BUILDING at Pioneer Works. (Photo: Rachael Hacking)

Building is a theatrical curiosity.

Comedian and storyteller Colin Quinn wrote and co-directed this unusual show with John Fitzgerald and Vincent Piazza. It is about New York in the 1960s and 1970s and contemplates the people who built and worked around the World Trade Center.

It only had a two-night run. So, if you’re reading this, you’ve missed it. But maybe it will have another life.

It is dubbed as an “immersive installation,” though neither term quite fits.

I might have called it a site-specific character show. Staged in Pioneer Works, a former iron works factory, several actors stand, sit, and perform monologues around the main hall in the cultural space.

Each actor is in their own niche, some high above our heads simulating working on the building site and others more earthbound.

The Pioneer Works building from 1866 speaks to another era of New York construction but it’s an open space and semi-neutral surface for the projections and performances. Because alongside the monologues are projections by Joel Fitzpatrick, of historic footage, portraits of New Yorkers, and evolving pictures of the building of the trade center.

In a show focused on the World Trade Center, naturally events like Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk are covered. But there were other events in local history I didn’t know about, including the collapse of the West Side Highway in 1973 and the Hard Hat Riot of 1970. But the show kind of jumps around making all sorts of references without necessarily delving into them.

The show is meant to be made up of New York characters and I’d say it gets a heavy dose of them.

There is Lee (Joe Perrino) the ball breaking crane operator with an oversized ego and a long-standing dispute with a bird. Dolores (Kathrine Narducci) is a secretary working in the construction company office after she lost her husband in a site accident. There is Joann (Florencia Lozano) who runs the food truck at the construction site. She lost her husband in maybe less of an accident and more of an incident. And Joann slings coffee and doles out advice for finding a husband to her daughter Isobel (Julia Randall) who works alongside her. Walter (Motell Foster) is an ex-con who finds work at the WTC through an old connection from East New York. Mario (Vincent Piazza) is an electrician working high on the beams above our heads. And finally, Les (Saul Stein) is the developer trying to get people to invest in this crazy idea of a building site.

You do not need to chase the narrative here or wander through the space. The show is presented while you stand in the hall and turn around and upwards to see the actors or the screens.

With this array of colorful characters, there is talk of graft, unions, the mob, questionable pension practices, and a lot of conflicts between the ethnic factions of New York. But stories veer off from lower Manhattan into the segregation of East New York, the Vietnam War, and a very long revenge tale that relates to nothing else really. It shoehorns in some Patty Hearst footage too. Sometimes the narrative connections are tenuous.

I wanted to call Building some kind of working class history, but that’s not accurate. It’s not documentary theater either. It dabbles in a very specific kind of blue collar nostalgia that erases meaningful interrogation of the era (throwaway lines about women’s lib and hippies are just that and I could not help but feel there was a sneering undertone to them).

If anything, it is more a love letter to loud, brash New Yorkers full of attitude and opinions. These people tell you to love your country and to not marry a gambler. And one will remind you that only eagles and “real men” are endangered species. So you might like some of the characters less than others.

I grew up with some of these salt of the earth people and attitudes and not everyone enjoys so much sodium.

BUILDING at Pioneer Works (Photo: Rachael Hacking)

That said, at 80 minutes the actors keep things moving along.

With just hints of costume design and set design, we get a decent understanding of where we are. Though Dolores’ office space was the most confusing. The corrugated metal wall behind her desk sets a certain rough and tumble construction site vibe. But then the desk is framed by towers of TVs or monitors like a Nam Jun Paik exhibit which threw me. If you’re close enough to the coffee truck set you will smell fresh coffee and that’s about as immersive as this show gets. But it did help set the scene for the monologue about New York City at 4:30 in the morning.

Ultimately, the actors establish the tone more than the design and each were well cast in their roles. They delivered New York accented authenticity to the proud tradesmen they portray or the no nonsense women trying to support their families because the world dealt them a bum hand.

If the show gets more life than these two shows, I wish there would be more of a connection between the vignettes, some sense of timeline (things jumped around a lot), and building on what this era meant then and now.  There are parallels to be teased out but the show did not attempt that.

One thing the show did get me thinking about was how many times New York has been on the brink of collapse and counted out. And yet it has always risen again. I feel like I’ve lived through at least two New York renaissances after catastrophe which is plenty for a lifetime. It’s hard not to be in awe of the aerial photography as the World Trade Center towers were being built and feel something dreamy and hopeful in their ascent.

And even with a bankrupt city, rampant corruption, and a divided country, New York constructs, grows, and keeps reinventing itself. Building reminded me of that resilience.