When it premiered Off-Broadway in December of 2001, Anne Nelson’s The Guys had a sobering effect on New York audiences. It had been barely three months since the devastation of 9/11, and Nelson’s two-person drama, in which a journalist works with a fire captain to help him remember his fallen comrades, put a human face on that oversized tragedy.
Paul and Roz Potenza, the Hillsborough County husband and wife thespians, first performed The Guys in 2003 at Jobsite Theatre. Since then, they’ve done the piece in numerous other venues. This year, to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the event, they’ll bring The Guys to life at the Murray Theatre inside Ruth Eckerd Hall.
There’ll be four performances between Sept. 8 and 11.
“There’s a responsibility that comes with doing this play,” Paul Potenza says. “You want to do it justice — and tell the truth as best you can, as it’s written on the page.”
Playwright Nelson has become a personal friend of the Potenza family.
“We know that although the names have changed, these people existed,” he adds. “These are real people and real stories.”
Potenza, a native New Yorker, was vacationing in the Keys with his wife when the planes struck the World Trade Center. Just like everyone across the nation, he was galvanized and horrified by the news.
He also had a personal attachment.
“At that time, most of my family was still in New York,” he says. “My brother-in-law was a fireman, at a station in Queens.
“My brother-in-law Tommy means a lot to me. He had a lot to do with who I am as a person, and as a man. Kicked my ass a few times as a kid to kind of show me the way. I thought I wanted to be a fireman at one point in my life, but when I moved to Florida, that changed.”
One October morning, Tommy brought Paul along to Ground Zero.
“I don’t like to call it a tour, because I was told to stand in places and not move,” Potenza says.
He still remembers the quiet that followed the discovery of a body — it was a fireman — in the rubble.
“A shout went up, and everything — drills, presses, welders — just stopped.”
It was, understandably, an experience that’s stayed with him all these years. “I’m just grateful that I got to be there. It held me closer to my city, my country that I wanted to … help? I don’t know. You could feel pretty helpless.”
It was his idea to suggest The Guys to Ruth Eckerd Hall. He wasn’t sure it had ever been done in Pinellas County.
“It’s a great space, an intimate space,” he says of the 250-seat Murray Theatre.
“I’ve done theater for a long time, locally,” Potenza explains, “ at almost every single house in Tampa Bay. But I don’t think there’s ever gonna be a play that I feel such a responsibility to doing it correctly. To telling the truth.”
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.