From the Ruins of 9/11: Grief and Terror

Abstract

After the twin towers crumbled to the ground, the cinders drifted northward and seaward. Handfuls of dirt taken from Ground Zero were blessed and buried in place of incinerated bodies, and New Yorkers knew that they’d breathed in the ashes of the dead. The taking of life took one hour and twenty minutes; the loss of life totaled 3,021 dead; 2,792 of those died in New York City. The 9/11 date has come to act as a dividing line in the American historical consciousness, separating a prolonged age of innocence from the new and dreadful knowledge of vulnerability. Ultimately, this profound threat to national self-conception would be used to produce a rhetoric that divided the globe into allies and enemies. By exploiting the language of grief and fear, a rationale for defense through pre-emptive action was devised. In this chapter, I discuss works that were written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Plays by John McGrath, Anne Nelson, Neil LaBute, and Alexandra Gerstem-Vassilaros and Teresa Rebeck each attempt to register the horror of the event and to begin to describe the “new normal.”