Richard Willett

When struggling New York photographer Jennifer Evers tells her entomologist husband Christopher that the photo she took of him by his abusive mother’s deathbed—the one he never gave her permission to take and asked her not to show anyone—was secretly entered by Jennifer in a very prestigious competition, which it has now won, it doesn’t go well. Christopher’s refusal to grant retroactive permission to use the picture seems to bring to a head deeper issues in their relationship: his desire to have children vs. her conviction that he has never really understood or supported her career. They take a time-out: Christopher retreats to his lab upstate and Jennifer goes out on assignment to California, to write and photograph a piece on the fiftieth anniversary of a Pulitzer Prize−winning photograph, Grief at High Tide, taken by news photographer Roy Phelps of a young couple, Doug and Nancy Windsor, at seaside the precise moment they realized their baby daughter had been swept into the ocean to die. Interviewing the three principles, Jennifer finds her hopes of digging deeper into issues of privacy and photography, and marriage for that matter, at first thwarted, but then fulfilled in disturbing ways, especially when after her interview with him the prize-winning photographer, Roy, attempts suicide. Back home with Christopher, Jennifer is ready to let the photo and the prize go, but he surprises her by having deepened his understanding of her work, and telling her she can use the photo after all. She then surprises him by confessing that her time with the bereft parents in California brought home her deep fear of becoming a parent. They decide to forge ahead, to try and navigate these treacherous waters of marriage together.

9/10 tells four interwoven multicultural stories that take place in the World Trade Center on the night before September 11, 2001.

How does it feel to watch a group of people go about their ordinary lives when you know that in less than twenty-four hours their world will change? Roberto, a young Dominican-American elevator man, is pestered by Walter, an older Black security guard, to turn down his loud music, until Roberto reveals he’s trying to mask the sound of a woman he's convinced he hears crying in the elevator shaft. During a party at Windows on the World, Colin, a young firefighter, nervously anticipates proposing to his girlfriend Allison, who beats him to the punch by announcing that she never wants to get married, and whose obsession with events that occurred just prior to the Titanic sinking presages her own fate. Working overtime, Scott, a lonely gay account executive, ends up in an unlikely bond with Sahar, a devout young Muslim woman who's temping the graveyard shift and husband-hunting online in her spare time. And in an empty office, Grace, a tall white actress, and Roy, a shorter Asian actor, running lines for an ill-fated Equity showcase of Barefoot in the Park, teeter on the brink of career suicide -- and an unlikely middle-aged romance. In the course of 9/10, it is revealed in sometimes surprising ways that some of these people will be in the towers the following morning, but the play is as much an elegy to an almost-forgotten New York City as it is about the devastation of 9/11. The dreams the city has always inspired -- in everyone from Roberto’s Dominican uncle, to Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (Roy's hero), to playwright Neil Simon, to a woman who was hurt falling in the subway the day before the Titanic sank -- are an integral part of the script, as is the enduring voice of those dreams, which survived September 11.

Katie Milbrandt is an aspiring New York actress working part-time as a medical receptionist when she meets troublesome patient Desmond Forrester, notorious in the office for ignoring Dr. Martin Crossley’s advice and addressing his cancer diagnosis with alternative medicine. Desmond flirts with Katie and teases her about the voice-over work she’s auditioning for with pharmaceutical companies, his theories about Western medicine managing to undermine her faith in both her career paths.

When Desmond continues to pursue a connection with Katie, she resists, until he offers to help her sort through a sea of medical bills she’s been getting over a recent minor procedure. That night, over drinks and dinner, and more drinks back at Desmond’s apartment, they never get to her medical bills because they’re so consumed in arguing about health care -- and getting to know more about each other: both raised by mothers alone and both unlucky in love.

When Desmond accidentally sabotages her big pharma audition, Katie wants to be angry, but just then another patient, Roberta, whom Katie has grown friendly with, takes a turn for the worse, and Desmond provides a port in that storm. But when he then disappears for a prolonged length of time, she discovers he’s been avoiding her because he believes his cancer has gone into remission, and he fears her skepticism about his unconventional healing methods will undermine his progress. She’s frightened too, but more than anything of her growing feelings for him.

Roberta’s death and Desmond’s goading get Katie to walk out on a particularly humiliating audition and begin to find the courage of her dream to be a serious actress. But when Desmond’s symptoms return full throttle and he still refuses to see a doctor, she feels she has to walk away from him.

Dr. Crossley’s telling her, however, that a snafu around Roberta’s diagnosis meant that she actually developed symptoms after she had been given the wrong test results (one of Desmond’s pet theories about the real causes of illness), coupled with his revelation that he has heard Desmond has taken a turn for the worse, has Katie quitting that job also and returning to care for a dying Desmond.

In his final days, the two of them are able to overcome past wounding and say “I love you” to each other -- something neither has been able to do before -- and in the end that love seems to transcend the essential mystery of what healing actually may or may not be. Later, alone at Desmond’s grave, Katie gives thanks for his help in getting her to assert herself, and hears a familiar voice telling her he won’t be far away, continuing to help her do just that.

When his platonic roommate and chief drinking buddy, Kirk, decides to join AA, Danny is accepting on the surface, although he wants nothing to do with what he calls “a group of self-important drunks sitting around an ugly, crowded room, consuming more coffee and smoking more cigarettes than you’d think was humanly possible.”

As Kirk’s relationship with AA deepens, however, Danny finds himself plunged into two peculiar dreamworlds, in one of which he’s a Madison Avenue executive in the 1950s given to joining his gal pal Abigail for three-martini lunches, and in the other of which he’s a cloistered pre-Vatican II nun giving counsel to a troubled postulant, who is the same young woman, Abigail.

In real time, Kirk’s sobriety grates more and more on Danny, whose own drinking now has a spotlight cast on it. And the distance between them seems to trouble Kirk even more deeply -- until a night when, in the interest of making amends with anyone he’s ever wronged in life, he confesses a hidden truth.

The honesty of Kirk’s emotion seems to push the final button for Danny. His dreamworlds fall apart, too. Just when he’s begun to actually crave the solitude of the nunnery, the Second Vatican Council changes everything and the mother superior prods him to rejoin the outside world. And his cherished 1950s bar life also comes to seem a flimsy hideout, when an incident involving Abigail and her best friend reminds Danny of just how mean the world of Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies would have been for him.

At home, he finds Kirk back on the bottle and embarrassed by his confession, and it seems to fall to Danny -- fired from his job, dreams turned to dust -- to steer the course of their future life -- with surprising results.

A Black family from 1964 Cleveland is spending a weekend at the historic Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, as a prize the mother, Eleanor, has won for a mysterious essay she’s written on the Kennedy assassination. Her husband, Calvin, is a Civil War buff but his kids couldn’t be less interested; they have concerns of their own: Destiny wants to fly to Hollywood and audition to replace blond Marilyn on The Munsters and Darrell believes himself to be the young Broadway star Barbra Streisand. The family is joined in the hotel dining room by Jordan and Penny, a newly engaged couple from 1974: He’s traumatized by the unfolding Watergate scandal and she can’t get the voice of Enos, an ape from the Mercury space program, out of her head. At the third and final dining room table sit Will and Ian, a forty-something gay couple from the modern era whose relationship is straining under the weight of Will’s faded glory as a country-western star and the more starry-eyed show-biz dreams Ian carries from his Canadian childhood.

The strange mood of the hotel dawns more and more on Ian. The young waiters in the restaurant seem oddly reminiscent of him and Will. And the hotel’s other guests -- who eventually include a singing hippy, the former child star Linda Blair, and the abolitionist/poet Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the Willard on a night of singular inspiration during the Civil War -- seem weirdly nostalgic of key eras in Ian and Will’s lives. As their relationship disintegrates into violence, stemming from Will’s bitter inability to equal his one smash-hit success, its themes are echoed in the hotel’s other stories: of Julia, who to her dying day regretted that all anyone ever wanted to hear was “that song”; Destiny, who shucks her Hollywood plans when she falls in love with the ghost of a Union soldier; Calvin, who finds companionship with Ian’s adolescent gay self; Jordan, who tries to escape Penny’s space-age preoccupation by taking in a movie but stumbles into The Exorcist by mistake; and Linda, whose fading star Ian hopes to burnish with a new musical he’s writing. And all this to a score of one-hit wonders!

In the end, it’s Darrell who gives voice to the characters’ darkest and most deeply felt yearning: to triumph somehow after years of neglect, in his case by becoming a megawatt star who’s so big he’ll “burn all of you up in the power of it all!” It is this sought-after, wish-making, heartbreaking American fame that is the soul of the play’s odd world, the view through a Canadian’s eyes of the adventure, joy, and horror behind the razzmatazz of the American dream.

Duncan Mowbray is a charismatic, belligerent English nightclub singer born with short arms because his mother took the drug thalidomide. He’s living with his sister and performing an act in which he sings only songs from 1962, the year of his birth and the birth of thousands of other “thalidomide babies.” Despite his obsession with the time period, Duncan wants nothing to do with anything that identifies him as a “flid,” especially a group that has been pestering him to sing at a candlelight vigil to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the drug, which caused an epidemic of malformed births throughout Europe and the world.

Duncan’s established, if limited, way of life is disrupted by visits from a series of somewhat zany but determined spirits who take him on a journey into the dramatic story of the drug, and by a meeting with his sister’s attractive young friend Rachel Stohl, a doctor who is considering trying the newly redeemed medication on a terminally ill patient.

Duncan and Rachel seem to take an instant dislike to each other, but as the spirits continue to guide Duncan into a new relationship with his dark past (including the suicide of his mother, a driven, perfectionistic painter), he and Rachel move on a bumpy course toward mutual attraction and the melting of each other’s defenses.

On a final leg of his journey in time, Duncan is able to confront the inventor of thalidomide himself, who turns out to be an ironic source of worldly wisdom and leads Duncan to appear at the commemorative vigil after all, where he expresses his newfound tolerance of life’s essential imperfection with a final, and surprising, song.

Aaron and Jimmy’s five-year relationship is disrupted when playwright Aaron is nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Though neither of them is entirely sure what a Drama Desk Award is, it’s important enough to get Aaron’s name in the New York Times and to have the phone ringing off the hook. Jimmy is in hog heaven: This is exactly the kind of step up to fame and fortune he’s been waiting for since he gave up acting and moved in with Aaron. Aaron, however, a moody, actor-hating stay-at-home, finds himself paralyzed with fear, waking up in the night with visions of horror, crying out the name of a 1940s Greer Garson movie called Random Harvest. He’s also driven to make contact with the subject of an article he’s fact-checking for a living: Donna, the mother of a high school senior who committed suicide shortly after winning a prestigious athletic trophy.

In the days following the announcement of Aaron’s nomination, Jimmy’s excitement, and his frustration with Aaron, builds, and they both find themselves drawn into Aaron’s visions, now focused almost exclusively on one of the supporting players in Random Harvest, Susan Peters, a young actress who received an Oscar nomination in 1942 for the movie and was then apparently never heard from again. Assisting Aaron’s investigation into what happened to Susan Peters and why she’s haunting him is none other than Greer Garson, who pops up in the kitchen one day as a kind of guardian angel.

On the night of the Drama Desk Awards, Aaron stays home and Greer informs him that he has in fact been assigned the task of helping Susan let go of her life on Earth and cross over into Heaven. Aaron has no idea how or why he’s supposed to do this, but before he has time to think about it, Jimmy returns from the award ceremony with surprising news -- and the announcement that he’s leaving Aaron. Stunned, Aaron is then confronted with Susan, who, when he attempts to carry out his assignment from Greer, finally reveals the truth of the terrible accident that ended her career and her life.

Armed with this information and the transcendent experience of Susan’s ascent to Heaven, Aaron is able to offer Donna his first real insight into why her son may have killed himself, and to finally confront his own terror of success and move forward with his work and his life, alone now but more self-aware, and touched by the power and mystery of fate and choice.

Carey and his lover Bernard break up when Carey’s experiments with tantric sex lead him to explore his bisexuality. He becomes involved with Rosemary, a book editor with issues of her own, and Bernard, hoping finally to cruise the scene unshackled by Carey’s crazy theories, finds himself instead seduced by Dennis, a liquor delivery man who wants to return to the 1950s with Bernard as his “female” companion.

In his work as a journalist, Carey is writing an article about the infamous nude posture photo program, in which freshman students at Ivy League universities from the 1930s until the 1960s were forced to pose for a triptych of revealing pictures. Paralleling his and Bernard’s return to the single life is the story of Helen at Radcliffe in 1935, who poses for her posture shot only with morbid reluctance. When it’s discovered that the negatives for her class have been stolen, Helen’s worldly-wise sister Debbie hatches a scheme to swipe the freshman boys’ photos in revenge.

A third story develops in the home of what turns out to be Carey’s family, circa 1974, where they are recovering from the apparent suicide of Carey’s brother, Keith. His grandfather, Chester, suffers from a bizarre Tourette’s-like symptom that causes him to erupt into somewhat obscene declarations about nudity, as if he is perennially coming upon someone undressed. It evolves that he is in fact the Harvard freshman who falls in love with Helen in the 1930s story. He marries her, but beginning with her nude photo experience, she slowly loses touch with reality and is unable to tolerate intimacy with him.

So Carey’s research into the posture pictures becomes a journey into himself and his family, culminating in the tracking down of his mother, who has been missing for years, and a meeting with his father, now a successful pornographer living in upstate New York.

From Rosemary, Carey learns a lot about women and his capacity to love them, but to come to terms with his deepest fears, he feels in the end he must be with a man, specifically Bernard, who has learned a thing or two himself in his role as Bernice, Dennis’s “wife.”