Before Sept. 11, 2001, a room in a lower Manhattan apartment would take just days to rent out.
But when out playwright Brian Sloan advertised his “WTC View” apartment in the Village Voice the day before the terrorist attacks, he could have had no way of knowing what the outcome would be: that the World Trade Center would collapse, that it would take months to rent his room and that he’d write a play about the experience.
His acclaimed play — named “WTC View” after the ad he placed — details life in lower Manhattan in the months after the attacks, and will be performed for the first time outside of New York City at Allens Lane Theater March 11-26.
“WTC View” follows the story of a gay man, Eric, and his friend Josie after he places ad looking for a roommate for his SoHo apartment on Sept. 10, 2001.
“I had taken an ad out in the Village Voice at midnight on the night of Sept. 10,” Sloan said. “That was the last thing I did before I went to bed that night. Then everything happened the next morning. Then I went to stay in Brooklyn for about a week. When I got back to my apartment, there were all these messages on my phone from people who had started calling me on Sept. 12 wanting to come see the apartment. It was kind of a surprise. I had sort of forgotten that I had taken the ad out because of everything that had happened … You couldn’t even get into the neighborhood because it was shut down by police.”
Sloan said that normally a room in an apartment in The Village would have been snapped up in a heartbeat, but the extraordinary circumstances of that time complicated things.
“I’ve had a number of roommates and, in previous instances, I usually found a roommate very quickly — within a week,” he said. “But this was the first time that it took me much longer than a week. I was seeing people for almost two months to find someone to move in, which again was such an unusual situation.”
The lengthy procession of potential roommates, all with their own emotional baggage in tow, became exhausting.
“For me, it became frustrating because I got a little tired of the parade of people coming and telling their stories, in some ways,” he said. “People came to the apartment certainly, but after a few minutes the conversation would inevitably turn toward 9/11. My apartment was only about 20 blocks from the Trade Center. The site was still on fire and smoking. It was a fact you couldn’t ignore. It was the elephant in the room.
“Often people just, unbidden from me, would just start telling me their 9/11 story. It became more than just a roommate interview: It became these intense emotional encounters in that people were processing their own feelings and grief and shock over what happened. The funny side effect of all of this was that there were so many people coming to the apartment that I started taking notes just to keep track of all these people. It was through these notes and a journal that I was keeping at the time that serves as the genesis for the play. This was just like an unlikely outlet for that.”
“WTC View” debuted in New York in 2003 and was adapted into an independent film starring Michael Urie in 2005, making the rounds at festivals internationally. But aside from a few readings, the play has never been fully staged outside of New York City. The Allens Lane Theater production will be the first.
Sloan said it didn’t feel right until now to have the play performed outside of New York.
“In some ways, I think the readings were too soon after the original production in 2003,” he said. “I think maybe at that time it was too soon for people to look at it as a play objectively. Now that we’re closer to the 10-year mark, people can look back on that time and see the play in a different light and not get caught up in the politics of that moment.”
Tom Ryan, director for “WTC View” during its run at Allens Lane, said this production has been on his bucket list to direct ever since he first read it, and that Philadelphia is an ideal place to stage it.
“With Philadelphia being as close to New York as it is, I think people have a sense of what the Trade Center was and what it meant,” Ryan said. “I think Philadelphia audiences are connected enough to New York. It’s still timely. It’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11. There’s some beautiful moments in it.”
Ryan said he likes that “WTC View” is different from the many documentaries and films that have been made about that day.
“It really isn’t a story about 9/11 itself,” he said. “It’s about the people that had to deal with the outcome and try to find some normalcy. The play doesn’t preach about the hidden agendas and terrorists. What I love about the script is it deals with all these people that, for one reason or another, were left homeless and responding to the ad and really trying to reestablish some normalcy in the days and weeks that followed it. It’s very different from the documentaries that were about survivor stories. It’s really a character study.”
“Everybody knows the more traditional stories of firemen and heroes,” Sloan added. “There’s certainly nothing about those stories that aren’t incredible. But everybody knows them. This is trying to show a different aspect of the story of 9/11. It’s the story of the people who were living around the Trade Center and how it affected their lives directly. I really tried to keep politics out of it as much as I could. For me, it’s a very personal, intimate story about one man’s struggle to keep his life together living downtown after 9/11.”
An aspect of life after 9/11 that “WTC View” touches upon is the presence of environmental hazards in the area. While it is widely known now that the air at Ground Zero was toxic after 9/11 and that many rescue workers developed serious and deadly health issues from exposure, at the time, the EPA told the public that the air posed no danger.
“Right at the beginning, one of the characters enters the room and he’s wearing a surgical mask,” Sloan said. “One of the other characters comes and asks, ‘Why are you wearing the mask? Everyone says the air is fine.’ And he doesn’t believe it’s true. As it has been shown, especially recently with Congress passing the relief for the 9/11 responders, the air was not safe to breathe. It addresses that issue in the way that people living downtown dealt with it. Some people were like, ‘What are you worried about? Everything is fine.’ Other people, myself included, were like, ‘This is not healthy to be breathing this air.’”
Sloan continued, “Depending on the way the wind was blowing, the neighborhood would smell awful. It was such a nauseating smell and it lasted for months. That’s the one thing people don’t understand. For my neighborhood, Sept. 11 didn’t end on Sept. 11. It actually continued for months afterward. You’d see the [missing people] posters every day on the street. You’d smell the noxious fumes coming from the site. The traffic patterns were all screwed up because a lot of roads were closed off. You were constantly seeing police and National Guard vehicles. That’s what the play is about.”
Surprisingly enough, even with all the emotional baggage it has brought him, Sloan still lives in the same apartment that sparked “WTC View.”
“I have a different roommate, but it is the same apartment,” he said.
Allen Lane Theater Company presents “WTC View” March 11-26, 601 W. Allens Lane. Sloan will host a free talkback with the audience after the March 19 performance. For more information or tickets, visit www.allenslane.org or call 215-248-0546.