Soldiering On
Pamela Reeves, who splits her time between Silver City and Manhattan, publishes two plays about dealing with 9/11.
Like many people, Pamela Reeves remembers with stark clarity where she was and what she was doing when terrorists flew airplanes into New York's Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. The London-born professional copyeditor and passionate part-time playwright was in downtown Manhattan.
"I was getting my green card renewed, and wondering what all of those sirens were about," she recalls wistfully, her melodic English accent still crisply present despite 23 years of living in the States. She was tying up loose ends, she says, preparing to make a trip out to Silver City to look at a house on six acres she'd found over the Internet.
"Needless to say, my flight (scheduled for Sept. 14) had to be postponed," she says, then pauses. She takes a breath, audible over the phone line. "But I did get out the next week," she continues, "and saw the house."
Reeves now owns that Silver City property, where she spends at least seven months of the year these days. It's her place away from the busyness of Manhattan. But she still keeps her apartment in the Big Apple, too.
"Rent control, don't you know," she explains with a laugh. "It's like they say. I can't afford to give it up!"
She's in that New York apartment on this early fall morning, sitting atop a step ladder, happy to take a break from painting and repairs to reflect on another aspect of her life–how writing plays has helped heal her own sadness and trauma.
Reeves has written two plays stemming from her Sept. 11 experience, both published by One Act Play Depot. The first, Let It Stand, was "written in anger, and I was finished by October 2001," she says. Barely a month.
The second play, the just-published Soldiering On, took her the next four years to complete. Both works were important to her healing, she says, and the difference in their tone reflects the steps along her journey.
Like her main character in Soldiering On, Reeves suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the terrorist attacks, though she didn't recognize it at first.
"I came back to New York and I began to fall apart," she says simply. "Silly things. I was forgetting to attach logos and very basic things like that to the jobs I was doing. Finally, my boss had to talk to me about it, because it just wasn't like me. I had to stop working. It was PTSD, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder."
Reeves quickly makes it clear that while Miss Wilson, her fictional but nonetheless rather autobiographical character, was in the Twin Towers for both attacks–the bombing in 1993 and then the airplane attacks that took the towers down in 2001–Reeves herself was not in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
"I never was in any physical danger," she says emphatically, perhaps a little like her character, Miss Wilson, who insists she is "fine, just fine!" Although Reeves did work in the towers at one point, she was not in them on Sept.11, 2001. "But I was connected to the tragedy and all those emotions, like so many people were," she says.
Reeves says she'd like to eventually see both plays produced for the stage. "They complement each other," she says. Currently they are available online and in printed form through One Act Play Depot.
But just having gotten the words out on the pages–first the red-hot jumble of sadness, rage and fear, then the painstaking journey to restore her psyche and rebuild her life–has already yielded great healing, she says.
Up on the ladder, painting her New York apartment, she's happy to be going about the business of normal life again. The New York City Marathon will be coming through, she says, and the route goes right past her apartment.
"I've got to make the place presentable, you know," she adds lightly.
Asked what color she's painting the room, she pauses.
"Do you know what color fuchsia is?" she asks coyly, then chuckles at her bold choice. "It's a good thing," she adds, "It's a sign, perhaps, that I'm getting back into life."
–Donna Clayton Lawder
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