“The Guys” Mirrors Life For Actor Kevin Shea
Kevin Shea was just going off shift as a firefighter on Ladder 35 on the Upper Wast Side on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
He ran to the lieutenant of his truck and asked if he still had a free seat, but the rig was full.
He found an empty seat on Engine 40, which shares a firehouse on Amsterdam and 66th Street with his Ladder, and raced downtown just after the second plane hit, unaware that he would be the only man who left the house that day to come home alive.
“I thought it was the fire of the century, and was going to be a great rescue for us,” said Mr. Shea, who had at the time been in the FDNY for three-and-a-half years.
He woke up later in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma and three broken vertebrae and very little recollection of what had happened. He later pieced together that he had gotten off the engine and gone to look for his crew on the ladder, which had been routed in a different direction.
He had just left a command post in the lobby of one of the towers, and was putting out small fires outside the towers with other firefighters who had been “orphaned” from their crew when a firefighter came running out telling everyone to run as the buildings collapsed. He was rescued from the rubble.
The complex mess of feelings that made up his return to the guys who were still alive in his firehouse, the grief of losing 11 men whom he had worked closely with every day, and his recovery from the injuries, both physical and emotional, have continued now for 25 years.
But he’s found a new way to process those feelings that he hopes will be a part of the North Fork community’s healing on this major anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Mr. Shea, 59, now lives in a geodesic dome he built in Baiting Hollow and is a dedicated master gardener. He began acting in local theater here in 2020.
He has been haunted for years by the play “The Guys,” written by journalist Anne Nelson after she worked with an FDNY Captain to eulogize the men he lost.
Ms. Nelson interviewed Mr. Shea while doing her research for the play, and he remembers being touched by her attention to the detail of firehouse life, and to the sense of purpose each firefighter brought to their job.
Mr. Shea and a team of local actors, producers and directors brought a standing-room only production of “The Guys” to CAST in Southold two years ago, and this year, for the 25th Anniversary of Sept. 11, they’re bringing a free production to the North Fork Arts Center in Greenport on Sept. 13.
An afternoon matinee, which will be followed by a Q&A with Ms. Nelson, is already at capacity in NFAC’s 275-seat Theater 1, and a second 6 p.m. performance has been added.
Producers Judith and Stephen Ness are footing the bill to make the production free and open to the public, though advance registration is going fast.
“It was so successful at CAST. We had 300 people at two performances. We had to turn people away,” said Mr. Ness as he discussed the production with the team at Mr. Shea’s dome in mid-August. “It’s so important to remember the people behind this tragedy — the survivors. That’s why I wanted to do it two years ago.”
This year’s team, mostly former members of Corchaug Rep now involved with Northeast Stage, is the same as two years ago. Christian Lepore directs and Nicholas Auletti serves as assistant director. Eileen Trilli reprises her role as Joan, the journalist who helps the captain write the eulogies, while Mr. Shea plays Nick, the captain.
“I wanted to do this for a long time,” said Mr. Shea. “My intent was initially to do this as a memorial for the brothers, but as I got a little distance from my firehouse I realized I also wanted to prove to the guys still here that I have the same pain the other survivors were having. It was internalized. For the guys who come to see this, they’re just going to be one of the crowd, learning about the universality of this at a personal level — not with other people pawning on them and saying ‘thank you for your service.’ I know a few guys who won’t even go to a 9-11 memorial, because it freaks them out.”
Mr. Shea said when got out of the hospital in late September of 2001 and returned to the firehouse, “I was all smiles, because I saw all my brothers that were still alive. But what they had was a firehouse filled with widows who would sleep in the house, hoping that they would at least find a part of their husband — a finger or a leg or anything so they could say they found him and had a funeral for him. When I got there, they didn’t know how to take me, standing there with my neck brace. They tried to put me on little assignments outside the firehouse, so they wouldn’t be uncomfortable with me there.”
Mr. Shea stayed on in the FDNY until 2004, eventually working with a Hazmat team to train firefighters for other types of potential terrorist attacks.
Unlike Nick, his character in ”The Guys,” he never became an officer, but he has some sense of what Nick is going through.
“My captain didn’t make it back, and the captain from the engine company wasn’t on duty — he’d traded a duty shift that day,” he said. “He was dealing with it, big time, and he wrote a book about it years later.”
Mr. Lepore, the director, and Mr. Ness, the producer had seen Ms. Trilli in several plays including what Mr. Ness termed a ‘magnificent’ performance in “The Father” at the NFCT in 2024.
“This role is very challenging, and I thought it was very brave of Kevin to do this work,” said Ms. Trilli. “I appreciate the depth he brings to this role, and his unique experience of honoring and respecting the lives and the story — bringing what happened to life for people who might not have been born yet.”
“Some of Kevin’s guys from New York City came to the show at CAST. They were big guys, and they were very touched,” she added. “I believe theater is here to bring us out of our everyday lives and connect us to a different perspective — emotions we don’t want to feel, but are necessary to explore, for healing.”
Mr. Lepore, the director, is also finding the pacing of this show rewarding.
“You have to balance all your normal theater instincts — it’s gotta be quick, it’s gotta move, you’ve gotta build the action and build the energy, but at the same time this is a very contemplative piece,” he said. “It itself is like a eulogy, and it’s a very emotionally taxing piece. You have to hold it very lightly. You don’t want to run roughshod over that.”
The play includes a poem by Jesuit priest Gerard Many Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty,’ in which a shepherd looks across his fields, and sees the unique beauty of each of them.
Assistant Director Nick Auletti studied that poem in college.
“Each piece of land is useful and particular,” he said. “And each fireman has a particular trade and craft — in the four eulogies in the play, each one had a particular purpose and specialty. Each was human, and there was a wonderful imperfectness about these people. We have to appreciate them for the people they were, not with false heroism. They’re lovely, perfect schmos.”
“But everyone relies on them,” said Mr. Shea. “Anne really got the culture of the firehouse. She was inside the firehouses, and absorbed the lingo they used and their value sets. Not every culture is like that.”
“Their skill of being dependable was more useful than any adjective,” said Mr. Auletti. “This damn poem, which starts with the line “Glory to God.” Praise him? We’re wrestling with ‘why would a god allow this to happen?’ And yet we have to praise him because look at where we are now. You had four fields, they were burned with scorched earth, but now you’re raising your crops.”
In all, 343 New York City firefighters died in the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. More than 400 have died since of illnesses believed to be related to their response that day and working on the site in the aftermath.
The number who have died due to the long-term mental health impacts from that day, or who are still living with those impacts, are unknown.
Here at home, Mr. Shea became a member of the Riverhead Volunteer Fire Department earlier this summer, wearing his pager proudly and running to catch as many jobs as he can. He’s still on probation — again a low man on the totem pole, proving himself all over again. He doesn’t volunteer his history at his new firehouse unless anyone asks. But he’s loving every minute of starting over again at what many firefighters will tell you is the best job in the world.
“The Guys” will be performed in 22 states this September, but this production is the only one in New York. Mr. Ness said Ms. Nelson called him up out of the blue and they made arrangements for her to be here for the Q&A.
“She could have been anywhere in the country, and she chose to be here,” he said.
Reservations for the evening performance can be made online at northfork-artscenter.org.
— BHY
