A new play dealing with a slice of New York City history is set to be produced at an off-Broadway theater in New York. The playwright Justin Rivers has a longtime connection with the Vineyard. He has spent summers at his family home in Edgartown ever since he was a sophomore in high school. Though he works in New York as a teacher, Mr. Rivers does much of his writing on the Vineyard.
“It’s the only place in the world where I can be unadulteratedly creative,” Mr. Rivers said in a recent phone interview with The Times. “You can just be quiet and settled and get to work.”
The Eternal Space, Mr. Rivers’s soon-to-be-produced play, is set during the demolition of the original Penn Station in 1963. It focuses on two characters who are affected in different ways by the loss of one the city’s landmarks.
The description of the play from the show’s Kickstarter page outlines the questions raised by the razing of the building. “A construction worker turned photographer is running away from his past while an aging English teacher can’t let his go,” the description reads. “Their coincidental meeting begins a three-year debate over progress, preservation, and posterity, as one man fights to keep the station standing while the other is instrumental in taking it down.” (Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform that enables people to donate online towards a creative project.)
The character of the photographer is a composite, loosely based on a handful of people who documented the demolition of Penn Station. The show will feature thousands of images from the time as a continuously changing backdrop.
Mr. Rivers says the photos are the third character in the play. As a matter of fact, it was a volume of photography that inspired the script. Shortly after 9/11, the Brooklyn-based playwright picked up a book called The Destruction of Penn Station. It resonated with him at a time when New Yorkers were living through loss on many levels, including the loss of a landmark.
“Everything shifted after 9/11,” Mr. Rivers said. “I started to think about the emotional residue of an event of this magnitude and how the city relates to its architecture and buildings.”
Mr. Rivers, who has had 15 plays produced in venues around New York City, wrote The Eternal Space ten years ago and, though there was some interest in producing it at that time, the play went into an extended hibernation. “I had put this show to bed for a while,” said the playwright. “I co-wrote a graphic novel. I worked on that for a good five years.”
Mr. Rivers had all but forgotten about the play when he was contacted by one of the theater directors to whom he had originally submitted the script seven years earlier. Since then, The Eternal Space has been produced in one form or another a few times, most recently by the New York City chapter of the Architectural Institute of America. That show was a sellout and a huge success, and it led to further interest in the script.
Mr. Rivers’s graphic novel, The Wonder City, is also historically based. “History tends to creep into a lot of my projects,” he said. “History is really my passion. I love doing research. I really enjoyed writing this show because digging into these pictures was fascinating to me. I had no idea there was an old Penn Station. I couldn’t believe it was gone. What was the idea behind taking down one of the world’s most beautiful indoor spaces? I found out that there were architects screaming about it. It kicked off the preservation movement in the city.”
Although he’s not a photographer himself, Mr. Rivers learned a lot through researching the work of the half-dozen photographers whose pictures are included in the show. He was able to interview three of them. “It was a real honor for me to meet the photographers who did the work of documenting the building and the demolition. The only people who could save Penn Station for future generations were photographers.”
With a cast and team in place, Mr. Rivers is now running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to produce The Eternal Space in an off-Broadway venue. The deadline for the campaign is Thursday, November 6, at 7 pm. The target goal of $20,000 must be met in order to collect any of the donations. Visit Kickstarter.com make a contribution.