Nbc New York

Robert
Kahn

February 18, 2014

A colleague recently suggested that the “difficulty” with 9/11 art—that is, responses to the terror attacks in music, theater and so forth—is that the process of hearing someone else’s Sept. 11 experience serves chiefly to preoccupy us with our own. Put another way, it’s hard to absorb what someone else was doing that day because once the subject arises, we fixate on what we were doing. Still, I’d been eager to see Bikeman, a new play about one man’s trials that morning, first because that man is a veteran journalist, and second because the play is staged at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, in the proverbial shadow of the nearly complete One World Trade Center.

Curtain Up

Jacob
Horn

February 19, 2014

On the morning of September 11, 2001, CBS News writer/producer Thomas F. Flynn was outside his Greenwich Village home when the first plane passed overhead. Driven by reporter’s instinct, he grabbed his bike and headed towards the Twin Towers. As the horrors of that "Forever September Morning" unfolded, his role morphed from observer to participant when he was trapped in a parking garage by debris from the first tower’s collapse. Flynn made it out alive — or rather, not dead — and later wrote about his experiences as the "Bikeman" (as he was called by an ambulance driver who guided him and a small group of others to safety) in an epic poem. William Brown brought a reading of Bikeman to the stage a few years ago, and it was last performed in March 2013. Now, a new adaptation of the play, adapted by Flynn and Michael Bush and directed by Bush, takes up residence at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Ken
Jaworowski

February 19, 2014

The portentous narration begins soon after Dan Rather delivers a windy recorded video message to start “Bikeman: A 9/11 Play,” a docudrama by Thomas F. Flynn that recounts his experiences on Sept. 11, 2001. “Nothing in my garden gave a hint of the pain, the hurt and the deep sorrow that would manifest in salty tears on the cheeks of neighborhoods after,” Tom (Robert Cuccioli) says. Why a garden would foretell plane crashes, or later, how Tom would know that a sea gull following him was looking down, “eyes staring and perturbed, mystified, wondering what we have done here,” are just two of the many peculiar questions raised by Mr. Flynn’s script.

New Jersey Newsroom

Michael
Sommers

February 18, 2014

There is little doubt that journalist Thomas F. Flynn and everyone involved in the making of Bikeman: A 9/11 Play have their hearts in the right place in their attempt to commemorate the World Trade Center tragedy. Sad to say, Bikeman is a pretentious, self-absorbed slab of poetical drama that would seem hilariously bad were it not for its mournful subject.

February 20, 2014

The Clyde Fitch Report. Arts. Politics. Discuss.

Laura
Axelrod

March 20, 2013

On September 11, 2001, Thomas F. Flynn heard the plane from his Greenwich Village apartment. As a writer and producer for “The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather,” he went where stories took him. So Flynn jumped on his bike and headed to the World Trade Center. That day, he witnessed people jumping to their deaths. When the towers fell, Flynn became trapped in an underground parking garage. Bikeman: The 9/11 Theatrical ExperienceHis experience is the basis of “Bikeman: The 9/11 Theatrical Experience.” Directed by William Brown, the one-hour production allows the audience to see and hear the event through Flynn’s eyes. The text is a mixture of emotions and facts. “It’s not graphic but it doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the day,” Brown says.