ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses many of the projects provide spaces for people to come together for shared activity and support, the projects differ in that the safe environments and structure they provide enables people to reflect on their experiences and connect them with the larger context of community life and history as well as universal themes of suffering and transformation. The driving idea behind theater work was that public opportunities for collective reflection were important in a post-disaster/terrorism environment—that avoidance and silence may be counterproductive. A small group of us met each week at Bazzini’s, a local nut store and factory that had been transformed into a gourmet market and café, to discuss the possibility of creating a video narrative archive. The Lower Manhattan theater project stemmed from earlier work among traumatized and refugee communities, to harness the potential of theatrical performance to elicit and facilitate public discourse.
