Barbara Kahn's THE TIME TRAVELERS CLUB Turns Back the Clock In Greenwich Village

Walking around New York City can be a kind of time travel, as we see old buildings still standing and sometimes what appears when other old buildings are demolished. But if you could step into a time machine and travel back in time for real, to a particular place and meet particular people, where, when and who would that be?

The time-honored tradition of time travel in popular culture gets a new and New York City spin in Barbara Kahn's new play, "The Time Travelers Club, Manhattan Division." Kahn builds a time machine that takes us back to a time and place certainly worth the trip.

"The play is a gentle homage to 'The Wizard of Oz,'" Kahn said of her script that lets a woman travel back and meet often renowned women of an earlier time.

We find ourselves in Greenwich Village more than a century ago, encountering poet Emma Lazarus as well as other women from the pages of history. Just as "The Wizard of Oz" lets us travel into a new world, Kahn's latest play, kind of like "The Wizard of Was," lets us travel back in time in Greenwich Village.

Theater for the New City Executive Artistic Director Crystal Field is presenting the latest work, written and directed by Kahn, at Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (between 9th & 10th Sts.) February 23 - March 12, 2023.

Shows are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. For more info., call 212-254-1109 or go to www.theaterforthenewcity.net

"Most of my plays have historical settings, many in New York City. I approach writing a play using techniques I learned as an actor. I create a time and place, put characters there and let them talk to each other while I write it down," she said. "Sitting at home during the early days of the pandemic, I thought about a year I hadn't yet used as a setting for a play and where in my adopted city of New York I could portray life in that time. Greenwich Village in 1870 became the focus of my research."

JC Augustin, Arianne Banda, Jamie Coffey, Selear Duke, Isa Goldberg, Jenna Levere, Nikki Monson, Steph Van Vlack and Rebekah D. Wilson bring Greenwich Village to life, including some historic figures.

We meet poet Emma Lazarus, whose words would later grace the Statue of Liberty, as well as composer Georgina Schuyler, a descendant of Alexander Hamilton and early Dutch settlers. Famous actress Charlotte Cushman and her "wife" sculptor Emma Stebbins stop in New York en route to Boston where Charlotte is seeking treatment for breast cancer. Sarah Smith, a widowed African-American school teacher who boarded in a building on 13th Street, is among those we meet.

"When Dolly fails to return home, her wife Alice attempts to rescue her and bring them both 'back to the future,'" Kahn said.

She said this play, a blend of Greenwich Village and the Emerald City, came about, at least in part, from the fragility and stillness of the pandemic. A sense of being stranded today led her to devise a plot about being stranded in another time.

"In March 2020, when New York City and its theaters shut down because of the threats of the new Covid-19 virus, my production of They Came to the Castle closed five days before opening night," she said. "It felt like free fall, going from the excitement of rehearsals to living alone in my studio apartment for an indefinite length of time."

Kahn picked a time when the nation was trying to heal, after the Civil War began to give birth to a very rocky Reconstruction. "It was a time of transition- five years after the end of the Civil War, when the population were trying to make the country whole again," she said.

Kahn's love affair with theater actually started with cinema, including her own trips in time while watching old movies. "I've been a movie fan for most of my life. My love affair with the cinema began as a child watching silent movies in the replica of a nickelodeon in the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia," she said. "I would sneak downstairs when the family was asleep to watch old movies on late night television."

She later stepped into the screen as a background actor, getting to know what it's like to make movies, before writing her own scripts.

"Ultimately, as a young actor, I worked background or small roles in current day films," she said."One of my favorite movies, from the first viewing on television to a screening in a theater, is 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

The scene where Dorothy clicks her emerald slippers and travels to a different place has a lot in common with time travel, where characters, if not by clicking their heels, suddenly journey to a different time.

"The Time Travelers Club, Manhattan Division was a title that came to mind, a vehicle to provide the context of the play," Kahn said. "Why and how would a young woman named Dolly in the present day find herself in 1870 Greenwich Village? What if, like Dorothy in Oz, she is stranded in this other time and place?"

Kahn does meticulous research, understanding the time, place and people who occupy it, allowing current day characters to meet those from the past as we get to understand our time as well as history.

"I scanned census records and other sources for fascinating characters living in the Village at that time and settled on three - Emma Lazarus, Georgina Schuyler and Sarah Smith," she said. "I later added two other real-life characters - Charlotte Cushman and Emma Stebbins."

Kahn said those two characters were visiting New York City at the same time and "would most likely have known Lazarus and Schuyler." Her time traveler finds out what it's like to travel, not so much into history books, but to meet people from history.

"Dolly is excited meeting the people she learned about in school, while longing to find a way back home, much like Dorothy in the Emerald City," Kahn said.

Theater for the New City has been the primary New York City home for Kahn's plays since 1994, with other productions around the United States, in France and Germany. She has directed in New York, Paris and at The National Theatre in London.

Among the many awards she has won are the Torch of Hope for achievement in non-profit theatre, following past recipients Terrence McNally, John Guare, August Wilson, A.R. Gurney and others; the joint Robert Chesley Playwriting Award/Wurlitzer Foundation Residency in Taos, NM; an Acker Award for her work in downtown theater; and the 2019 Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award from the New York Independent Theater Foundation.

She is co-author with Jackie S. Freeman of lyrics to "Actions are the Music of the Free," music by Jennifer Giering, performed at the United Nations. And she is a participant in The Entertainment Community Fund (aka The Actors Fund) Performing Arts Legacy Project as well as a member of The Dramatists Guild, SAG/AFTRA, Honor Roll! Advocacy Group for Women Playwrights over 40.

Would Kahn (www.barbara-kahn.com) like to travel back in time? She isn't so eager to jettison the present for a less technological time. "I don't have an earlier time I'd like to actually visit, especially being dependent on much of the 21st century technology," she said. "I have the means to safely visit the past in the plays that I write."

We travel through time simply by growing older, as we watch the world transform and transition around us, including Kahn's New York City.

"During the decades I have lived in Manhattan, I have seen the city change in both good and bad ways," she said. "The historic places lost to rampant gentrification find a permanent home on the pages and stages of what I write. "

Kahn has written roughly 25 full-length plays that have portrayed pirates in the Caribbean in 1720, silent movie making in a studio on 14th Street in 1908, volunteers and residents in the Home for Immigrant Girls on 17th Street in 1925, as well as a Jewish lesbian immigrant who operated a Greenwich Village tearoom in 1926, was arrested, imprisoned and deported, then murdered in Auschwitz after being deported for a second time.

She uses imagination as a vehicle to glide from one era to another, discovering people and plots. Kahn, however, also has helped preserve history in another way. She was asked to record an oral history for Village Preservation, an advocacy organization for landmarking buildings and neighborhoods. "Their efforts have inspired my work," she said of plays that blend past and present, reality and imagination and create true time travel machines that are very much worth the trip.

The Time Travelers Club, Manhattan Division, written and directed by Barbara Kahn. Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (between 9th & 10th Sts.) February 23 - March 12, 2023. Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Featuring: JC Augustin, Arianne Banda, Jamie Coffey, Selear Duke, Isa Goldberg, Jenna Levere, Nikki Monson, Steph Van Vlack and Rebekah D. Wilson.

Tickets $15, Seniors/Students $12, groups of 10+ $10 each. TDF accepted. Reservations: 212-254-1109, pay at the door. Purchase tickets online: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-time-travelers-club-manhattan-division/

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