Pete Simpson and Jen Tullock in The Wind and the Rain. Photo: Maria Baranova

“I’m trying to make a play about time that feels like Sunny’s–a play that feels like a jam, that feels like home.”–Sarah Gancher

On a beautiful early October New York evening, after an afternoon spent wandering the open studios of Red Hook, the site-specific theater piece The Wind and the Rain–which takes place on the hundred-year old barge known as the Brooklyn Waterfront Museum and, among other things, tells some of the stories of the hundred-plus-year old Sunny’s Bar, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy but also from elsewhere in its history–feels precision-engineered to strike a powerful chord with the very specific audience member that is me. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for almost thirty years, not in Red Hook, true, but never farther than walking distance. I’ve spent time in Sunny’s Bar, in the days when Red Hook was a lot more desolate and distant than it now seems (pre-IKEA; pre-ferry) and Sunny’s was basically the only bar. And at my book-publishing day job, I’ve spent even more time thinking about Sunny’s Bar, as I worked on Tim Sultan’s book Sunny’s Nights (and was fortunate enough to chat with Sunny Balzano himself at the book’s launch event, shortly before he passed away in 2016). I am a sucker for both site-specific theater and anything that happens on a boat, let alone site-specific theater on a boat. And, less pleasantly, I’m newly acquainted with the destructive forces of wind and rain, as most of my family took on substantive damage in Hurricane Helene just weeks ago (and it remains to be seen, as I write, how much worse Milton is going to be). 

If you don’t know Red Hook, don’t know Sunny’s; if you didn’t live through Hurricane Sandy in New York, well, you might not make your way to this show in the first place, and maybe if you do, it won’t speak to you the way it spoke to me. But maybe it will, because it’s also a show about the frailties and the strengths and the triumphs and the failures of all our human institutions–family and place and community and city–and, on the grandest scale, the way we as humans live on our fragile planet and the way we make peace with the inevitable losses. Sarah Gancher’s script shuttles from the very particular to the almost absurdly epic, from idiosyncratic individual tales of love and betrayal to the celebration of tiny bureaucratic triumphs to a run through the history of New York from dinosaurs right up to gentrification. Four actors, under Jared Mezzocchi’s fluid direction, enlist the audience as equal participants and players in the story they’re building together, both intimate and sweeping.

The play doesn’t shortchange the charismatic figure of Sunny Balzano himself, the longtime owner and presiding spirit of Sunny’s Bar, but–unlike in many other stories told about Sunny’s–he’s not the hero. Balzano is played by Pete Simpson in an uncanny evocation of Sunny in all his complicated, magnetic, frustrating, grandiose glory: a man who radiates warmth and charisma and who’s hero-worshiped enough that he never quite has to make the hard choices of the real world. The magic of Sunny’s Bar is real, and Gancher and Simpson give Sunny his due–but The Wind and the Rain also insists on acknowledging the work that goes into holding a place, a community, a family together, especially in times of crisis. The work that, over four generations of Balzanos and associated parties, has so often been done by the women, holding together the foundation that lets their heroes shine. 

Sunny’s under Sunny never has an actual liquor license, for example; no one really pays attention to the taxes. So the hero of this play is the person primarily responsible for bringing Sunny’s back to life post-Hurricane Sandy, and for its continuing to function in the twenty-first century: Tone Johansen (Jen Tullock), a Norwegian artist and Sunny’s prickly, dogged, determined late-in-life wife. Tone is a hard-working pragmatist who spends her life trying to simultaneously sustain the home she’s helped to create and to make sure it’s surviving on more than vibes. Tullock gives her a core of steel–her upright posture, her quiet persistence, the hard-earned wisdom in her eyes–but also slowly lets us see Tone’s weariness, the way she realizes she has only herself to fall back on, the way she questions whether Sunny ever really loved her the way she loved him. The Wind and the Rain is as much as anything a love story, or a series of them, but it’s also about the ways love goes wrong, or at least isn’t sufficient to sustain one’s life. Sunny and Tone are the central couple–meeting when Tone is in the U.S. on an artist’s visa, getting married when she gets pregnant and wants to stay, running the bar together even as she gradually begins to doubt whether he is capable of loving her as much as she loves him–as much as everyone loves him. “I don’t know if love has a point,” she says. “But I will love you…as the world is ending.” 

Alongside them, we also see the stories of two other couples: Sonny’s Italian immigrant grandparents Angelina (Tullock) and Antonio (Paco Tolson), who build the bar of Angelina’s dreams even though Antonio claims the right to make all the business decisions, most of them poor. And Romeo (Simpson) and Teresa (Jennifer Regan); Romeo tends bar at Sunny’s and delivers their moonshine during Prohibition, and Teresa, also an Italian immigrant, who comes from a hard childhood and falls for Romeo, an inveterate playboy who loves her but not as much as he loves being a player. Romeo’s brother, Dominic (Tolson), yearns for Teresa his whole life, watching her yearn for the husband who is always just out of her grasp. 

And around all of that, Gancher, Mezzocchi, and the ensemble weave the audience into the narrative, calling on us to read lines, to take roles, to become part of the history of a place. If I have any religious faith in this world, it’s in the power of the communion and the community formed in a theater: the community of theater makers; the communion between artist and audience. And The Wind and the Rain feels like a work that honors that communion in a thoroughgoing and committed way. It’s a piece of narrative theater, yes–part traditional play, part storytelling, part documentary–but it also feels like a ritual, building and requiring an unusual, and unusually mutual relationship between audience and performance. 

Which means it also often feels extremely fragile and provisional, and you can see all the many ways this could have gone wrong on a night where the weather was less mild or the crowd was smaller and more self-conscious. The Wind and the Rain critically depends on audience participation, with the audience as both a collective sort of Greek chorus and the casting pool for many of the incidental single-scene characters who populate the stories of Sunny’s Bar. I am normally the person hiding in the corner at the idea of being made part of the play, but the players carefully build a structure of rules–including an opt-out technique–that makes our participation feel natural. And the intimate space of the barge, with its hefty wood furniture (set by Marcelo Martinez Garcia), the lanterns woven into Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting, and the gentle rocking on the tide, makes us feel like part of the action. We ourselves become a framing device, the very container that allows the story to exist–and then, at its end, the play drags us outside the container we’ve created together and asks us to follow a path through the streets to a multimedia conclusion projected on the facade of Sunny’s itself (designed by Paul Teziel). We step from the intimate to the massive–but the massive literally grounded upon the very particular place that is the subject: it’s the shuttle back and forth the piece has been taking all along.

It’s only fitting that the show ends at the bar itself: a bar hanging on despite time, though we all know it might be underwater soon–even more this month than ever, as we look at the ruins of Asheville, North Carolina, and the disaster bearing down on southwestern Florida even as I write. The concluding projection is an astonishing technical achievement that’s majestic to watch, but the play would be fine without it. What it needs is Sunny’s. Because destruction and change may be inevitable, loss and heartbreak unavoidable, but we all know what it feels like to find and to build a home for yourself. “Why did I save the bar?” Tone asks. “I saved it for you. I saved it for tonight.” That “you” is Sunny, yes. That you is also all of us, as we step into a bar out of time for a drink to close the evening. 

The cast of The Wind and the Rain with patrons in silhouette, facing Sunny’s Bar. Photo: Maria Baranova.