In “The Guys,” a journalist who helps a fire captain eulogize the men he lost in the Twin Towers wonders, “Will we go back to normal?”
“Yes,” she decides. “But ‘normal’ will be different.”
Ten years later, Anne Nelson’s play is being reprised to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Sigourney Weaver again plays the journalist — based on Nelson herself — who channels her grief by helping a bereft captain (Tom Wopat) memorialize the eight men he lost.
When the play debuted, just months after the attacks, audiences were still so raw, they took solace in simply “being together in a room for an hour and a half and being allowed to think about what had happened,” Weaver says.
“Once the lights go down, you are open in a way you are not open when you are watching the news or reading the paper,” she says. “You can think about things and have emotions and disagree and experience what’s going on in the world in a more personal way.”
A decade later, it’s like that line in the play — things are back to normal, but “normal” is different.
“If anything, we’re kind of numb from all the disasters that have happened since,” Weaver says.
Weaver herself has made a career out of making normal sort of different. The sci-fi queen who battled otherworldly life forms in her underwear in several “Alien” flicks is still sexy at 61. More recently she’s played saucy stepmoms (“Tadpole”) and cougars (“Cedar Rapids”). And while she played a key role in the biggest blockbuster to date — “Avatar” — you’ll often find her at the Flea, an 85-seat downtown theater run by her husband, Jim Simpson, who directs her in “The Guys.”
Actually, Weaver says, acting in film and at the Flea aren’t so different. To make the action 3-D, the “Avatar” actors filmed using pretend backgrounds and props. “We were just doing scenes on an empty stage,” she says, “so it ironically felt a lot like what would be an early rehearsal at the Flea.”
Weaver, whose less exotic birth name was Susan, grew up in New York, the daughter of an NBC exec who came up with the late-night talk-show format. One of her earliest memories was seeing “Peter Pan” on Broadway with her dad. She later attended the Yale School of Drama with Meryl Streep and playwright Wendy Wasserstein.
She met Simpson at a party at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where her friend Dianne Wiest told her to talk to him. She and Simpson wed in 1984 and have a 21-year-old daughter, Charlotte. Part of the reason she works so much, she says, is it’s all “really fun.”
“I don’t sort of say to myself, ‘Oh well, this year is the year I have to find some huge earth-shaking part that will win me an Oscar.’ I just sort of run out and say, ‘What’s happening?’ and then I try to play in as many games as I can.”
To young actresses who don’t want their careers subsumed by their faces or figures — those who actually want to act — Weaver says: “Read everything you can . . . You have to understand history and great literature to bring it to the material you are offered. Otherwise, you have to rely on other people’s tastes . . .
“No one could make me do something I knew wouldn’t work,” she continues. “I believed in all the projects I chose. It didn’t matter to me if they were all successful.”
“The Guys” will be staged tomorrow and Thursday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place; for ticket information, visit theflea.org.