By Liz Carman, Guest Reviewer
Xavier Theatre’s new alumni theatre initiative debuted this past weekend with The Guys, by Anne Nelson. Although the show ran for three days only, it set a very high bar for future productions in this vein at Xavier.
A Story of 9/11’s Aftermath
It is mid-September 2001, and New York City is reeling from the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center. Nick (Sean Moss XU ‘26) is a fire captain who lost a truckful of his men in the response to the first hit to the towers, and now, tasked with delivering eulogies at their funerals, finds himself without words to express his feelings. Enter journalist Joan (Sarah Malarney XU ‘24), a former war correspondent turned indoor-cat editor, who offers to help him write the eulogies as an outlet for her own craving to do anything of use in the wake of the tragedies. As they work to memorialize the fallen, Nick and Joan find profound connection in their shared love for New York City’s unconquerable spirit and light each other’s path through grief.
Conscientiously Minimal Design Breathes Life Into the Show’s World
The set is minimal but effective, with a single small table and a couple of chairs suggesting Joan’s Manhattan living room. The playing space is ringed with lit jar candles, evoking a memorial, a vigil, or a Catholic church’s rack of votives. In this space, the play unfolds more or less in real time as Joan and Nick spend one afternoon shaping Nick’s unfiltered remembrances of his men into appropriate eulogies.
I would like to shout out the costumes as well, designed by Jessica Pitcairn, which had the same thoughtful simplicity as the scenic design but included careful touches to indicate person and place. Joan’s blocky heeled sandals brought me crashing straight back to my own early-aughts high school days.
The show’s technical elements are likewise dialed back – The Guys was presented in a recital hall in the music department, not one of Xavier’s designated theatrical spaces. That’s fine. The show doesn’t need much, and the simplicity of the production lets its two virtuoso performances shine.
The Performances
The show runs barely over an hour but asks a lot of its two actors in that time, and both Moss and Malarney are incandescent. Moss spends most of the show sitting at Joan’s dining table, but he brings an incredible vibrancy, energy, and physicality to his performance. He may be seated, but he’s never still, and he is compulsively watchable the entire time.
Malarney exudes warmth and generosity as Joan, bringing the audience into her world with the same hospitable ease with which she welcomes Nick. She occasionally breaks off to deliver a direct-address monologue to the audience; it’s a tricky thing that Malarney handles with grace and naturalism.
Also deserving of praise is director Kelsey Schwarber (XU ‘21), whose light but capable touch steeled both these performances to a razor-sharp edge.
The Show’s Impact
Despite being an outlet for Xavier Theatre’s alumni, the production does slide a little into the college-theater idiom of asking young performers to play characters much older than themselves. Although the script doesn’t offer exact ages, Nick and Joan are both solidly midlife, decades-entrenched in their respective careers. Moss and Malarney rise gamely to the challenge, but I would love to see these two perhaps reunite in a show that embraces their playing ages more naturalistically.
The Guys is a tribute to the first responders of 9/11 that is uplifting and harrowing in equal measures. The International Association of Firefighters reports that 441 first responders lost their lives that day, with another 600 firefighters from the scene dying in the weeks and years afterward from injuries and toxin exposures.
The Guys offers a powerful reminder that in this magnitude of loss, every one was a real person – someone’s spouse, parent, child, friend – who was individually and uniquely grieved. It also doesn’t shy away from the impact of collective and cultural trauma as it suffused America post-9/11. It was a big, brave project for XU’s new alumni theatre group, and they really stuck the landing. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Xavier University Theatre Season
For information about the rest of Xavier University Theatre’s season, go to: https://www.xavier.edu/theatre-program/index
Liz Carman is a Theatre artist-administrator, fundraiser, and writer living in Cincinnati. She is a graduate of Miami University and spends her free time petting dogs. This is her first LCT review.
