lackawanna Blues," a one-man show written and performed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who won an Obie for its spring production at the Public Theater.

Both Santiago-Hudson and director Loretta Greco are McCarter veterans (Greco is Mann's old assistant), which, Mann says, will help Lackawanna Blues be a much-needed " healing piece" for her theater.