Amy S. Green, Nora’s Playhouse’s Associate Artistic Director, created What Happened: The September 11th Testimony Project with her students at John Jay College in the months after 9/11. In October, November, and December of 2001, students fanned out across NYC to collect first-person accounts of New Yorkers’ experiences on September 11th. The play, comprised of excerpts from dozens of interviews, premiered at John Jay in April 2002.
On September 14, 2021, under the direction of Green, a new generation of John Jay College students, staff, faculty, and/or alumni read their stories in a virtual production as they looked back 20 years.
All of us at Nora’s want to congratulate Amy on this beautiful and moving production! We are thrilled that she was able to revisit What Happened with a new generation of participants on this important 20th anniversary and hope that all of you will watch.
Virtual production of What Happened: The September 11th Testimony Project
After you’ve watched the play (embedded above), please contribute to their interactive reflection and brainstorm. Read what others have shared, add your own thoughts, and check out resources related to the play.
Green joined Nora’s Playhouse in 2014 and has been on the John Jay College faculty since 1995 where she is Associate Professor of Applied Theatre and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is a director, actor, playwright, and dramaturg. She holds a Kennedy Center Gold Medallion for Lifetime Contribution to the Arts and is the author of The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics (Cambridge University Press). She also directed Nora’s critically acclaimed production of Catherine Filloux’s whatdoesfreemean? at The Tank (NYC) in 2018.
The National Endowment for the Arts has announced that Nora’s Playhouse’s board member and Co-Literary Curator Dr. Jacqueline Allen Trimble is one of 35 writers who will receive an FY 2021 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. This year’s fellowships are in poetry and enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. Fellows are selected through a highly-competitive, anonymous process and are judged on the basis of artistic excellence of the work sample they provided. Trimble was selected from 1,601 eligible applicants. The full list of FY 2021 Creative Writing Fellows is available here.
Trimble is a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2017 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in various journals including The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Poet Lore and in anthologies which include The Night’s Magician: Poems About the Moon, edited by Phillip C. Kolin and Sue Brennan Walker and the forthcoming The Beautiful, a collection of fifty poets representing fifty states. In addition to her academic work, she also writes essays, such as “A Woman Explains Why Learning Poetry is Poetry and Not Magic Made Her a Poet,” which appeared in the anthology Southern Writers on Writing. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut collection won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Recently Trimble has turned her attention to television, writing five episodes for the South African soapie, Die Testament, which aired in September 2019. Trimble holds the B.A. in English from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.
Trimble joined Nora’s Playhouse as an Artistic Associate in 2017 and served as the Associate Dramaturg for our 2018 co-production of A Doll’s House at Montgomery, Alabama’s Cloverdale Playhouse. In 2020, she joined our board and she and Dr. Sharon Friedman (NYU Gallatin) were named Nora’s Co-Literary Curators.
