The High Drama of 9/11 Mysteries
Truth Action Project Assembles an All Star Cast for a Night of Staged Readings at New Dramatists, NYC
by Richard Squires
The invitation headline read: The Mysteries of 9/11: An evening of performance, poetry, and improv on America’s #1 taboo topic. The readings were presented on February 16th, 2017 at New Dramatists, the famous play development center near Times Square, in partnership with New York City’s Truth Action Project. Sander Hicks—an alumnus of New Dramatists and a principal coordinator for Truth Action Project—was the moderator as well as the guiding force behind the evening’s events.
Founded in 1949 by Michaela O’Harra, New Dramatists is one of the country’s leading playwright centers and a nationally recognized new play laboratory. In the 65 years since its
The response to the invitation was so enthusiastic that the event was moved from the reading studio to the main stage of New Dramatists, where it attracted a capacity crowd of 90 people. Part of the excitement was due to the superb quality of the cast, which included Brandy Burre, star of The Wire; John Ventimiglia, The Sopranos; Lynn Cohen, The Hunger Games; Marc Duret, The Borgias; Jake Robinson, American Odyssey; and Kevin Sebastian, Blue Bloods, to name a few, all assembled by casting director Eve Pomerance.
But something else was in the air as well. The political mood in America is desperate; people
The evening began with a forty minute reading of seven selected scenes from the completed playA Blanket of Dust, by Richard Squires. When the daughter of a US Senator loses her husband in the World Trade Center, and she investigates the
reason for his murder, she finds herself at war with the United States. Brandy Burre readthe protagonist Diana Crane, with John Ventimiglia as her partner, Andrew Black. Burre’s performance—even in a reading—brought members of the audience to the verge of tears.
After a brief intermission four scenes were read from Bronze Star, a work in progress by Sander Hicks. Bronze Star explores the suspicious death of whistle-blower Dr. David Graham of Shreveport, LA, who fruitlessly warned the FBI about his contacts with two of the 9/11 hijackers, ten months before the actual event. Giacomo Rocchini and Kevin Sebastian gave particularly strong readings as the snarky, comic Arab operator Mohamed Jamal Khan and the devious neocon, 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow.
The readings concluded with a group performance of Les Jamison’s epic poem, Masters of Plunder. A question and answer session with Hicks and Squires followed, moderated by the evening's excellent director Mahayana Landowne, followed by a lively reception that was still in full swing when the building closed an hour afterwards.
Given the general hostility toward any public discussion of the issues of 9/11, New Dramatists and Playwright’s Lab director John Steber should be praised for acting as though the exercise of free political speech is the most natural thing in the world.
And the evening proved, to this writer at least, that the performing arts can and should play a role in the debate. The forensic evidence that’s been amassed over the past 16 years and disseminated through articles, conferences, books and documentaries has built an overwhelming factual case for the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, which the establishment can only counter with evasion and increasingly ludicrous deception. Turning such knowledge into widespread, actionable belief is arguably best achieved by the arts. Oliver Stone’s film JFK transformed the debate in this country on that state crime against democracy. Theatre and feature films should play a similar role in the quest to bring the crimes of 9/11 into court.
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| Sander Hicks, and Richard Squires: Producers, Writers, Activists. |
For More Information: Email Sander Hicks, Producer.
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ReplyDeleteFew Americans will ever forget the events of 9/11 in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. But few Americans are aware that the people responsible for those horrific events warned the world of their impending actions a full year ahead of that day’s attacks.
ReplyDeleteThat warning didn’t originate from within some shady cave in the Middle East, or via a poorly-videotaped broadcast on Al-Jazzeera. It was published by an American neo-conservative group that called itself the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and was contained within a document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses, released in 2000.
In it, they uttered a phrase that should send a chill down the spine of every American who lost a family member in the 9/11 attacks, or in the unnecessary wars in the Middle East that ensued.
That phrase was part of a call for worldwide American military supremacy, and suggested what was needed was “a new Pearl Harbor.” Less than a year later, the core group behind that document had created just that.
Of the twenty-five people who signed their name to that statement, almost half of them wound up serving in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Anyone who wants to know where the plot for the 9/11 attacks was hatched, need look no further than those three masterminds of the American portion of those attacks.
It was those three, plus uncounted assistants and henchmen both in the U.S. and abroad, who initiated the overall plan to use existing A-Qaeda assets and plans as a cover for destroying our own buildings and killing our own people, and to usurp the ensuing emotional reaction as a catalyst to what the Military-Industrial Complex has always wanted: an Endless War. You can identify that plan’s adherents to this day, by their feverish dedication to the phrase “radical Islamic extremism.” They want to continue a process of warfare against an idealism which cannot be won, but which can continue to be funded for an eternity.
In order to halt this continuous drumbeat for war, we must return to those crimes and their criminal perpetrators who launched this false crusade, a word they also used during those heady days after 9/11. We must be brave enough to address the undeniable facts that still resonate in plain sight, from the inescapable involvement of Mossad agents in New York, to the direct obstruction by the White House of intelligence efforts to interrupt the attacks before they occurred, to the contra-indicators of lone terrorists working on shoestring budgets and with limited skills, to the impossibly coincidental chain of events that allowed the four attacks to succeed, and afterwards, both the destruction and removal of evidence, as well as the efforts to block any serious investigation of the events and those that carried out their planning.
Any dedicated investigator of the 9/11 events will quickly come to two astounding and tremendously painful truths:
That American leaders -- with the assistance of Israeli intelligence assets -- took part in, guided, and directed the attacks in order for them to be as successful as they were;
And that those same Americans profited from the war they helped create, and are still at large and living like kings to this day.
Never forget: we did this to ourselves. Every day we allow these criminals to exist without being brought to justice is a crime in itself.
Thank you, David, this is very well said. Please get in touch with me, so we can talk a little more. Sanderhicksdotcom AT gmail.....
DeleteThis is an event I would have attended if I were still in NYC. In the very least I'm really happy that there's a lot of creative work happening in telling these kinds of stories.
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