Article:9753; Posted: May 29, 2015 at 1:00 p.m.

Where were you on 9-11? What’s your story? Do you have one? Did you know someone who was killed? Are you connected? Where is your pain? This is the stuff of Thom Molyneux’s new play, “White Ash Falling 9/11,” making its world premiere at the Detroit Repertory Theatre.

“White Ash” is a play within a play, not surprising since Molyneux is a New Jersey-based actor, director and writer. The author is channeling the experience through what he knows. The story revolves around three actors performing a play, called “White Ash Falling 9/11” at an Off-Broadway venue three years after the attacks.

The action of the play we are watching alternates between the actors’ small, shabby dressing room stage-right, and the set of the play they are performing stage left. There is no wall dividing the two areas, which was a good choice by director Lynch Travis. The actors divide their time and make entrances and exits from one side to the other through a door to from the dressing room to an outside alley before entering their stage.

The actors, while in dressing room, talk about their struggles and methods of finding the truth of the characters they are playing on stage, as well as about each other, when the person being talked about is not present. Then, we see them try and perform their roles in the play with the insights and breakthroughs they think they have found in the dressing room.

Gwen (Kathryn P. Mahard) is a Yale and Welsley educated actress playing a waitress in a Hoboken café that once had a pristine view of the Twin Towers. Julie (Janee’ Ann Smith) is a former sit-com actress with the biggest name in the cast of the play, though she is considering giving notice in part because she is struggling to find the core of her character, a 9-11 widow who was trying to commit suicide in a snow-storm when she crashed into the café’s parking lot wall. Richard (Harold Uriah Hogan) is a talky, advice-giving actor, older than his cast-mates, and his character in the play within the play is a writer who would have been killed in the attacks if he hadn’t pushed back a meeting in the South Tower to the afternoon of the fateful day.

Molyneux’s story is a little hard to break down because we are watching two plays at once that are certainly connected. But we have the challenge of watching the actors as people stage right and the actors as actors in the simultaneous play stage left. After a while, the two blend together, and we are left with shards of characters in both plays having a whole lot of chatty dialogue.

There is a spine of a good play here. But as this is the premiere, one hopes that Molyneux will keep honing the dialogue. It wavers a bit, even at times within the same monologues, between sounding like conversation you would overhear from real people and stilted speechwriting that sounds more like the written word than the spoken word. The actors keep plugging, and it feels like they have gotten away from the actual script text and are conveying the content, but in their own riffing style. In particular, we hear a recording of the last voicemail left to Gwen by her brother, a NYC firefighter, a few days before the attack. She says she plays it before every rehearsal and performance of the play. The trouble is that the writing of this long voicemail sounds like no NYC firefighter who has ever lived, and is almost eye-rolling in its lack of authenticity.

Mahard’s “Gwen” toggles between her Connecticut Yale-educated real-life character and the gum-chewing waitress she plays on stage with genuine depth, and (speaking as a New Jersey native) she nails the dialect of a Jersey City/Hoboken waitress–a dialect that is easy to exaggerate. Smith’s “Julie” delivers some of the best lines and reactions in the play, both as Julie and her suicidal character in the play. Occasionally it feels like she, in particular, got away from what was precisely written in the script, and those are her best moments. Hogan’s “Richard” carries a lot on his shoulders in both plays–the one he is in and the one we are watching. He has to get emotional in both roles, but seems to be having trouble on both tracks of this play getting close enough to the truth.

Plays about 9/11 perhaps have a little bigger hill to climb than most. Considering “White Ash” is sure to be performed in the New York City tri-atate area, people who lived through it are going to have high expectations and standards. It’ s a dense play that maybe could be trimmed from its two-hour length, that includes a fifteen-minute intermission, to a more streamlined 1:45 without break.

The ending resolution of the story and the characters, too, seems a little pat. There is a moment in the play when Smith’s Julie, playing her role, reveals why she tried to commit suicide, and delivers the most literary and deepest connection to the 9/11 tragedy. That revelation comes in the play the actors are performing. One wonders if it came too early in the play, given the somewhat ragged ending. It was a piece of the story that shook me. But there was nothing in the scenes between the actors as people to match it.

It’s always exciting to see a world premier of a play that we are sure is going to be performed around the country. It is possible that we will need to see it more than a few times, though, as this play will likely evolve to a place that becomes a bit more memorable and deeply felt. “White Ash” is off to a good start, but it is drawing on the worst, most memorable experience the country has felt in a half-century. The bar to connect to that artistically is high.

SHOW DETAILS:
White Ash Falling 9/11
Detroit Repertory Theatre
13103 Woodrow Wilson, Detroit
May 28–June 28, 2015; Thursdays–Sundays; check the website for performance times
Price: $17 in advance; $20 at door
313-868-1347
www.detroitreptheatre.com