Bolivar Arellano (right) — a Post photographer at Ground Zero on 9/11 — was visited in his gallery by firefighter David Rodriguez and Rose Foti, whose son died in the attacks. Arellano is portrayed in “110 Stories” by “Ugly Betty” actor Stelio Savante. (Brunilda Arellano)
When the Twin Towers fell, Kathleen Turner, like most everyone else in the city, wanted to be useful. Other would-be volunteers were sent away — but a truckful of men couldn’t turn down Turner.
The “Body Heat” star watched the towers fall from her Lincoln Center apartment, gathered her then 12-year-old daughter from school — and rushed downtown.
“I stopped a firetruck and told them I was Kathleen Turner and that they should let me help,” the throaty actress tells The Post. “And they did.”
She spent that day and half the next at St. Vincent’s Hospital, waiting for ambulances that never arrived. Then she went to Stuyvesant HS to help feed rescue workers.
The selflessness she and others showed overtook the city for weeks after 9/11. And while it eventually dissipated like the smoke on what became known as “the pile,” playwright Sarah Tuft wants to focus on the goodwill the attacks engendered, not just the grief.
Her “110 Stories,” playing benefit performances tonight and tomorrow at NYU’s Skirball Center, is a dramatic retelling of the attacks based on true stories, as related by stars — Turner, Katie Holmes, Jeremy Piven, Ralph Macchio and dozens of others.
The real-life heroes are the people of Tuft’s tales: the homeless man who led tower workers to safety; the mother looking for her young son; the nurse who volunteered to the point of making herself sick.
“In that moment of extreme grief, our response was to do the most positive thing possible,” says Tuft, 44. “There was a preciousness to it because we were so connected to one another.”
The Greenwich Village playwright and filmmaker says her own involvement came when she was turned away from relief centers overflowing with volunteers. Feeling helpless, she returned to her kitchen.
“I baked cookies all night, strapped a milk crate to the back of my bike, went to the periphery of Ground Zero and started handing them out,” she says. Later she went to the Javits Center, which had been turned into a relief station.
For the following five weeks, she listened to stories over cookies and coffee. “People started telling me things that they’d been experiencing, and it was really clear that it was helping them,” says Tuft, who asked them if she might turn their words into a narrative.
“110 Stories” was first performed at the Vineyard Theatre on Sept. 11, 2003. To complete the work, Tuft tracked down “characters” whose voices she thought the narrative needed — a firefighter who’d been in the North Tower, a photographer who kept shooting as the buildings fell.
That photographer, former Post fotog Bolivar Arellano, 67, was covering the mayoral primary election that day. He’d just shot former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer at the voting booth when his editors sent him to the World Trade Center.
A battle-hardened lensman who’d covered civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Arellano shot frame after frame as workers jumped from the burning buildings.
“Inside I was crying,” he says, “but I kept taking pictures. Photojournalists are supposed to be strong. We see a lot of bad things and we never cry. In my thoughts I said, ‘Please, God, don’t let them crash [to] the ground.’ ”
When Tuft approached him, he hesitated.
“At the beginning I didn’t want to talk to anyone about my experience,” he says. “Everyone said you need psychological help, but I didn’t want people to think I was going crazy. But it helped me to talk to her. Now the big shots and the movie stars portray my story.”
One such big shot, Ralph Macchio, voices a young cop who runs to the towers as everyone else runs away.
“This play encompasses what ordinary people do when faced with extraordinary circumstances,” says the former Karate Kid, 49, who was preparing to head for the city from his Long Island home when the first plane hit.
“It’s unrelenting, to hear the stories told from the people who were right in it,” he says. “There is a respect element in the play, for keeping that bravery in our consciousness.”
Tuft says that’s the point. Instead of exploiting the drama and despair of that day, she tried to capture the moments afterward, when survivors found a strength they didn’t know they had.
“I want to take us back to that time of grief because we’ve had a really crappy decade and we’ve squandered that moment when we all wanted to help each other,” she says. “There was something in the air that I wanted to bottle up.”
For tickets to the staged readings, call the NYU Skirball Center box office at (212) 352-3101.