Local News from Marbletown, Rochester, & Rosendale
“War at Home,” a collaborative short play written by Nina Shengold, Nicole Quinn and students from the Rondout Valley High School Drama Club and Diversity Club back in 2001, will be performed this spring by students nearly 9,000 miles away in Wellington, New Zealand. It will be the play’s 155th production and the ninth country in which it has been staged.
Back in autumn 2001, with our region reeling from the events of Sept. 11, Shengold and Quinn attended a peace ceremony at Rondout Valley High School. They were so struck by the spoken words of the young people present that they began collaborating with over 30 students from the clubs in which they had been holding workshops for several years. Students were given writing prompts related to the World Trade Center tragedy, and the two award-winning playwrights combed the resulting journal entries for the most evocative lines.
“Eventually, we came up with the structure of an eight-period school day, and created a group of characters with different viewpoints to speak the lines,” wrote Shengold on a resource site for school drama teachers, Curtains Up!, in 2008. “Some of our writers also acted in the play, and new students and community members, including professional actress Melissa Leo and English teacher Joseph Reeder, joined the cast. Multi-instrumentalist Thomas Workman and student violinist Michelle Sirak added live music to the play’s fabric, and we created a set with collaged images of the Twin Towers and the kind of makeshift shrine you saw everywhere at that time: flowers, candles, flags, photos, and other offerings.
“Our first performance was on Dec. 7, 2001 – Pearl Harbor Day. All money donated that night went directly to victims’ families.”
“War at Home” was published by Playscripts Inc. in 2003 as a one-act ensemble drama that can be performed by anywhere from 16 to 30 actors. The script is a blend of universal human emotion with very local specifics and a gut-wrenching depiction of what it felt like to be just 100 miles from an attack on U.S. soil. A diverse cast of characters – the Freshman, the Artist, the Jock, the Bully, the Introvert, the Muslim, the Slacker Dude, and more – react to the event and its aftermath in ways achingly recognizable to anyone living in the region around that time.
“Quinn and Shengold provide an intriguing, youth-oriented look at the events of 9/11 in ‘War at Home,’ a short play that deserves some legs,” wrote Larry Schwartz in Library Journal. At high schools, middle schools and community theaters across the U.S., in Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore and the U.K., and now in New Zealand, “War at Home” has proven that it’s indeed a work with legs and with the stamina to keep on walking.
“Working with Nina and Nicole on ‘War at Home’ was a really powerful experience, and it’s great knowing that the play is still being used and performed,” says Rondout graduate Elias Primoff, an associate editor at Doctors Without Borders based in New York City. “It was a necessary outlet during a really difficult time – the Sept. 11 attacks happened during the first week of my freshman year of high school at Rondout Valley. Nina and Nicole recognized the need for a way to explore the feelings of fear, grief, anger and confusion that we were all feeling at the time, students and teachers alike. The writing workshops and performance helped us all to contextualize those feelings, and support each other, when there were very few other avenues to do so. I’m proud to have been a part of the project, and it means a lot that people are still finding meaning in the play 15 years later.”
His classmate Alison Sickler agrees. “The 9/11 attacks happened on my second day of high school. They could have been an incredibly isolating event, but thankfully Nina and Nicole were there to give us students a voice and help us make sense of it all. I will be forever grateful to them for that opportunity,” he said. Sickler is currently teaching English in California. Michelle Sirak, the student who provided violin accompaniment, is currently a doctor who, according to her proud mom on Facebook, still plays violin for her patients.
At the time of its 2001 debut, the play was acclaimed by most, but not all, of its hometown audience. “Some parent objected to F-words in the script,” recalls Shengold. “Nico and I followed guidelines for a PG-13 movie, the age of both participants and intended audience, but when a kid hands you a line like ‘Dude, the Pentagon’s like the s*** of our whole country. We’re going down!’ you say thank you, not ‘Could you neuter your language so no one’s offended?’ One of the comments at the talkback afterwards was that the characters ‘really sounded like us.’ Exactly.”
Controversy over “adult” language and themes would eventually lead to the end of the playwrights-in-residence program, but “War at Home” seems likely to be a lasting legacy.
‘It's kind of amazing to think that somewhere in New Zealand, students who weren't even born in 2001 are reenacting a day at ‘Rondout Valley High School,’” says Shengold. “And not only did our student playwrights decide all royalties should go to Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Heifer International and ADRE, but Playscripts is also donating their portion of royalties. It’s like Newman's Own: 100 percent to charity.” At this writing, the donated funds amount to more than $13,800.
