Where Do We Live (review)

Within one week in May of 2002, three London productions premiered that commented directly and indirectly on the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon. At the Royal National Theatre Peter Hall's masked production of Euripides's Bacchae stressed the play's East/West conflict between a vengeful Eastern religious figure (Dionysus), worshipped by rabid followers, and the Western leader (Cadmus), who callously and tragically ignores him. Because of the West's contempt, a horrific reprisal destroys a family and an entire city. At one fiery point in Hall's production the Olivier stage frighteningly fractures in half as flames shoot through the fissure. A few blocks away at the Young Vic, Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul offered a thoughtful, if wordy, perspective on the East/West conundrum, as a husband and daughter search for their missing wife and mother in Kabul and in the process confront the stark contrasts between the two cultures. The third premiere and, most notably, the subtlest of the three was Christopher Shinn's Where Do We Live at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.

Shinn's carefully crafted piece presents the philosophical, social, and personal struggles of the occupants of two neighboring New York City apartments. In one apartment is Shed, a conflicted drug dealer. He wants to stop dealing and become the good person he knows he can be, and yet this internal desire runs counter to the bad image his current position demands, which he fosters by blasting homophobic rap music so that it invades the neighboring apartments. In the apartment across the hall is Stephen, a gay writer, who finds himself struggling with his liberal, life-affirming philosophy of helping those facing difficult times—the main recipient of Stephen's philanthropy is Shed's uncle who lost his leg in a car accident. Prompting Stephen's uncertainty is his trust fund actor boyfriend Tony, who espouses a hands-off policy toward all strangers, especially of different ethnicities. Despite the differences in race, sexual orientation, educational achievement, and professional activities between the two neighbors, Shinn suggests that both men are more similar than they appear, and in two short, finely written exchanges between them, the wide divide vanishes precisely because of Stephen's compassion and Shed's thankfulness.

On one level, Where Do We Live is a well-observed, humorously written domestic piece that questions the obligations we have to our immediate neighbors as well as our fellow human beings in order to become better people. However, the attacks of September 11 resonate underneath this query as Shinn makes us consciously dread the impending doom in the characters' lives from the play's beginning. The play opens with a prologue set in a Wall Street bar, where Stephen's friend Patricia bartends. Hanging over the bar's action, and all the play's subsequent locales, are two television monitors that announce the date as 28 July 2001, as two stockbrokers discuss the market. Once that date flashes on the screen we know that Shinn will return to this bar after September 11 and that one or both of these stockbrokers will have perished.

In hindsight, one might note the predictability of such a narrative device, but as an audience member at the press night performance, I was instantly and painfully startled by the date on the monitor. No longer could I watch Shinn's play as mere entertainment, as mere theatre. His specific dating of the play's action is one of the most effective uses I have seen of Bertolt Brecht's notion of providing summary titles before each scene in order to erase audience empathy and increase its intellectual engagement. In this case though, Shinn's play does not even require a summary to be effective precisely because of the emotional power already associated with the days leading up to September 11. And by counting down to the date of the attack [Begin...