The People of 9/10

NDT New Directions Theater

The People of 9/10

Roberto: "Shhhh. Listen. She's crying, man. She's crying. For three nights now. I go up and down. I even call out to her. Nothing. She just cries."

Colin: "But it’s not about that, you see. You got to understand that. It’s not about whether I come back or not. It’s about how well I do the job. It’s a calling, Allison."

Scott: I’ve been victimized my whole life, Sahar, by people who believe the Christian religion is the only right and good one, and a lot of them think I’m gonna burn in hell, and some of them seem more than anxious to hurry the process along. What right have you to tell me that my sexuality disqualifies me from manhood?

Sahar: "My cousin she take me to a store once and I see very beautiful, very elegant white suit that I think I would wear for my wedding. Maybe take picture and send to my family. They see Sahar is not just brain maybe. Is hanging in my closet that suit."

Roy (quoting Minoru Yamasaki): "I also took many walks past and visits to the Empire State Building, to convince myself that my concept of two high buildings was a good one. What I realized was that in Manhattan, one becomes as comfortable standing next to a one-hundred-story building as one forty stories. It is only the first-time visitor who cranes his neck to look up."

9/10 tells four interwoven stories that take place in the World Trade Center on the night before September 11, 2001. NDT will premiere the play in January 2021, the twentieth anniversary year of 9/11.

Walter: "I was the one they sent the kids to when they got scared. Come all the way up and step out of that elevator and they’d freak. It’s just too high up and too big. So I’d give ‘em candy and corral ‘em around and start telling ‘em stories, about all the different people I’d met up there, from just about everywhere in the world."

Allison: "You die on board the Titanic, you don’t die alone. Your grief is universal, it’s part of something huge. You and me, Colin, we’ll probably never know anything like that drama."

Grace: "My first day down here, I got off the subway and started walking in the direction I’d been told to go, but you know you don’t see them when you’re this close, and then suddenly I rounded a corner and . . . The first thing I recognized was the plaza, and that made me automatically look up, and my first response was actually to feel a shiver go through me."