New York Native Has Close 9/11 Connection in Advance of Black Box Drama
While he’s probably at least two decades older than the fire captain he’s playing in the new Black Box Theatre production, Jim Harris is otherwise the perfect choice to help commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy.
The 68-year-old native of Brooklyn, N.Y. – who moved to the Quad-Cities three years ago to be closer to his daughter and their family – plays
Harris, a New York City native, as he’ll appear as a fire captain in the 9/11 drama “The Guys.”
Nick in “The Guys” by Anne Nelson. Based on a true story, in the two-person play opening Thursday, it’s less than two weeks after the September 11th attacks, and New Yorkers are still in shock.
One of them, an editor named Joan, receives an unexpected phone call on behalf of Nick, a fire captain who has lost most of his men in the attack. He’s looking for a writer to help him with the eulogies he must present at their memorial services. Nick and Joan spend a long afternoon together, recalling the fallen men through recounting their virtues and their foibles, and fashioning the stories into memorials of words.
In the process, Nick and Joan discover the possibilities of friendship in each other and their shared love for the unconquerable spirit of the city. As they make their way through the emotional landscape of grief, they draw on humor, tango, the appreciation of craft in all its forms—and the enduring bonds of common humanity.
“As a child I witnessed, first-hand, the World Trade Center being constructed, piece by piece, in the 1960s,” Harris said Tuesday. “Sadly as an adult, I was there when it violently came down on 9/11. I worked directly across the Hudson River in Hoboken, N.J. and witnessed, first-hand, their collapse. I will never forget the color of the sky that day, the smoke, the smell and the feeling in my body as the shock waves from the collapsed towers reverberated down to the bedrock, beneath the Hudson and up into my feet and body on the other side of the river.”
Jim Harris is a 68-year-old retired publishing executive and actor.
The hijackings of four jet airliners that Tuesday morning led to the deaths of 2,977 people, including 412 emergency workers who responded to the World Trade Center in New York City (343 of whom were firefighters)
At the time, Harris was president of a company that worked directly with major publishers to design, print, bind and distribute their books. The company moved from Manhattan to Hoboken in the late ‘90s, right across the river from the World Trade Center.
“We had an office originally overlooking the New York Harbor and you could see the Twin Towers right from our offices. We were on the 7th floor of a building overlooking the harbor,” he said Tuesday. “It was really gorgeous, but as time went on, I kind of reinvented my business like five different times because of technology, because of changes in the business. So we moved to a much larger space in an industrial area and we became a digital printer.”
“I could have been in Manhattan. I transited through the World Trade Center Transit hub on a very regular basis. I could have been there,” Harris said of 9/11, noting he often met his high-profile clients in the Twin Towers and was typically at work in Hoboken by 7 a.m. (the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m.).
“There are things that just are ingrained in your memory, you know, like the sky that day. I call it 9/11 blue whenever I see it. It’s the color of the sky, of the smoke coming up from it and then a building collapsed.”
“You could hear it and we were only a mile away. But what was really eerie about the whole thing is that it took a while for the sonic waves to get through the river,” he said. “We felt it in our feet and our bodies. And, and in our chests. It was just very intense. I went back to the office and I was desperately trying to get in touch with my daughter and I wanted my wife to know that I was okay, ‘cause she didn’t know what my routine was.”
A view from Hoboken, N.J. (where Harris worked) on Sept. 11, 2001.
Harris’ wife Beth was a nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital in the psychiatric division, in White Plains, at the time, and their daughter Hannah was a sophomore at New York University in Lower Manhattan.
“She could have been downtown that day. We got lucky,” he said. “I have dedicated my performances to my dear friend, John Wright, who lost his son that day while at work on the 104th floor of the south tower. I also want to thank all the first responders, in all the cities and towns across the world, who put their lives on the line for us every day.”
Wright then was a well-known editor who worked with Harris’ company on publishing a series of New York Times guidebooks. A new one was about to be printed on the city, at the time of the attacks.
“I was literally, we had put the book to bed, and it was on the press — the New York Times guide to New York City the day that 9/11 happened,” Harris said, adding the book had to be completely rewritten. After the planes hit, he went down to the riverfront in Hoboken, about six blocks away, with one of his employees.
Wright’s son, John, Jr., was 33 at the time, worked in investment banking, and left a wife and three children.
“I was friends with John but you know, we became very, very close,” Harris said, noting he attended his son’s funeral that October. “I was there for him and to this day we spoke a couple of weeks ago, because I wanted to ensure that it was okay with him that I mentioned his name in my bio and he said, ‘I will never forget that day and that you were there for me and it meant all the world’.” Harris also had an employee whose wife worked in the World Trade Center and he had no idea whether she was alive or dead, He found she survived with a broken leg, and took them both to his house in Nyack, N.Y. since they couldn’t get back to Brooklyn.
From stages in New York to Moline
Harris and his wife lived on the Upper West Side in Manhattan for 10 years then moved to Nyack (in the Catskills), after their first child (Hannah) was born in 1982. They also have a son, Jacob, who lives with his wife in London.
Harris’ paternal grandfather was an actor and producer in England prior to emigrating to this country. “I still have some of his billboards
The World Trade Center (destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks) as seen across the Hudson River from Hoboken.
from Limehouse Town Hall in London. He came to this country to make a name for himself in theater, but life and the Great Depression got in the way,” he said.
After majoring in theater at Case Western in Cleveland, Harris directed shows at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York City under the auspices of Ed Bullins and the budding playwrights program.
“Then, as with my grandfather, life had other plans for me. Beth and I had another child and my book publishing business began to expand and take off,” he said. “I left the theater for about 15 years as my business and children grew. My first foray back to the stage was with a wonderful community theater in Nyack, Elmwood Playhouse, as Ziggy in ‘Side Man.’ That led to other roles — Arnold Wiggins in ‘The Boys Next Door,’ Richard in ‘Moon over Buffalo,’ Gribble in ‘Room Service’ and Vinnie in the ‘Odd Couple’.”
Jim and Beth Harris (both retired) moved to the Q-C three years ago to be nearer to Hannah and her family, who own and operate a 200-acre farm in Coal Valley (including raising vegetables and making many kinds of bread). Her husband is from the Q-C originally, and they fell in love when Hannah had stopped in Davenport around 2004 during a flotilla trip down the Mississippi River, doing environmental programs. They got married in 2011 and have four kids, ranging in age from 10 to 2. (They sell their products at the Rock Island Farmers’ Market.)
In January 2020, Harris portrayed the Rabbi in the Black Box presentation of “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” He was cast as Sam, the butcher in “The Cemetery Club” at the Richmond Hill Players in Geneseo, but that production was cancelled due to Covid.
In “The Guys” (directed and designed by Lora Adams), Joan is played by Jennifer Cook Gregory, who recently completed “Guys and Dolls” at First Presbyterian Church in Davenport and will appear in “Company,” scheduled for October at The Black Box, 1623 5th Ave., Moline.
“The Guys” will be performed at Moline’s Black Box Theatre Sept. 9-12.
“The Guys” was penned by the first-time playwright, Anne Nelson, for The Flea Theater, near Ground Zero, premiering in December 2001. It was directed by the Flea’s founder Jim Simpson, and featured Sigourney Weaver (Simpson’s wife) and Bill Murray in the two roles. Those two stars played the electrifying romantic leads in the 1984 classic “Ghostbusters.”
Nick is based on a real fire captain, who lost eight of his company’s men on 9/11, and has to give eulogies at their funerals. “The character is just he can’t write, he’s not a writer,” Harris said. “He’s the captain of this particular company in a fire house which was way downtown. It was probably one of the first responders to it.”
“It’s 12 days after the event and people want to move on with their lives and have services,” he said. “He doesn’t know how to put it into words.”
Joan wants to contribute to the healing after tragedy, and helping Nick find his words is important for them both.
“Her arc is that she wants to do something and then she gets brought into this entire tragedy that Nick is going through and how to deal with it,” Harris said. “She internalizes all of that, and as he gets stronger, she now feels the effects of it first-hand, right? And it’s kind of almost what I felt – it was terrible when it was happening. But when I heard it was John and his son was dead…It was all over the place. So those were my connectors, with my personal connections.”
He wants to pay tribute to the courage and bravery of all first responders with the play. “I just hope that I can do justice to the character, to the play and to the to the work that they do,” Harris said. “Honestly, that’s all I can hope…There’s a synergy to where we are now, in this place with Covid-19. And that’s very, very sad.”
Unlike the period after 9/11, when the nation seemed truly unified and working in unison, the Covid pandemic has exposed bitter divisiveness and polarization, he said, as the death toll from Covid (over 650,000 in the U.S.) is more than 216 times greater than 9/11. “I can’t imagine us treating the firefighters this way,” Harris said of people now who dismiss or reject vaccines and mask wearing to stop the Covid spread. “These guys on 9/11, they saved thousands of people’s lives, and then the nurses and the doctors and everybody else are saving thousands of people’s lives now, but they’re doing it over 18 months rather than over one day, and it’s awful.”
“The Guys” will be performed Sept. 9, 10, 11 and 12 at the Black Box — Thursday ($13), Friday, Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. ($16). Due to new Covid restrictions, patrons are required to wear masks and actors will be in face shields. Tickets may be purchased at theblackboxtheatre.com.
