Learning How to Move Forward

Playwright Charles Evered isn’t an everyday commuter, but he rides trains often enough to know what the train culture is like. He’s seen people get dropped off at the station by their loved ones, and he’s noticed the memorials to the people who died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 that are located at stations along the Northeast Corridor.

“And I started to realize that these are places where so many people saw their loved ones for the last time, so these places are in and of themselves a kind of memorial,” Evered says. “So setting a play in a place like that was really meaningful to me, and haunting because how does one go on in a way? The trains, eventually they got back on schedule, eventually we got back on with our lives.”

The play he set at a train station is “Ten,” a 10-minute, two-character drama that will be presented in a staged reading at the Princeton Arts Council’s Paul Robeson Center for the Arts on Sept. 10.

“Ten” takes place on the 10^th anniversary of the attacks. A woman named Flora is at an unspecified station, waiting, even expecting, to see her husband Bill get off the next train. Bill was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and promised Flora he’d get home. The number 10 had several meanings in their life, so Flora is convinced Bill chose the 10^th anniversary of the attacks as the day he’d come back.

“Obviously, she’s not well in a way but in another way, she’s just hoping against hope,” Evered says. “She managed to convince herself that through a series of circumstances and coincidences, which she talks about in the play, that somehow maybe he did survive and there’s a chance that he’ll come back, and that this is the day he would come back. “

The other character is Doug, a cop who has long had feelings for Flora. He brings her coffee and tries to convince her to realize the truth and move on.

One inspiration for the play were news stories Evered read about cars that we left at train station parking lots for days because their owners died in the attacks.

“That really touched me when I learned that local cops would be the ones who had to bring them home,” he says. “And as it turns out, in this play, it’s that local cop who she’s known all her life, who had to bring her husband’s car home.”

Evered’s wife, Wendy Rolfe Evered, will play Flora in the reading. She says the theme of letting go and moving forward with life can apply to many situations, not just something as big and tragic as 9/11.

“I think everything Chuck writes, and the reason why people identify so much with the things that he writes, is they get you,” she says. “You can just apply it to your own life and go, ‘Oh my God, he wrote this just for me, this is exactly my situation.’”

Evered is a playwright and screenwriter whose plays include “Running Funny” (whose cast included Paul Giamatti) and “The Size of the World,” which featured Liev Schreiber. “Ten” is a companion piece to his play, “Adopt a Sailor,” which also started as a 10-minute play and eventually became a feature-length movie, directed by Evered and starring Bebe Neuwirth and Peter Coyote. 

The Evereds live in Princeton, with their two children. Charles served as the first artist in residence at the Paul Robeson Center when it opened in 2008. He talked with Jeff Nathanson, the Arts Council’s executive director, about staging “Ten” at the center. The reading will take place during the opening reception of the Arts Council’s “Re:Member” exhibit, in which artists will explore how we remember people, place and events.  

There will be a lot of memorials and events commemorating the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. Evered says he wrote the play because he wanted to acknowledge the anniversary in a particular way.

“Because of what we’ve all been through, I felt there had to be some comment on the decade,” he says. “In some ways, it’s been a long decade and in some ways it’s almost as if we blink it’s that morning again.”

He wanted to do it with a story that is personal, about regular people who anyone could relate to, rather than writing something that was analytical or political. 

“It came from being haunted in train stations and looking around and saying, ‘Think of all the goodbyes that were said here,’” Evered says. They were, most likely, casual goodbyes, made by people who expected to see each other that night.

As he Evered puts it, “You never know.”

“Ten” will be performed at the Solley Theatre in the Arts Council of Princeton’s Paul Robeson Center for the Arts on Sept. 10 at 4:30 p.m. The Arts Council will host the opening reception for “Re:Member” from 3-5 p.m. For information, go to www.artscouncilofprinceton.org.