gowanus bay terminal (part 2)

On the way to figuring out what I learned producing theater for 25 years, I'm taking a look at the various places we put up shows. A couple previous ones are here:

• The Sanford Meisner Theater
• BWAC

These were intended to be short, but writing about the Gowanus Bay Terminal got the better of me.

Part 1 is here.

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The basic story of Enemy of the People goes like this: A physician in a resort town, which is popular for the healing waters of its spa, discovers that the waters are in fact contaminated with bacteria and potentially deadly.

The physician’s brother is the mayor, and when he learns the doctor is planning to make this discovery public, he advises him not to do so, because it will bring ruin to the town. Meanwhile, the newspaper publisher is torn between an opportunity to expose corruption - since the mayor is making an effort to cover this up - and fear of economic collapse.

The play culminates in a town meeting where the doctor rails against the tendency of people to fear truth. Powers that be, including the newspaper publisher, whip the town into a frenzy, the townspeople turn against the good doctor, his reputation is ruined, and the waters of the spa continue to flow.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but you can see the resonance that led our artistic director Pink to select this play.

One thing that became clear, going to meetings and talking with neighbors about the potential waste storage plan, was that people in Red Hook hadn’t made themselves familiar with the details of the idea being proposed. What they mostly knew was they didn’t want TOXIC materials near them. Again - maybe a position an informed person could reasonably come to in light of the facts. But we weren’t getting much light, just an abundance of heat.

Why did we make this our fight? I don’t know. It wasn’t that we were such great friends with John; we didn’t know him that well before proposing to perform a play in his building. It wasn’t a deep desire to save the Superfund project tens of millions that were going to come from a trans-national gas company anyway. I think it was just our nature. To go back to our list of values:

• We will create work that is truthful.
• Some truths have had more opportunity be told than others, and we will seek to prioritize truths that have not been told as often (even when we are telling a story that has been told many times). (9)

And more than that, a deep antipathy toward people who were content to employ a culture of fear and sweep truth to the side in their effort to avoid an outcome. The NO TOXIC band, whoever they were, might have been right about storing concrete-entombed waste near their parks and schools. And yet, whatever the answer to that question might have been, here in 2026, I feel comfortable saying that the tactics they employed proved worse for the community than the outcome they opposed.

Sometime between the start of rehearsals for our production of Enemy of the People and opening night, yet another community meeting was scheduled to discuss Red Hook’s role, if any, in the cleanup of the Gowanus. I don’t recall who organized it, but it seems it was officially sanctioned by the EPA. It took place in Red Hook, in the gym of a high school, and our artistic director Pink offered to moderate.

I mentioned above that Enemy of the People culminates in a town meeting where the public are whipped into a rage against the doctor and his effort to reveal the facts. Being in the midst of rehearsals, we invited the cast to attend the meeting, to get some real-life experience they might bring to their performances. What we saw was eerie and terrifying: Life revealing the accuracy of art’s imitation.

The meeting started hot, and its temperature rapidly approached its ignition point. Statements against the processing and storage of waste in Red Hook received rabid applause. Comments suggesting anything approaching neutrality, or further investigation - let alone outright support of the proposal - were shouted down. I’m not saying speakers were booed, I’m saying they literally weren’t allowed to finish. The fear of hearing any side other than the NO TOXIC side was palpable; as it often does, that fear displayed itself as anger. One summary of the meeting is described here, quoting this typical, well-considered statement:

“The Gowanus Canal runs through Carroll Gardens. Put the stuff there!” shouted Brian Melton, a third-generation resident of Red Hook, who attended a recent EPA meeting to discuss the plan.

Pink, in her role as moderator, strove for neutrality while promoting civility, and for her trouble was tagged as being in bed with the evil industrialist. We were producing a play at John’s site, and I guess that was evidence enough. Never mind what the play would actually present. Never mind that our goal was to, at a minimum, show people the actual location in question so they could better inform themselves.

Well, you can’t be neutral on a moving train, I guess.

Our knucklehead “newspaper” publisher George Fiala didn’t think so, that’s for sure. After the meeting, and likewise before our play went up, he ran a front page article smearing everyone who had ever been associated with our host John, as well as John himself. Now, almost 15 years later, I still wonder whether Fiala was paid, or perhaps endowed with a natural desire to hop in bed with those who wanted to pump up residential real estate values in Red Hook, or maybe just preternaturally stupid.

I don’t want to, but I'll link to the “news” article here, and another editorial here.

I offered that the tactics employed by the NO TOXIC RED HOOK people, with Fiala as their paid or unpaid stooge, proved worse for the community than the outcome they opposed. Red Hook has long been a community with ready-made divisions - since the Dutch showed up, probably. Those divisions certainly existed, in various forms, in the twenty-plus years I spent time there. Our little theater company worked as hard as we could to bring people together; I’ve gone on at length about how getting people together in a room to share experiences was the heart of our work.

A measure of Red Hook’s tendency to turn against itself was in how often people would insist that there was “one Red Hook,” as in the knucklehead’s claim in his editorial that “Since Sandy and before, Red Hook speaks with one voice.” That notion is risible to anyone who has spent more than five minutes at a community meeting in the nabe. The plain but unspoken intention in Fiala’s editorial was that Red Hook spoke with his voice, the purported non-toxic voice. Anytime you hear someone claiming they want to achieve unity, it’s correct to assume that what they mean is, you should come over to their point of view.

By the end, John was spent. I remember him walking out of that raucous community meeting, his proposal clearly (should I say it?) dead in the water, looking like he never wanted to be seen in public again. Around the same time, we had sent him a draft of the press release we were planning to send out, which of course referenced the controversy over the canal cleanup. John’s reaction was strong and negative enough that it felt existential to the project.

I met him for breakfast to talk about the publicity plans, and everything else. We had a show to put on, and we wanted an audience and, yes, press, and if we dodged talking about why we were doing that play, in that place, at that time, then there wasn’t really a point. For his part, he just wanted to stop being in the news.

We came to some sort of compromise, tweaked the wording a bit without totally ignoring current events. Compromise becomes possible when you meet over pancakes and listen to each other.

This was everything, and more than everything, going on in Red Hook in the weeks leading up to our production. When they ask what radicalized us, this was probably the moment.

After all that, we did put on a show. I had no idea what we were doing when we staged Enemy of the People; if I had, I would have flown every person I cared about to New York to see it. It was an experience more than a play.

As described, buses brought people past the potentially hazardous sections of John’s site, but not up to the theater door; instead, people stepped down into the world we made. A set of lamps decorating the “Beyonce rocks,” with two actors engaged in a tryst atop the hill. A ship with a captain prowling about. Pink, as the doctor, running and playing with two young actors playing her children. The audience entered the performance space by first passing through a series of rooms setting the scene, with envelopes pouring out of a mail slot and stacks of filing boxes holding the papers of the mad, justifiably angry, ultimately doomed scientist.

It was, and I will say this partly because I feel like I had nothing to do with the ambitions of the production, a remarkable piece of work. And partly I will say this because we got some awards that would normally have gone to some company, much bigger and more well-heeled than the six people who sat around a table in a bar and sketched out plans to put on a show.

The building where we performed still stands today, and the Loujaine, whose decks our captain stalked, still floats alongside. Since our show, Gowanus Bay Terminal has hosted various other events, including a play about pirates where the audience sat on land and the actors climbed up and down the rigging of a sailing ship. The site also has a storage container with artifacts dredged up from the canal.

The last time I talked to John, he told me he was getting out of the concrete business, so perhaps changes are afoot. Even so, the grain elevator will undoubtedly outlast us all.

We did some other productions that were pretty spectacular, but none of them measured up to Enemy, at least to my mind. Certainly, none of them had a horse.

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(9) We - I - hadn’t actually written these down as of the time when we performed Enemy of the People at Gowanus Bay Terminal. I think performing that play significantly helped us crystallize our values as a company, but whether we had realized them or not, those values were in us.