A Mailer reflects on the 9/11 days

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By Maureen Dezell, Globe Staff | May 27, 2005

John Buffalo Mailer's ''Crazy Eyes" is billed as a comedy about an actor, an AIDS researcher, a Wall Street trader, a Palestinian-American shop owner -- and a bag of white powder.

The play, which has its American premiere tomorrow at the Provincetown Theater, resonates with the writer's disquieting memories of New York's surreal landscape in the weeks after 9/11.

Set in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn in October 2001, ''Crazy Eyes" takes its title from one of the striking human responses Mailer witnessed at a time when it was not unusual to see ''grown men moving from laughter to tears in the blink of an eye," he says.

The play unfolds at the height of the anthrax attacks. A trio of young New Yorkers, open-minded children of privilege reeling from the terrorist attacks, have each begun to recoil from any foreign presence -- human or synthetic.

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2005/05/27/a_mailer_reflects_on_the_911_days/