At first, Don said, “I know. We have the TV on. We’ll do something next week.” It was a Tuesday, and that week’s issue was already at the printing press; it would be loaded onto trucks for distribution in a matter of hours.

Then I added, “I have the name and number of a guy with a digital camera who took pictures.” He lived in the neighborhood and had been standing in that scrum on the corner; I had instinctively pulled a reporter’s pad out of my bag and asked for his contact info. We were still half a dozen years away from the first iPhone. There was no such thing as social media. Don told me to hurry to the office.

Dazed, shaken, guided only by the purpose Don had bestowed on me, I joined the throng trudging up Centre Street, interviewing along the way some World Trade Center secretaries who hadn’t quite made it in to work before the first plane hit. When I arrived at the Voice, at Cooper Square, Don insisted on pouring me a scotch — I looked ghostly, he said — then set me up at a terminal outside his office and instructed me to write what I saw and heard and felt. He tore out the page from my notebook with the number of the guy with the camera and left me alone. Maybe an hour later, he peered over my shoulder and picked up the phone on the desk where I was working, to call the plant. “Stop the presses,” he told them.

 When the Voice hit newsstands, its cover bore a photo of one tower spewing fire and debris, the other, a cloud of gray ash. (And a headline — “The Bastards!” — that I hated. “Don’t even try arguing,” Don said, cutting off my objection. “I’m not changing it.”) My fevered account ran on the first inside page. In the meantime, my partner and I stood in line outside (the now departed) St. Vincent’s Hospital with dozens of others hoping to give blood. None was needed; there were few survivors.

For a time, the city changed — or more accurately, its best qualities surged to the fore. New Yorkers became solicitous in that way Rebecca Solnit writes about in A Paradise Built in Hell, when, in the face of disaster, people recognize their common plight and caring purpose. Strangers on the subway asked after each other’s well-being. Folks hailing cabs at the same time insisted that the others go first. Even Mayor Rudy Giuliani — locally reviled for his racist tough-on-crime campaign, efforts to ban protests and censor art, deployment of cops in schools, and gung-ho defense of police brutality (he had an approval rating of only 37 percent in April 2000) — gave voice to our shock and stoked our resilience. He was lauded as “America’s Mayor,” and as ludicrous as we knew that designation to be, we could take some comfort in his saying the right things. In the two decades since, what Giuliani has become stands as a perfect — and loathsome — emblem of our current national state, as our democracy faces an even graver threat than we confronted on that terribly beautiful September day in 2001. Calm and resolute as he strode north from the collapsing towers, coated in soot, then; sarcastic and whiny as he spouted conspiracy theories about election fraud in the parking lot of Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping on another blazingly bright day last year.

To the late great Voice muckraker Wayne Barrett, those two scenes would not have appeared so far apart. His reporting on the mayor — and on the real estate mogul — includes a 1993 exposé showing how, in 1989, Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney, quashed a probe into the dodgy financing of Trump Tower, soon after which Trump co-chaired a fundraiser for Giuliani’s first (failed) mayoral campaign. And in the book Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, Barrett and co-author Dan Collins undo the myth of the 9/11 hero, chronicling ways that the mayor blundered in establishing security measures for the city — or ignored them altogether.

Meanwhile, many of us covered the developing War on Terror, whose excesses — whose very essence — abroad and at home also ended up helping to lay the path to our perilous circumstances today (as Spencer Ackerman argues in his new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump). With unsuppressed alarm, we reported on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; inflamed anti-immigrant animus and an exploding detention industry; the assault on civil liberties through expansive surveillance and arrest powers granted by laws like the USA Patriot Act (which passed speedily and almost unanimously); a hounding of Muslim and Arab New Yorkers (or those presumed to be Muslim or Arab) so severe that hordes fled the city to request asylum in Canada; a ramped-up rhetoric of jingoism that among other things led to harassment of academics, artists, writers, and others who raised questions about this disorder. The president’s spokesperson warned that Americans should “watch what they say” and the attorney general huffed that anyone expressing concern about the Bill of Rights was engaging in “tactics [that] only aid terrorists.” We followed, too, the militarization of the police, racial profiling as national policy, government monitoring of political and religious gatherings, “preventive detention,” secret trials, the brazen use of torture. And, of course, the military invasion of Afghanistan, with its benighted rashness, and Iraq, based on bogus intelligence. All in the name of “national security.”

But what did security mean? And who got to have it? The measures claiming to “preserve our freedoms” were curtailing them for untold numbers of people at home, while the civilian casualties abroad were fomenting fury and producing new enemies. Much of the U.S. tolerated such measures and even cheered them on — after all, they mostly didn’t affect white people. It was easy enough to sacrifice someone else’s rights and liberties.

This is an old story in the United States. You can find plenty of precedents in America’s history for the nativism, polarization, suppression of dissent, Islamophobia, xenophobia, warmongering, and violent white supremacy that heaved up as the towers fell. The post-9/11 reaction didn’t by itself produce Trumpism. The demise of the Fairness Doctrine, along with other Reagan-era deregulation, and, more recently, the lifting of restrictions on campaign spending the Supreme Court handed to corporations in Citizens United, and the Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, to cite only a few major blows to democratic progress, also deserve a share of the blame. But, as Ackerman suggests, Trump “recognized that the 9/11  era’s grotesque subtext — the perception of nonwhites as marauders, even as conquerors, from hostile foreign civilizations — was its engine,” and he stepped on the gas. He cast himself as savior from the humiliations of the “forever wars,” and made politics tribal.

The Trumpian tribe, as the Republicans have become, puts its faith in one unshakable idea, the same tenet that the War on Terror required: American innocence. The conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni attacked universities as the “weak link” in America’s response to 9/11, and in a report naming more than 40 professors who had made “anti-American” statements, condemned as seditious sentiments such as, “We need to understand the reasons behind the terrifying hatred directed against the U.S. and find ways to act that will not foment more hatred for generations to come.” It’s the same principle that has incited hysteria over a twisted idea of “critical race theory” — the U.S. need never examine its own injurious actions or goals, for it can never do any wrong.

Otherwise, the party has no political program or policy agenda. Its primary objective is to own the libs. Even if that means aggressive voter suppression and gerrymandering. Even at the expense of thousands of lives lost to the pandemic. Even at the cost of dire environmental calamity. The demolition of voting rights, the mutating coronavirus, and accelerating climate change are the urgent threats to American security today — those and one more: an armed base gunning for a fight that has bought into the falsehood that Biden illegitimately usurped the presidency. On January 6, they came much closer to destroying the seat of government than Flight 93 on 9/11, which had been aiming for the Capitol and crashed when passengers rushed the cockpit.

I will avoid the 9/11 commemorative hoopla this year. I have never been able to stand listening to the hyperventilating descriptions on the radio or watching the endless loops of disaster footage on TV on any anniversary. I will honor the day by lighting a candle for a friend lost in the rubble, the sweet-natured firefighter Pat Brown. And I will know that it is the homegrown terrorists who hate the rest of us for our freedom.    ❖

The post 9/11: Witness to the Fall – Reporting on the Coming Dangers appeared first on The Village Voice.

Lilian Loukakou stares at the cinder block walls of the York County jail in Pennsylvania, trying to make sense of the nightmare that has been her life since she traveled to the U.S. last December. What is she doing locked up in a maximum security cell? She has committed no crime. Why is the U.S. government treating her this way?

Loukakou, 26, came from the Republic of Congo last winter with a visa to study English in Colorado. She hoped to earn a degree in computer science. But hours after she landed in Chicago, the Immigration and Naturalization Ser­vice took her into custody. They accused Loukakou of lying on her visa application and intending to remain in the U.S. indefinitely. After a week in a local holding cell, she was sent to the immigration jail run by the notorious Esmor corpo­ration in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She was crammed in among some 240 men and 60 women from 40 countries, all nabbed at airports without proper documentation.

Most of these prisoners had applied for asylum as refugees from political repression, religious persecution, or ethnic warfare, only to find themselves jailed in a concrete former warehouse as they waited — typically months, possi­bly years — for their cases to be resolved. Loukakou’s only solace was finding another French-speaking detainee with whom she could communicate.

For four months she languished. Finally, in April, an­other detainee recommended an attorney, and a hearing date was set for July. If she could just hang on until then, Loukak­ou told herself — if she could endure Esmor’s spoiled food and freezing temperatures, the racial and sexual slurs from guards, the insect-infested bed and relentless stench from the open bathroom nearby — everything would be all right.

Then in the wee hours of a Sunday morning toward the end of June, the jail erupted in a riot. A small group of male detainees led the charge, tearing up mattresses, yanking down sprinkler pipes, cutting electricity, smashing up chairs, all in a desperate attempt to protest the inhumane conditions of the jail and the Kafkaesquc process of getting their cases addressed. After a night of turmoil, local police stormed the jail at dawn.

The prisoners were moved to other INS detention facil­ities or to county and federal jails. For 18 hours, their wrists were shackled behind their backs, and they were deprived of food, water, and the me of a toilet. Three Cuban men were immediately put into solitary confinement, isolated for six days until their lawyer — after hounding the INS to learn the whereabouts of her clients — paid them a visit.

Several men report that they were beat­en during the transfer, stripped naked, and forced to sleep on the floor. Among them was a Finn whose body, according to a local prison-rights activist, was covered with bruis­es. He smiled dopily at his visitor, pointing wordlessly to his head and lower spine to in­dicate pain. A week after the transfer, he had neither seen a doctor nor spoken to anyone who understands Finnish.

Loukakou, separated from her French­-speaking friend, was taken to the county jail in York. Guards dismissed her protests and cut her hair. Lilian Loukakou’s shoulder-­length dreadlocks dropped onto the cement floor, like her silent tears.

The riot shone a light on the govern­ment’s bizarre and often corrupt sys­tem of detaining immigrants. The case looked closed when the INS re­leased a scathing report on the Es­mor facility two weeks ago and an­nounced that it would not be renewing the company’s contract. The riot was treated as an object-lesson in the perils of privatization.

But a Voice investigation, including interviews with more than 50 INS detainees all over the country, has established that the in­humane practices at Esmor are common — ­whether facilities are operated privately or by the government. The 315 detainees from Eliz­abeth represent just a fraction of nearly 82,000 immigrants who were imprisoned by the U.S. last year in conditions that often fail to meet the standard set by the American Corrections Association, not to mention the UN.

In a labyrinthian system of 10 detention centers run by the INS, five contracted out to companies like Esmor, and hundreds of beds (an INS spokesperson could not say ex­actly how many) rented out for detainees in many of the country’s 900 county jails, im­migrants are subjected to human-rights violations that are the stuff of denunciations on the floor of Congress when they take place in Cuba or in refugee camps in Hong Kong. But here they go officially unchecked and un­challenged, as Congress makes increasingly restrictive immigration policy and the INS enforces it without having to account to any­one. In response to ongoing reports of abuse, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner ap­pointed a citizens’ Advisory Panel in March to review complaints. It is still too soon to gauge the impact this 15-member group will have on an entrenched system.

INS detention facilities have been investigated — and condemned — by the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the UN High Commis­sioner for Refugees, and Amnesty Interna­tional. A national class-action lawsuit on be­half of detainees has been filed by attorney Peter Schey of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. The case was grant­ed class standing in March — several months before Esmor exploded. The court, says Schey, “is signaling its belief that we’ve raised serious constitutional claims and its willing­ness to issue nationwide orders telling the INS how to run its facilities. Esmor was bad, but it’s hardly unique. No other correction­al institutions, state or federal, engage in such alarming practices. Only the INS.”

Over the last decade, as Congress has made it easier to deport immi­grants, the number of detainees has increased —  from 57,000 in 1991 to a projected 88,800 in 1996 — crowding the jails and overwhelming the system. The average length of detention has increased from 11 days in 1986 to 26 days in 1994, but those figures are skewed by the inclusion of thousands of Mexicans who are detained for a day or two before they are thrown back over the border. Advocates estimate that hundreds have been held for more than six months and dozens for years. In 1994, taxpayers spent nearly $200 million on immigrant detention.

It’s not just the INS’s widely reported er­rors and excesses that allow abuses to persist. Detainees have little claim to such all-Amer­ican principles as due process and equal treatment under the law. Even the Eighth Amendment, with its provision against cruel and unusual punishment, does not apply to these prisoners because of their classification as civ­il, rather than criminal, detainees. As such, they are not guaranteed attorneys. Even Alexander Aleinikoff, now a top INS official who defends such policies, once scoffed that U.S. immigration law resides “in the back­waters of constitutional jurisprudence.”

There are three types of immigrant pris­oners: “excludable,” “deportable,” and “criminal aliens.” Each category is governed by a distinct set of harsh and byzantine laws. Ex­cludables are people who, like Lilian Loukak­ou and most of those detained in Elizabeth, New Jersey, are apprehended by the INS as they arrive at the border. The INS defines them as never having entered the country, and this legal fiction means they are not enti­tled to the basic rights that apply to anyone who touches down in America. (Which is why it was in the government’s interest to wade into the water to round up immigrants on the Golden Venture before they could make it ashore.)

When Loukakou arrived last December, INS officials doubted that the passport she presented was her own because her long braided hair did not resemble the short style in the photo taken a few years earlier. Some faxes from the embassy in the Congo, and a scar on her neck that matched the one visible in the photo, cleared up the confusion. But by then, INS officials had searched her bag and found letters from her boyfriend in Col­orado in which he addressed Loukakou as “my dear wife.” For that reason, the INS ac­cused her of fraud: On the visa form, she’d checked the “single” box for marital status.

“Ayyyyy,” moans the boyfriend, Loui­son. “That’s just a traditional way to call your loved one in our culture. Since when is a let­ter the equal of a marriage certificate?” Louison recalls his own days in detention as a student opposition leader during the Congolese dictatorship in the ’80s, before he came to the U.S. as a refugee. “They took me away and put me in jail,” he says. “But I never met a sys­tem like this one in the U.S., this land of freedom and democracy.”

Ever since the Chinese Exclusion Act, more than a century ago, the Supreme Court has deferred to the “plenary power doctrine” — the prin­ciple that matters involving immi­grants should be determined by Congress and the president, not by the courts, limiting excludables’ access to due process. More recent laws call for the manda­tory detention of excludable aliens awaiting “further inquiry” into their right to step on American soil. That means virtually everyone arriving in the U.S. without proper documents goes directly to jail. (Parole is a distant, chancy possibility.)

These strict provisions were enacted in re­sponse to huge influxes of Haitians and Cubans arriving by boat in 1981. The Reagan administration sought to discourage refugees, and detention camps looked like a good way to do so. Then, in 1989, the INS announced it would detain all applicants for political asylum entering the country through Texas to deter others from joining them. The INS commis­sioner at the time said the policy would send a message to would-be Central American refugees: they would be held in conditions that “won’t be like the Ritz Carlton.”

In sum, before Reagan, detention was a short-term measure to assure that “flight risks” with pending cases would not disap­pear. Now it is an ideological matter: Putting immigrants in jail makes examples of them back home, the explanation goes. Only those with serious fear of persecution will risk de­tention. The INS asserts that this policy has worked, citing a decrease in attempted illegal entries at JFK, for example, from 14,700 in 1992 to 8,800 last year. So by its own logic, the INS is detaining thousands with credible asylum claims.

Nonetheless, the law is becoming even more restrictive. In an effort to expedite asy­lum hearings — in 1994 the INS reported a backlog of 425,000 applications — the agency set up entry interviews at airports. Anyone with false documents is excluded from the program, as if political refugees could always obtain official papers.

Illegal immigrants who have made it past a port of entry, or those who came legal­ly and then violated the conditions of their visas, have a little more leeway if only because the state recognizes that they are actually here. These are the people deemed “deportable” and the INS is cracking down on any of them who fall into the system.

Anis Lalani is a 25-year-old man from Pakistan who had been living and working in the U.S. for six-and-a-half years. He had ap­plied for a green card with sponsorship from his employer at a Los Angeles printing press, and he was engaged to be married to a U.S. citizen. Last year, he and his fiancee went to visit her mother in Tucson, and they all decided to pop down to Mexico for supper. On the way home, they were stopped at the bor­der, and Lalani was surprised to learn that his work permit had expired a couple of weeks before. On the spot, Lalani was taken into INS custody; after some days in a federal prison, be ended up at an INS-run facility in Florence, Arizona.

Lalani sought various remedies, but after learning that his appeal could take months — if not years — he withdrew it. “I decided it was better to risk prison in Pakistan than to sit in this Arizona prison for one more day,” he said, after having been detained for two months. “This place is driving me crazy.” So he “signed out” — agreed to be deported. That was June 27, 1994. But it rook the INS until the following April to actually put him on a plane.

The third category of detainees­ — “criminal aliens” — are immigrants (many of whom reside legally in the U.S.) who committed a criminal of­fense. As they complete their prison sentence, the INS takes them into custody and begins deportation pro­ceedings. Such immigrants are often shocked to find themselves shipped out to a new kind of jail just when they thought they had finished doing their time — and many who took plea bargains had no idea that deporta­tion was part of the deal.

If these detainees try to fight in the courts to stay in the U.S., they can spend years locked up while the case grinds along. In INS custody, the “sentence” is always indefinite. Lulseged Dhine, an Ethiopian Jew who has been resisting INS efforts to deport him to Ethiopia (where, despite the airlift of virtu­ally all Jews to Israel, an INS judge ruled he had no reason to fear persecution), has spent five years in INS detention — more than tripling the time he did for drug possession — ­and he sees no end in sight.

Ex-offenders comprise about 5 per cent of all those eligible for deportation — and about 60 per cent of those who are detained. In these days of inflamed anti-immigrant sen­timent and tough-on-crime mania, there’s no bigger bogeyman than these “criminal aliens.” The Republican “Contract With America” goes so far as to demand the summary deportation of all non-citizen criminals the moment their sentences are completed. Just this month, Governor Pataki deported 180 ille­gal immigrants with criminal records.

But despite a few notorious cases of vi­olent felons who have evaded the INS, most “criminal aliens” — like most of those incar­cerated in criminal jails nowadays — are guilty of drug possession and petty sales. The law says that all “aggravated felons” must be de­tained without bond and be deported — and Congress keeps widening the definition of a felony. The result is INS jails overflowing with detainees who would not have been considered deportable a decade ago. Serving their sentences paid their debt; there was no double jeopardy, no exile. What’s more, many of these immigrants have lived most of their lives in the U.S. and have no connection to the country where they were born. A young Vietnamese man, who came here as an infant with his refugee parents and, two decades later, got busted for drug possession, told the Voice he was terrified of being sent to a country where he didn’t know a soul and couldn’t speak the language.

Arturo Garay Burgos, a legal permanent resident born in Mexico, did time for a 1978 conviction for possession of heroin. He was granted parole in 1984, and his case was closed two years later. He moved to Phoenix with his wife and three children and started a new life, working in a community service or­ganization developing programs for abused children and helping low-income families secure permanent housing. His record remained clean. “Then in ’88 out of the blue,” he says, “I get a letter from the INS saying I have to appear in court and I’m going to be deported. They had passed a law making the crime I’d done 10 years earlier an aggravated felony and now they want to punish me for it all over again.”

Garay, 42, has lived in the U.S. for 38 years. He was educated — from nursery school through college — here. His wife, children, and grandchildren are all citizens. “I don’t have anyone in Mexico,” he says.

Garay’s case dragged on until 1993, when the INS ordered him deported. His ap­peal is still pending. Nonetheless, the INS is­sued him a final deportation order on Janu­ary 10, 1994. Arguing that his case was not yet closed, Garay was granted a stay of deportation. Then, on March 13, “here come two INS agents out of the clear blue sky to my house and tell me I’m charged with failure to appear on January 10. Like a stupid fool I go with them to the office. That’s the last time I see the streets.”

Garay was taken to the Florence immigration jail and remained there for nearly four months until, about four weeks ago, he was released on a bond (which he was able to muster only because of a timely income tax return). Garay — like many “criminal aliens” interviewed for this piece — decried the conditions in the INS facility. “That place,” he snorted, “makes the state penitentiary look luxurious.”

The Florence facility — or as the INS euphemistically puts it, Service Pro­cessing Center (SPC) — sits in a dusty, remote town whose primary industry is incarceration. Along the two-lane highway, federal, state, and INS jails have been sprouting like cacti.

The INS SPC holds about 500 men, most of them “criminal aliens.” Temperatures typically reach 102 degrees in the summer, but the men get clean shirts and underpants only every several days — and, they say, the clothing comes from the laundry still putrid with sweat. They worry that men are intro­duced into the population without being screened for communicable diseases like TB. But the chief complaint is that inmates are punished on a guard’s whim and sent to “the hold” — solitary, lock-down cells just large enough for a bed and toilet. Once there, they are denied visits, recreation, and phone calls.

Phone calls at Florence, as at most detention centers, can be made collect only. And the INS has contracted one of the most ex­pensive phone companies in the country, RCNA, for this facility. According to an RCNA operator, a 15-minute call to the East Coast costs $22 (compared to $8 charged by AT&T). Worse still, the INS gets 35 cents on every dollar charged to a call. (INS spokesper­son Daniel Kane says he was not aware that the INS profited by such arrangements.)

At other facilities, such as the SPC in El Paso, detainees can buy a $10 calling card to use on phones there. But few of them come in with $10, so they end up taking kitchen or custodial jobs in the jail, reaping $1 a day on these jobs. “This is particularly distasteful and probably illegal,” charges attorney Schey. “They work for the INS at slave wages as a quid pro quo for a seven-minute call to their attorney.”

Florence is one of three INS detention facilities that has passed inspection by the American Corrections Asso­ciation, the body that monitors stan­dards in criminal prisons. But ac­cording to a guard at the Florence SPC, who had helped spruce the place up before the ACA looked it over, “They found things that didn’t measure up and just said, ‘Fix this before we come back next year.’ ”

The detention center in New York doesn’t come close to passing an inspection. It is filthy, airless, and right across the street from one of SoHo’s prime cultural attrac­tions — the Film Forum at Houston and Var­ick Streets. On the fourth floor of this feder­al office building, 185 immigrants are confined.

Almost two years ago, the ACLU published a blistering report on the facility, pointing out that it was ill-equipped and over­crowded. The jail was established in 1984 to hold detainees on a short-term basis — no more than one week. Since then, the length of time has increased more than twentyfold. As of 1992 (the last year for which figures are available) the average stay was 154 days.

No one is permitted outside (a violation of ACA — not to mention UN — confinement standards), and the windows  are sealed shut. That means that for upward of five months, most detainees never see the light of day or inhale fresh air. In the four years he was confined at Varick Street, Lulseged Dhine watched his brown skin turn a pasty gray.

Visiting hours are more restrictive than at a high-security prison. Visitors are herded into one line after another, and none of the procedures are ever explained. Minors who show up on weekdays to see a parent typically burst into tears when they are gruffly turned away — and no one tells them they may come back on the weekend. One day a guard urged the crowd to move faster through the sign-­in procedure. When a visitor suggested the process would be quicker if instructions were posted in a few languages, the guard snapped “Yeah, it would go faster if all these people learned English.”

Visitors can’t catch a glimpse of the liv­ing area, and the INS said it could not ac­commodate a tour for press. But Sun Tok Stegeman, a detainee originally from Korea, describes the women’s dorm as a small room crammed with a dozen beds. There’s barely room to walk between then, she says, but that hardly matters as there’s little to do but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Detainees can watch a single television set for up to two hours a day, but they are forbidden to have books. The temperature is so cold, Stegeman sleeps in long johns, socks, and a sweatsuit­ — which she possesses only because her boyfriend has brought them. Others are not so lucky. They yank their single blankets over their heads, she says, and whimper through the night.

Lilian Loukakou spent a night at Varick Street in June. She was taken there after the Esmor riot. She slept on the cold floor with­out a blanket.

At a notorious INS SPC in Texas, where employees said supervisors and other personnel were sexually molesting female detainees and guards, it took years of pounding on government doors before the Justice Department would conduct an in­vestigation — and in the end little action resulted. Beginning in 1990, former guards at the Port Isabel SPC in Los Fresnos attempt­ed to publicize allegations of misconduct. In 1992 some brought a sexual harassment suit against private security companies the INS contracted for guard staff.

Reverend Anthony Hefner, who worked as a guard at Port Isabel from 1983 to 1990, says he saw supervisors pluck young women from the dorm late at night, bring them out to the parking lot, and take them into their cars. Another former guard (and a plaintiff in the sexual harassment case), Cyn­thia Rodriguez, says she was asked to escort a 16-year-old Salvadoran girl from her dorm to supervisors’ offices and then back to the dorm. “I was asked to take her three or four times that day and each time she’d come back all sweaty,” Rodriguez recalls. “I said to her, ‘What the hell were you doing, girl?’ and she said she was dancing the Lambada for the officers because they said if she did, they’d help her get out.”

All the charges were denied by the INS district director at the time. Nonetheless, these reports led to an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General in 1992 — which concluded that the allegations were unsubstantiated. But, former staff say, the probe was intentionally obstructed by officials. Several guards, says Reverend Hefner, were warned by superiors that they’d lose their jobs if they spoke to any investigators­ — and four signed affidavits attesting to these threats. Some detainees and staff who wit­nessed sexual misconduct were not inter­viewed, though their names had been sup­plied to the OIG. Meanwhile, the sexual harassment suit was thrown out on a technicality — the judge ruled that it had been filed after the statute of limitations had expired. An appeal is still pending.

Most detainees at the Port Isabel SPC come from Mexico and Central America; indeed, guards must speak Spanish to be hired. Rodriguez remembers having to go through 40 hours of training for the $9-an­ hour job. Part of it, she says, was learning not to care about people. “They told us not to talk to these people unless we were giv­ing them an order, not to crack a joke or even smile at them, to treat them as they’re supposed to be treated — which is not like people at all.” Still, says Rodriguez, “you just can’t help it. There was this lady pass­ing out and spitting up blood and I couldn’t just sit there. Another officer and I carried her to a cell, but one of the immigration officers yelled at us and accused the lady of bluffing so she could be let out. He kicked her and told her to get up. She passed away that evening.”

Along with Hefner and other former employees, Rodriguez described such inci­dents in testimony before a House Judiciary committee on International Law, Immigra­tion and Refugees almost two years ago. They called for a new, complete investigation and for extensions of protections of the Whistleblower’s Act to any personnel work­ing for a contractor in government facilities.

The INS spokesperson had no informa­tion on the status of the investigation. “They haven’t gotten back to us” says Rogelio Nunez, executive director of Casa de Proyec­to Libertad, which provides legal services for detainees at Port Isabel. “Conditions remain the same.”

Olanrewaju Ajayi has been detained at Port Isabel for almost almost three years. He was tak­en into custody by the INS for lying about his immigration status on a $2500 student loan application in 1982. Back in Alabama, Ajayi’s wife tries to look after their three chil­dren as best she can, but her hands are para­lyzed and Ajayi worries about his oldest, 11- year-old Yinka, who is “doing everything for her and losing his own youth.” Ajayi has lost 30 pounds at Port Isabel, and at 5-11 weighs a scrawny 150 pounds. “This place,” he says, “is like a concentration camp.”

Proyecto Libertad is one of a hand­ful of groups around the country that supplies free legal assistance to detained immigrants. Without the intervention of such organizations, attorneys, or the occasional jail­house lawyer, most detainees would never know they had any recourse at all. Indeed, one of the central points in the Schey class-action suit is that prisoners are de­nied meaningful access to legal assistance.

By law, they are supposed to be given a list of attorneys and phone numbers upon their apprehension. But according to dozens of detainees around the country, the lists are distributed without any explanation — prisoners, especially those who don’t read Eng­lish, don’t have a clue what they’ve been handed. Often, the lists are inaccurate or out date. And even if a detainee uses the list, there is no guarantee that a collect call from a stranger will be accepted. Especially if the law office has an automated voicemail system that can’t accept collect calls. A U.S. citizen was penned up at Varick Street for weeks in 1993, unable to obtain a copy of his birth cer­tificate because he couldn’t get a collect call through to the Department of Health for in­formation on how to obtain it.

Lawyers say that because there’s no way to contact detainees, their clients often arrive at meetings unprepared. And guards may take their time producing the clients for vis­its. One New York attorney says he has stopped representing inmates at Varick Street because he frequently had to wait nearly two hours before seeing them.

If the client is even there. Often de­tainees are moved from one facility to another without the attorney being notified — even the day before a hearing. During his three­-year detention, Franklin C. Bart-Addison, a 49-year-old Ghanaian national with a green card, was moved 26 times, shuttled from Texas to Oklahoma and Louisiana. “There was never any explanation for all this,” he says. “On the way, I lost all my legal papers and personal property. I would try to call my wife to tell her where I was each time. The farther from home I got, the more difficult it was for my family to visit me.” For four years, Bart­-Addison didn’t see the youngest of his six children, now five years old.

When the INS rents beds in criminal jails, there is even less accountability. After Lil­ian Loukakou was transferred to York, it took almost a week for her lawyer, Carmen Men­diola, to locate her. Then, after Mendiola drove three and a half hours from Elizabeth to visit Loukakou (and other clients), the warden refused to let her in. After 90 min­utes of haggling on the phone with INS au­thorities, Mendiola finally persuaded them to give her the access that is her clients’ right. The warden relented, but would not permit the assistants who accompanied Mendiola to go in with her; in fact they were threatened with arrest if they did not leave the waiting room.

The most notorious county jail to take in INS detainees is the New Orleans Parish Prison, a 7000-bed complex where current litigation alleges sexual abuse of female in­mates and men subjected to beatings and electric shock. Many of the Chinese women who were fished up by the INS when the Golden Venture ran aground two years ago were taken there; they remain in custody (though some have been moved to a Cali­fornia jail).

This prison gets $45 per detainee from the INS — almost twice the amount the state of Louisiana pays for criminal inmates. Employees there refer to INS detainees as a “cash crop.”

Medical access is often even worse than legal access, despite recent INS efforts to meet national standards on correctional health care. At Port Isabel, says Cynthia Rodriguez, “medical attention means Mylanta or Tylenol” — an assessment echoed by detainees across the country. A 22-year-old Russian man held at Varick Street who was HIV-positive was, despite repeated requests, unable to get his pre­scription filled. He became so depressed that he attempted suicide by slashing his arms, splattering blood all over his crowd­ed dorm. The INS had ordered him de­ported after he completed a criminal sen­tence for possession of stolen property, but couldn’t get him onto a plane because he had no travel document. For months he sat in the airless boredom of detention, fearing that he would die there. Finally, another de­tainee told a visitor about the Russian’s case and she contacted lawyers at the ACLU and GMHC. It took them three months to get him released — and only because the ACLU threatened a lawsuit.

One of the named plaintiffs in Schey’s class-action suit, Gladstone Jumbo, was de­tained for two years in a small jail outside Atlanta, all the while denied access to the walk­er he needed to get around and the care he needed to delay progressive paralysis. “Guards said he was faking it,” says Schey, “never mind that he had been getting treatment for two years before his detention, and was using a walker when the INS apprehended him. In his cold cell, his condition deteriorated. By the last few months of his two years there, he was dragging himself along the floor to get to the shower or visitation room. Just drag­ging himself along, and they said he was con­triving his condition.”

Stories like Gladstone Jumbo’s — along with the spreading fervor for legislation like California’s Proposition 187 — have spurred a grassroots movement for detention and im­migration policy reform. Contradicting the sweeping tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, private citizens, especially in counties where detainees are kept in local jails, have made reg­ular visits to detainees, pressed for their re­lease, and even offered to take people in until they can fend for themselves.

A group called People of the Golden Vi­sion: An Interfaith Coalition for Immigrants’ Rights has organized a series of regional meet­ings around the country to bring together lawyers, human rights activists for immigrants, religious groups and others “to call national attention to the conditions” and “put an end to human rights abuses” within INS detention centers.

At the first such meeting in Washing­ton, D.C., in April, some activists warned that detention reform is a tricky goal, especially as there’s talk in Congress of moving INS detention centers offshore, putting them under the control of the U.S. mili­tary in closed bases, or building huge pris­ons in the boonies. “You think we have access problems now,” said Wendy Young of the Women’s Commission on Women Refugees. “Just imagine.”

ACLU attorney Judy Rabinovitz elabo­rated: “We could lose by winning. They could build a giant facility that’s clean and has a ful­ly stocked library and plenty of outdoor recre­ation — in Oakdale, Louisiana, where detainees would be out of the public eye, and away from family and attorneys. The goal is not to have beautiful, wonderful detention centers, but to make  detention at most a last resort.”

In the meantime, Lilian Loukakou re­mains in maximum security at York County jail, awaiting an appeal. The ruling last week, in the July hearing on which she’d pinned her hopes, was decided against her. The judge said he did not believe her story.

The eight-month confinement has taken a toll. Loukakou stares listlessly at the floor and fidgets in her chair. Her fingernails have grown long and her skin is breaking out. “She looks totally different from when I met her in April,” says attorney Mendiola. “Mentally, she’s had it.”

Says her boyfriend Louison: “She calls me almost every day, and all she does is cry and cry and cry.” ♦

The post The Worst Prison System in America appeared first on The Village Voice.

“I can’t explain how he appeared,” says Vogel, who developed Indecent over seven years with co-creator and director Rebecca Taichman. “My characters just do that, and I fall in love with them. Lemml had a sweetness about him. He looked like Jack Gilford, whom I adored.” She speaks in measured, emphatic cadences and fixes an interlocutor in the warm, unswerving gaze of her blue-gray eyes. The effect is hypnotic.

The fact that Lemml became a stage manager certainly owes a debt to Wilder, but it also has to do with Vogel’s own half-century love affair with the theater. As a high school student in the late 1960s in Maryland — “a very Southern state” — and already feeling the stirrings of same-sex desire, Vogel found a home backstage.

Andrew Eccles

She sensed that directing was considered a province for men. What’s more, she says, “I thought that acting was natural to heterosexual girls because they were already acting, and to be directed by some young man telling me what it felt like to be a woman — that was agony for me.” As a stage manager, though, “I could climb ladders, move equipment, and be absolutely competent and capable.” That was a welcome antidote to having to wear white gloves to school dances and carry a purse that matched her pumps.

Stage-managing also afforded Vogel a valuable perspective on “backstage human behavior that is not conscious and the studied transformation of human behavior onstage,” she says. This meta-theatrical double vision may be the one trait that runs consistently through Vogel’s varied dramatic oeuvre — that, and an unnerving humor.

As one of America’s most formally and thematically daring playwrights, Vogel has continually experimented over the last four decades. The Baltimore Waltz (1992), which won an Obie for Best New American Play, memorializes her brother Carl, who died of AIDS in 1988; it traces a man and his ailing sister’s rollicking trip to Europe, with a waltz-like structure, taking place in the three realms of fantasy, memory, and reality. The Long Christmas Ride Home (2003) uses Bunraku puppets to represent the childhoods of the adult characters who manipulate them.

All the while, Vogel’s work has challenged audiences to examine their assumptions about gender, sexuality, violence, and family — including feminist assumptions. Hot ’N Throbbing (1994) deliberately confuses reality and representation to question (among other things) whether women can escape misogynist narratives even in their own sexual fantasies. In her most famous — and most unsettling — play, Obie and Pulitzer winner How I Learned to Drive (1997), Vogel returns again and again to a scene of a girl’s incestuous violation and, disturbingly, empowerment: Her uncle, teaching his niece how to drive, bestows a means of control and self-sufficiency even as he negates those lessons by abusing her in the car. The play changed how the theater — and the country — could think not only about trauma in terms of victimization, but also, as Vogel has often said, “about the gifts we receive from those who hurt us.”

But ask Vogel to take stock of nearly four decades of achievement and she slyly changes the subject to other playwrights — her influential “three gods,” Caryl Churchill, María Irene Fornés, and John Guare; her early and beloved experimental colleagues Connie Congdon, Jeff Jones, and Mac Wellman; the downtown innovators “who made such an imprint on me,” like David Greenspan, Mabou Mines, and the Wooster Group. “That’s the world of the Obies,” she notes, which have always awarded the “incredible bravery of the heart of our field.” She also extols the “brilliance” and “bravery” and “genius” of her former students during her twenty years heading the playwriting program at Brown and four at Yale, among them Ayad Akhtar, Nilo Cruz, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Sarah Ruhl.

Vogel’s not shy about admitting to some frustrations in her own career as she makes her Broadway debut with Indecent at age 65 — she’s feeling “jubilation with a soupçon of rage.” But, she insists, her voice rising, she’s more outraged by Lynn Nottage waiting to see her first Tony nomination till age 52, and by the lack of productions of such works as Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, or plays by Christina Anderson, Dan LeFranc, Gregory Moss — “I can go on and on and on.”

Over the years, Vogel has made a quiet practice of calling up young playwrights — especially women — after they’ve received a dismissive review, and taking them out for coffee and a pep talk. “I guess that’s part of the stage manager in me, too,” she says. “I’m a caretaker.”

Looking out for a young playwright’s work also ends up becoming Lemml’s role in Indecent. Weaving a theatrical tapestry of period songs, interstitial dances choreographed by David Dorfman, and original music by Lisa Gutkin and Aaron Halva performed by a three-piece klezmer band, Indecent tells the story of God of Vengeance, a play written by the Yiddish author Sholem Asch in Warsaw in 1906.

Carol Rosegg

God of Vengeance focuses on a brothel keeper who tries to buy respectability and a dowry for his daughter by commissioning a copy of a Torah scroll. But even as he is completing the deal, his daughter, Rivkele, runs off with Manke, a prostitute in his employ. The second act features a love scene in which the two women frolic together in the May rain; in 1907, the great Yiddish playwright Yankev Gordin famously likened their encounter to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

At the end of 1922, a production opened in English at the Provincetown Playhouse and transferred to Broadway a few months later. Though the rain scene was trimmed down for the move uptown, a Reform rabbi, concerned about perceptions of Jews at a time of virulent anti-Semitism and rising immigration restrictions, lodged a complaint under anti-obscenity laws, and the entire cast was arrested.

Indecent presents snippets of Asch’s drama as it traces the complicated fate of the old play, and the culture the work came from. We see God of Vengeance played successfully in Europe and Russia and on the Yiddish stages of New York, endure the scandalous Broadway performance in 1923, and watch it take shape two decades later in an attic in the Łódź ghetto. While Asch is a central character, aging from hotheaded youngster in Poland to beleaguered post-Holocaust Yiddishist in America, God of Vengeance itself is Vogel’s protagonist. A seven-member ensemble plays some forty roles, among them the actors who perform Asch’s play all over the world.

Much to Lemml’s disappointment, Asch doesn’t fully defend his play and its actors. The stage manager confronts the author before he returns to Poland, taking the Yiddish manuscript with him. “This play,” Lemml ardently asserts, “changed my life.”

Vogel and Taichman can make the same claim. Vogel was a graduate student at Cornell in the 1970s, toughing it out as an open lesbian, when she first read Isaac Goldberg’s 1918 translation of God of Vengeance while standing transfixed in the library. The “lyricism” and “lack of moralizing” in the love scene, she recalls, bowled her over and widened her sense of possibility for her life as an artist.

Some 25 years after Vogel’s epiphany in the stacks, Taichman, then a directing student at Yale, read about God of Vengeance in a book about theater and gender that had just come out. (Full disclosure: I’m the author of that book and, as a result, was invited to offer notes on Indecent during rehearsals.) In love with a woman at the time, and the granddaughter of a Yiddish poet, Taichman burned to know more and decided to build her MFA thesis around Asch’s play. In what seemed like a sign that the project was beshert — destined — Taichman found that Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library held Asch’s papers and those of Harry Weinberger, the lawyer who produced God of Vengeance on Broadway and defended it against obscenity charges. In 2000, she swimmingly passed her thesis requirement with a production of The People vs The God of Vengeance, which drew from the trial transcripts she’d found in the archives.

As Taichman’s career blossomed — across the country, she directed works by, among others, Shakespeare, Bock and Harnick, and Ruhl — Asch’s genius still tugged at her. “I felt that I had come to know these people and this moment in such an intimate way, and that somehow I had to try to caretake their memory,” she says. When the Oregon Shakespeare Festival invited Taichman to participate in its American Revolutions series of new works “sprung from moments of change in United States history,” she proposed it to OSF’s artistic director, Bill Rauch. Taichman was ready to hand over the many boxes of photocopies she’d made at the Beinecke to “a real playwright”; she mentioned the project to a former teacher she ran into at the theater, and he suggested Vogel, which struck Taichman as “audacious.” Why, Taichman wondered, would as distinctive and accomplished an artist as Vogel latch onto someone else’s obsession?

But when Taichman and Rauch called, Vogel remembers, “It was like one Trekkie finding another.” As they spoke, an image came into Vogel’s mind: an acting troupe in an attic. “I don’t think it’s just about the obscenity trial,” she told Taichman. “I think it’s larger than that.”

Taichman replied: “You can go anywhere you want.”

It was a good artistic match, too. “Paula and Rebecca understand emotion and abstraction and their relation to each other similarly,” notes Ruhl. “They know how to make space for an audience’s imagination and empathy to pour in.”

Carol Rosegg

Now, for a second time, God of Vengeance would change Vogel’s life. Over seven years and more than forty drafts, as the pair hunkered down at workshops and retreats like Sundance and the MacDowell Colony and then brought the production to fruition at the Yale Repertory Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, and Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theater, Vogel threw herself into researching Yiddishkayt. Born to a Christian mother and a Jewish father, Vogel remembers how relatives on her mother’s side fixed her with the nickname “the Yankee Jewgirl,” and being told, all through her life, that she was just like her brainy and argumentative father (who left Vogel’s family when she was ten). Her partner of 28 years (and, since 2004, her wife) comes from the Jewish left — “This was the family I was meant to be born in,” Vogel jokes. “OK, I’ll just marry into it.”

But before Taichman rang, Vogel had never fully studied that piece of her heritage. She dove into the materials Taichman had amassed, plus Asch’s sizable oeuvre of plays, stories, and novels, and innumerable volumes on Jewish history and literature. She consulted historians and interviewed Asch’s descendants. “I had to please the experts,” she says, explaining that when she invented a plot point she’d ask a scholar, “Could you believe that…?” Plausibility, she figured, could assure the artistic truth of the story even if it strayed from a particular fact.

Now that the courageously forthright lesbian writer has penned her Jewish coming-out play, is the move to Broadway marking the third way Asch’s 110-year-old play is changing Vogel’s life? Not so much. Proud to bring a piece of Yiddish theater and Broadway’s first lesbian kiss back to the neighborhood, and chuffed that she and Taichman have each been nominated for Tony Awards, Vogel finds it amusing that people are asking her, “gently and kindly,” how it feels to be making her Broadway debut at age 65 — “as if I were the oldest living virgin until now.” She lets out a laugh and crinkles those intense blue-gray eyes. “I haven’t been waiting,” she says. “I have been having a lot of fun in theaters all over the country.”

The post “This Play Changed My Life” appeared first on The Village Voice.

Terror Attack

September 11, 2001

by Alisa Solomon

I emerged from the Chambers Street subway stop at 9 this morning into a crowd gaping up at the World Trade Center moments after its top floors had burst into flames. Some people were crying, a few women crossed themselves, but mostly people were exchanging stories in that almost affable New York-in-a-crisis way, collecting the tales that they would later tell their friends and maybe someday their grandchildren. Until the second blast. As soon as we heard the muffled boom and saw flames kick along the walls of the tower, we knew in our bellies that America was changed forever. I wanted to throw up.

A panicky mob ran screaming up the street, some stopping two blocks north to gape some more. Theories started flying: “Terrorists,” though few could say which kind for what cause. Sirens howled and quickly the streets became eerily empty of traffic. We could see some small figures—something orange, something flapping white—hanging off the building. Could they be people? The crowd let out a high-pitched primal squeal. I got the hell out of there.

I headed east in a nauseous daze—due for jury duty at state supreme court on Centre Street, propelled by one of those defense-mechanism impulses that makes you focus on the thing that is absolutely beside the point. I turned onto Duane Street, soon finding myself passing the Javits Federal Building. I started to run. It might blow any minute, I thought.

I spent much of this August in Israel and the occupied territories. I was there during the weeks the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem was blown up by a suicide bomber, and left Haifa only a day before the bombing at a restaurant there. Though I witnessed during my travels through the West Bank and Gaza how those areas were the ones literally under siege, I began to understand the depth of Israeli fear. I lived in perpetual anxiety: sitting in a cafe, going to the grocery store, standing in any crowded area. Every time I boarded a bus I felt my heartbeat speed up. I never felt so relieved to return home from abroad as I did two weeks ago. At last I could drop the guard, leave the panic behind.

Or so I thought. Jury duty was over: The court was closing. So I began the citizens’ march up Centre Street, merging with the throngs sent home. Cops waved us away from subway entrances and told us to keep walking.

I fell in with a group of young women, administrative assistants at 2 World Trade Center. One was still crying. She was about to enter the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. “Arms, legs. Parts of people. They were falling on my head,” she said. Her friend put an arm around her, saying only “shhh,” and the whole block went silent for a moment. The third friend tried frantically to get a cell-phone signal. A secretary to three vice presidents at a Wall Street firm that opens at 9, she typically starts work at 8:30. “I have to get their days prepared,” she said, shaken yet proud, almost as if she expected to be there again tomorrow. “My subway was late today and for some reason, for once as the train slowed down and waited, I didn’t get mad,” she marveled.

Her calls wouldn’t go through. Neither would anyone else’s. Block-long lines formed at payphones as WTC workers tried to contact loved ones to let them know they were okay.

As we trudged along—strangers talking like old friends, people who managed to find cabs and offering to share them—I flashed on the grammar-school drills I went through in the ’60s. The Cold War came to my Midwestern suburban school in the form of duck-and-cover exercises and, once a year, a practice evacuation. We were let out of school early and had to walk all the way home, filing out in neat lines and heading into the streets, kids peeling off as we came to their neighborhoods.

A real war has come to these shores now, bringing massive violence into America for the first time. The terrible human casualties of today’s attacks haven’t even begun to be counted yet. Some of the intangible ones to come are obvious—the First Amendment, for starters. The altered city skyline is only the most visible manifestation of the size of the change.

I finally got my turn at the phone. There were three anxious messages on my answering machine: One from my partner. And two from friends in Israel.

Readers Responded:
Letters from 9-11

A Day of Reckoning

The Voice has done a public service by publishing Alisa Solomon’s article “Terror Attack.” What she describes about New York’s tragic and horrible terrorist events is akin to the daily terror one encounters in Israel. Today, no American journalist hesitates to refer to “terrorists” as the cause of this tragedy. But when similar violence occurs in Israel, many media—especially CNN and BBC—refer to “militants.” Perhaps Americans have learned a valuable, albeit costly and tragic, lesson about the “peaceful intentions” of the Palestinians and their supporters.

Michael Baldwin

Manhattan

Occupational Hazards

I understand Alisa Solomon’s fear and outrage at the attack on the United States. Her implicit indictment of the Palestinians, however, is uninformed and ultimately saddens my heart. If we fall into equating this violence with the suicide bombers in Israel, we must be fair and note that Palestinians also live in “perpetual anxiety.” The only way we can rise above this violence in our country is to absorb its profundity and refrain from lashing out. In fact, such terror is what the Palestinians have lived with under the Israeli government since 1948.

Ian Thompson

Beaumont, Texas

Touching Base

Having lived in New York back in 1975, I knew that I could find a human touch at the Voice. Thanks for Alisa Solomon’s article.

Ted Feder

São Paulo, Brazil

Headlines and Deadlines

I found “Terror Attack” to be extremely biased and sensational. And to title a Voice cover of this magnitude “The Bastards!”? That and Solomon’s use of a witness’s gory description show little sensitivity to this tragedy.

Bob Smith

Manhattan

The post Reprint: Terror Attack appeared first on The Village Voice.

“One great function of the Public Theater,” he explains, is to introduce to a broader audience “talented artists with skill and complexity, who have grown up and developed in a downtown theater scene, experimenting with form, questioning the primacy of narrative, and breaking apart expectations.”

As a member of the clever collagist collective Elevator Repair Service, Groff certainly has cavorted with deconstructionists, helping to compose movement-theater pieces out of found texts, uncanny choreography, and a cheerful disregard for logical connection. As a playwright, she has devised engaging, puzzling plots, while examining and appropriating various arcane idioms and manners of speech–air traffic control lingo, abstract number theory, the taunting boasts of Muhammad Ali–in such plays as Jimmy Carter Was a Democrat, The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem, and Inky.

The Ruby Sunrise, currently in previews, maintains an exciting sense of formal ingenuity and thematic irresolution, even as it provides plenty of story and character to hang onto. The first act follows Ruby, a teenage girl in rural Indiana in 1927 trying to build a television out of junk, determination, and notions gleaned from Popular Mechanics. In the second act, set in a New York City TV studio in 1952, Ruby’s daughter Lulu, a “script girl,” seeks to chronicle her unsung mother’s experience in a television drama. Collaborating with (and falling for) a promising writer, Lulu manages to get Ruby’s story aired, but not without some compromises.

Eustis was hooked the moment he read The Ruby Sunrise. The play’s questions echoed some of his own obsessions: how stories work and can have impact, how the truth matters in them, how to retain integrity within an inherently impure system, how to make things happen without abandoning one’s vision. The different levels of fictive reality appealed to him too. And he loved the relationships between the characters, especially “the vexed questions of a visionary woman and man trying to form a partnership of true equals.”

At the Trinity Rep in Rhode Island, where he served as artistic director for 11 years before taking up the reins at the Public last May, Eustis directed the play in the spring of 2004, in a co-production with the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. He was planning on bringing the play to Off-Broadway, but when he was hired to succeed George C. Wolfe, he realized: “This is a perfect match for the Public.”

As the theater celebrates its 50th anniversary, Eustis is looking toward reviving one of its most fruitful traditions: “building more bridges,” as he puts it, between experimental work and more conventional plays, thus compelling artists–and audiences–of various stripes to rub up against each other in the theaters. “The collision between all the different visions and approaches produces enormously rich feasts,” he says, nodding to Joe Papp, who’d do such things as “put Pirates of Penzance next to Richard Foreman’s Egyptology.” Thinking more about profuse creativity and cross-fertilization than about launching the next Broadway transfer, he wants constant activity in the theater–plays and performance pieces going up all the time, unburdened by the risks that accompany big budgets. “We can have a steady series of new plays that don’t cost half a million dollars and give young writers a way to attach here,” he says. With his production of

The Ruby Sunrise, Eustis is not just asserting his belief in Rinne Groff’s original voice, he is also declaring the Public’s commitment to imaginative young writers. And he is urging artists and audiences alike to venture beyond their separate, cozy corners.

Ruby self-destructs because she rigidly demands all or nothing. But Lulu finds a way to do the best she can in a reality she can fight but not conquer. Eustis is talking about Ruby when he says: “I grew up in the Communist left, so I understand the impulse to self-destruct, the idea that if you can’t achieve the fullness of your vision, it’s better not to achieve anything. Or you narrow your world as much as you need to feel pure within it. You create a niche for yourself where you and your 14 friends can be contemptuous of those who don’t agree with you and not risk the messiness and compromise of participating in your community, your city, your country.” Insisting on the risk, Eustis is expressing his ethic for the Public Theater as well.

The post A Public Display of Direction appeared first on The Village Voice.

I emerged from the Chambers Street subway stop at 9 this morning into a crowd gaping up at the World Trade Center moments after its top floors had burst into flames. Some people were crying, a few women crossed themselves, but mostly people were exchanging stories in that almost affable New York-in-a-crisis way, collecting the tales that they would later tell their friends and maybe someday their grandchildren. Until the second blast. As soon as we heard the muffled boom and saw flames kick along the walls of the tower, we knew in our bellies that America was changed forever. I wanted to throw up.

A panicky mob ran screaming up the street, some stopping two blocks north to gape some more. Theories started flying: “Terrorists,” though few could say which kind for what cause. Sirens howled and quickly the streets became eerily empty of traffic. We could see some small figures—something orange, something flapping white—hanging off the building. Could they be people? The crowd let out a high-pitched primal squeal. I got the hell out of there.

I headed east in a nauseous daze—due for jury duty at state supreme court on Centre Street, propelled by one of those defense-mechanism impulses that makes you focus on the thing that is absolutely beside the point. I turned onto Duane Street, soon finding myself passing the Javits Federal Building. I started to run. It might blow any minute, I thought.

I spent much of this August in Israel and the occupied territories. I was there during the weeks the Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem was blown up by a suicide bomber, and left Haifa only a day before the bombing at a restaurant there. Though I witnessed during my travels through the West Bank and Gaza how those areas were the ones literally under siege, I began to understand the depth of Israeli fear. I lived in perpetual anxiety: sitting in a cafe, going to the grocery store, standing in any crowded area. Every time I boarded a bus I felt my heartbeat speed up. I never felt so relieved to return home from abroad as I did two weeks ago. At last I could drop the guard, leave the panic behind.

Or so I thought. Jury duty was over: The court was closing. So I began the citizens’ march up Centre Street, merging with the throngs sent home. Cops waved us away from subway entrances and told us to keep walking.

I fell in with a group of young women, administrative assistants at 2 World Trade Center. One was still crying. She was about to enter the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. “Arms, legs. Parts of people. They were falling on my head,” she said. Her friend put an arm around her, saying only “shhh,” and the whole block went silent for a moment. The third friend tried frantically to get a cell-phone signal. A secretary to three vice presidents at a Wall Street firm that opens at 9, she typically starts work at 8:30. “I have to get their days prepared,” she said, shaken yet proud, almost as if she expected to be there again tomorrow. “My subway was late today and for some reason, for once as the train slowed down and waited, I didn’t get mad,” she marveled.

Her calls wouldn’t go through. Neither would anyone else’s. Block-long lines formed at payphones as WTC workers tried to contact loved ones to let them know they were okay.

As we trudged along—strangers talking like old friends, people who managed to find cabs and offering to share them—I flashed on the grammar-school drills I went through in the ’60s. The Cold War came to my Midwestern suburban school in the form of duck-and-cover exercises and, once a year, a practice evacuation. We were let out of school early and had to walk all the way home, filing out in neat lines and heading into the streets, kids peeling off as we came to their neighborhoods.

A real war has come to these shores now, bringing massive violence into America for the first time. The terrible human casualties of today’s attacks haven’t even begun to be counted yet. Some of the intangible ones to come are obvious—the First Amendment, for starters. The altered city skyline is only the most visible manifestation of the size of the change.

I finally got my turn at the phone. There were three anxious messages on my answering machine: One from my partner. And two from friends in Israel.

The post Terror Attack appeared first on The Village Voice.

Much of Greenwich Village boho was homo in the Voice‘s early days, so just by virtue of journalistic honesty, the Voice could hardly help steering queer. In the years before the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 Voice
writers were already following the explosion of queer culture that gave rise to Off-Off-Broadway, pop art, and a flamboyant niche of underground film.

But not without anxiety. The Voice‘s first review of a 1960 production at the Caffe Cino reveals an under-current of homophobia that has frequently burbled within the paper’s liberalism, occasionally erupting onto its pages as anti-lesbian wisecracking, trans sensationalism, cliché-ridden straight-guy reckonings with the erotics of male bonding, casual contempt, or plain old prudishness. But the vitality, diversity, and jouissance of LGBT writing that have coursed through the Voice for five decades have always overwhelmed these blips of hetero panic.

In that Cino review, critic Seymour Krim shuddered at the clientele: “incense-burning faggots camping.” But by the following year, when the Cino featured a chorus of hustlers in a production of Gide’s Philoctetes, a gay critic, Michael Smith, had been installed at the Voice. Enthusiasm rather than priggishness now characterized the coverage of the unabashedly queer performances of Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith, Ron Tavel, Andy Warhol, Jeff Weiss, Lanford Wilson, and other gay men at the Cino, La MaMa, Judson Church, and wherever else they could gather an audience. (When a comparable burst of transgressive lesbian performance occurred in the ’80s, C.Carr was on hand, as other incisive critics—the entire back-of-the-book personnel, in fact—have been for queer upsurges in music, theater, fashion, literature, film, dance, TV, and art.)

Jill Johnston—the paper’s, and arguably the country’s, first shameless public lesbian—joined the staff in 1959, inventing an astonishing free-form, self-conscious style for her art and dance criticism, which soon expanded into the witty, often outrageous chronicles of her own life-as-art. Thrilling to read today, Johnston’s columns are as furious as they are frivolous: Part Dada, part militant feminism, they often ran upwards of 2,500 words. “My heterosexuality was a flash in the man, you might say,” Johnston wrote in 1970. In an incantatory 1971 piece, much of which thinks too fast to be burdened with punctuation, she declares: “Until all women are lesbians there will be no true political revolution.”

The rebellion that was under way—signaled by the Stonewall riots in 1969—became an ongoing story in the Voice, beginning with extensive, front-page coverage of that fateful June night when queens at a bar rose up against a routine police raid. From the Voice offices nearby, two writers came down to check things out, and one, Howard Smith, got trapped inside the Stonewall Inn with the cops, while Lucian Truscott
IV reported from the streets. Smith detailed police violence, and Truscott tried to capture the mayhem in which “the show of force of the city’s finery met the force of the city’s finest.” The Voice took some heat from the fledgling movement for Truscott’s epithet-laden prose. But even as he wrote of the “forces of faggotry,” his writing evoked respect for the “unprecedented protest” that for two more nights continued “to assert presence, possibility and pride . . . ”

Gay power became a news beat at the Voice, and openly gay Arthur Bell was hired to follow it. Bell explained the movement’s strategies, dissected its debates, and skewered its enemies. Along with Richard Goldstein, who had joined the paper as the country’s first rock critic in 1966, Bell tracked the tortuous saga of New York’s gay rights bill, first introduced in 1971—and passed in 1986. Bell originated the persona of the public gay male journalist and flourished in his Bell Tells, a column of radical dish. (His glass slippers were fabulously occupied and refashioned by Michael Musto after Bell’s death in 1984.) Writing about the appearance of Metropolitan Opera diva Eleanor Steber in a “black towel” concert at the Continental Baths in 1973, Bell rhapsodized, “It was an affair to rank with the coming of Christ, the death of Garland, the birth of the blues, and the freezing of spinach.”

Goldstein came out in the late ’70s, and while continuing to contribute reported stories and analytical cultural essays, he also became an editor—a position from which he fostered diverse, frank, and honest queer coverage in the paper for some 25 years, often mentoring young writers, until his lamentable departure last summer. In 1979 he created the first Gay Life supplement to coincide with Gay Pride week. (It morphed into the Queer Issue sometime in the ’80s.) The section offered a chance to move beyond each year’s news events that regular Voice writers—Hilton Als, C.Carr, Athima Chansanchai, Laura Conaway, James Hannaham, Andy Humm, Gary Indiana, Doug Ireland, Jonathan Ned Katz, Lisa Kennedy, Donna Minkowitz, Donald Suggs, Guy Trebay, and myself, among others—reported on and/or analyzed. These topics included anti-gay referenda, the marriage debate, homophobia in sports, queer place-staking in religion, demos in D.C., hate crimes, out candidates and gay voting patterns, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” police crackdowns on cruising, Supreme Court sodomy rulings, the Rainbow curriculum, the emergence of a gay right, GLF, GAA, Radicalesbians, NGLTF, ACT UP, Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers, HRC, and always, the vast imaginative contributions of lesbian and gay artists—and the attacks on them.

And, of course, AIDS. Though the Voice took a while to find its sea legs in the tempestuous early stages of the epidemic, by the late ’80s the paper was a primary source of reliable information even as it held up a mirror to the grief, anxiety, and fury that raged through the community. For several years, and working right up to his death in 1994, Robert Massa was the best AIDS reporter in the country.

But the special June issue offered writers—and readers—a chance to step back from the demands of the news peg to contemplate trends, queer identities, contours of culture, political direction, sex. This was one of the few spaces where the Voice remained a “writer’s paper” well into the new millennium (despite the ever shrinking page count). The list of contributors over the years reads like the bibliography of a comprehensive queer-studies course. Just a short sample: Dorothy Allison, James Baldwin, Michael Bronski, Pat Califia,
George Chauncey Jr., Martin Duberman, Lisa Duggan, John D’Emilio, Allen Ginsberg, Jewelle Gomez, Marga Gomez, Bertha Harris, Essex Hemphill, Amber Holli-baugh, Holly Hughes, Andrew Kopkind, Larry Kramer, Eileen Myles, Jeff Nunokawa, Dale Peck, Vito Russo, Bayard Rustin, Eve Sedgwick, Michelangelo Signorile, Kendall Thomas, Michael Warner, Edmund White, Monique Wittig.

When I joined the paper in 1983, deep and broad LGBT coverage was simply regarded as one of its indisputable duties. The year before I arrived, the
Voice had become the first employer in the nation to provide domestic partner benefits to the unionized staff (under the leadership of then staff writer Jeff Weinstein).

I hope the Voice can keep living up to this legacy. I don’t smell any conspiracies, just the cautious, compliant scent of the zeitgeist: an increasingly conservative LGBT movement, obsessed with marriage and assimilation, and a liberal print media (and its advertisers) putting their economic hopes in young straight men who are riled by, or at least uninterested in, homos. Meanwhile, virtually all the queer liberationists are gone from the masthead, and the paper is facing a merger with New Times, an enterprise that, to put it kindly, has never been out ahead on LGBT journalism.

There are a million naked stories in the queer city and the Voice
knows how to tell them better than anyone. If it wants to.

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Warren Leight not only heeds this principle in his new, autobiographical play No Foreigners Beyond This Point; the production’s didactic program notes quote it prominently. Based on Leight’s own experience as an English teacher in southern China’s Guangdong in 1980, the play reveals the disastrous impact of the Cultural Revolution on particular individuals—the teachers, administrators, and students at the Da Lang Institute of Foreign Trade.

Two young, white Americans—Andrew (Ean Sheehy) and Paula (Abby Royle)—stand at the center of the familiar plot, providing the naive eyes through which we encounter foreign territory. Raised by lefty WASPs, Paula has come to China with both the idealistic aim to contribute to a society based on equality (“There’s no rat race. . . . They don’t have car loans or house loans”) and with the mundane desire to forge an independent identity. Andrew, an aspiring writer, has followed Paula, inflamed by her red hair and fiery spirit. His greater skepticism—no rat race? “They ate the rats.” No credit cards? “No things to buy”—presages the disintegration of their romance. As his frustrations boil over in the face of commie bureaucracy, the culture of spying, and the failure of the administrators to provide a promised bicycle, Paula stays focused on trying to lower the barriers separating them as Western “barbarians” from their local hosts.

Trouble is, the Chinese characters are potentially more interesting than the immature lovers, yet Leight gives the Americans’ personal turmoil—a letter telling Paula her parents are divorcing, news that John Lennon has been shot—as much emotional weight as the gradual disclosures by Da Lang’s personnel of the ravages of the revolution: a violinist’s instrument destroyed and her wrists broken; a husband banished to a distant province; a father sent away, leaving his traumatized children deeply damaged. Despite some deft and moving moments, such as a party at which the school officials abandon themselves to a waltz for the first time in decades, No Foreigners seems like the work of a writer far younger and less experienced than Leight, whose previous memory play Side Man won a Tony Award in 1999. Here, Leight seems simply to have pulled episodes from his 25-year-old diary, and built a dramatic action on the heroes’ dawning realization that the Cultural Revolution had a few drawbacks.

Like Side Man, No Foreigners conveys real affection for its characters as it explores the emotional fallout of detachment and of what’s long left unsaid. Ma-Yi Theater Company’s top-notch ensemble, under Loy Arcenas’s skillful direction, gives full emotion and texture to each person caught in the closed world of Guangdong. But in less capable hands, the Chinese characters could come off as mere background scenery in a romantic soap opera about American kids searching for self in an exotic setting.

Eduardo Machado’s Kissing Fidel zeroes in more directly on the people swept into the motive forces of world history—in this case, anti-Castro Cubans who fled their nation’s revolution for the United States. Such families have provided Machado rich material for two decades’ worth of engaging work. If he has had more success with earlier explorations of exiles’ bitter legacy, the conflict between Catholic repression and American openness, and the messy entanglements of kinship and politics, Kissing Fidel signals a new stylistic investigation that is as potentially exciting as it is unrealized in this effort.

Neoclassically set in a single locale—a Miami funeral parlor whose striking upstage wall is composed of blood-red roses—the play sees various relatives come and go, taking turns at voicing solo laments, exchanging rapid-fire recriminations, and throwing themselves into each other’s lascivious arms. Formally, Kissing Fidel marries Racine to telenovela, unleashing issues of duty and restraint into a genre where people are oversexed, overwrought, and over-the-top.

It’s not easy to strike a tone that is at once arch and sentimental, extreme and everyday, and the company at INTAR (where Machado is artistic director) achieves mixed results under the halting hand of director Michael John Garcés. But for a play that might also have been titled Blaming Fidel—all the relatives seem to think the old dictator lies at the root of the betrayal, incest, and suicide that have plagued the family for 30 years—Machado’s aggressive assault on the realistic frame of the dysfunctional family drama holds great promise.

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Most of us holding American passports can make the journey to the Old City more easily than a resident of Jericho, but in bringing the Palestinian National Theater’s charming and wistful Jerusalem and the Little Prince to the International Toy Theater Festival (greatsmallworks.org), running from June 10 to 19 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, Abdo is delivering something special to us as well: the alluring city as a child dreams of it.

Combining beautiful illustrations, live music, and a plaintive tale of a boy’s search for belonging and friendship, Jerusalem and the Little Prince fuses two theatrical traditions—the Middle Eastern storyteller carrying what Abdo calls his “box of strange things” and the toy theater form that was all the rage in Victorian parlors, a do-it-yourself mode of miniature spectacle.

The easy portability of toy theater has its advantages for artists likely to encounter military checkpoints on their way to a gig, but the genre is tantalizing to Abdo and colleagues from all over the world for other reasons too. “Unlike that contemporary box that sits in most people’s living rooms, toy theater lets you refashion existing images and interpret the world as you see it,” says John Bell, a member of Great Small Works, the collective that curates the festival. This year’s—the seventh—features a symposium, museum, and hands-on workshop, along with some 30 performances addressing such themes as Jewish life in a Polish town, the tales of St. Francis, the Haymarket Riots, the story of Christine Jorgensen, and the journey of an adventurous sardine.

As Abdo sees it, “Far away from the story that our lives are all about gunshots and stone throwing, we show the life that is possible in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem we love.”

From a kiboshed all-female revival of Grease to a satiric musical

The lyrics aren’t exactly Sondheim—”We’re Rock and Roll High School and at a sorority we will scoff/And we’re really really really really really really really really pissed off”—but Madi Distefano, co-author and director of Grease and Desist, which ended a brief and sudden run in Philadelphia at the end of May, is pleased enough with the last-minute musical that very well could have saved Tapestry Theatre and Brat Productions from a costly lawsuit.

Distefano and colleagues spent two days concocting a plot and new songs to match the costumes, blocking, and choreography they’d rehearsed for a production of Grease that was served a cease and desist order from Samuel French, the script’s licensing agent, the day before the scheduled opening early last month. The offense? An all-female cast. According to Distefano, Samuel French regarded women playing men’s roles as an unauthorized alteration of the play. (Samuel French did not return calls requesting comment.)

All-girl high schools often perform popular musicals like Grease without any interference, but with adult professionals in the roles of biceps-flexing, car-revving, girl-lusting teenagers, the publishers, says Distefano, assumed she was imposing “lesbian and political overtones, which we totally weren’t. It’s just that Philadelphia has an awesome female non-Equity talent pool that can sing and dance, and I wanted to do something with them.”

Distefano says she regrets that the company didn’t get to perform the “fabulous production” they’d prepared. She did learn a lesson, though: “When you have 20 minutes to write a song, repetition really helps.”

A downtown institution at long last enjoys the fruits of home ownership

After a dozen years on Sixth Avenue below Spring Street, where it has presented some 11,000 artists for more than 850,000 patrons, HERE Arts Center has purchased its 9,000-square-foot space. Watching so much of Soho get taken over by big companies like the Gap, French Connection, and Starbucks, while so many local businesses have been getting priced out, has made it essential that “HERE put down permanent roots and guarantee artists a place to keep creating risky work,” says artistic director and co-founder Kristin Marting. With a 28 percent down payment and bridge financing from a foundation of donor-advised funds, HERE closed the $1.7 million deal on May 10. To pay off the balance, renovate, retire debt, and maintain a reserve fund, HERE still needs to raise nearly $2 million. But in the end, Marting notes, “owning the space is actually cheaper than renting, so that means HERE will have more money to go to artists.”

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Lucas also brings a sharp and halting lyricism to the text (based on Cato’s literal translation), rescuing a crude and beautiful brutality from decades of stilted English versions. In their post-coital power struggle, the servant Jean tells his boss’s daughter, Miss Julie, “I can’t pretend that . . . it isn’t, in some ways, fitting to see, to learn once and for all that the glittering gold is junk, nothing: powder over a scar. That the polished nails have filth underneath and the handkerchief has snot under all that perfume . . . ”

Of course the breaching of the social barrier between the two seducers is essential to Julie’s desperation after the deed—as well as to the attraction. At its core, Miss Julie shares the elemental plot of all those hunky-plumber porn movies: Taking an impulsive tumble with the sexy worker is hot precisely because it’s transgressive. But Julie’s suicidal anxiety is hard to make convincing in this day and age; and Jean’s dreams of working his way up and opening a hotel do not easily sound futile to an American audience, reared on promises of opportunity for all who apply themselves. American actors face a tough challenge in this play, as they have to embody the class war through which the old battle of the sexes is waged.

Good as they are in revealing moment-to-moment, shifting, and competing feelings, Marin Hinkle and Reg Rogers don’t generate a visceral sense of class difference. Hinkle indicates Julie’s aristocratic status with a wan haughtiness, capturing her death wish, but not her lustiness; Rogers subtly conveys Jean’s efforts to demonstrate refinement, but misses his unselfconscious machismo. They simply aren’t sexy together. (I can still feel the charge of Lena Olin and Peter Stormare seething at each other across the BAM stage in 1991 in Ingmar Bergman’s production.)

Cato hasn’t managed to make contemporary sense of Strindberg’s interlude in which Jean’s fellows, celebrating midsummer’s eve, trash the kitchen while he and Julie, hidden away in his bedroom, have a go at it. But by commissioning Lucas, he has brought us a fresh and thorny version of a dramatic masterpiece that continues to prick and disturb.

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