News

August 28, 2011
Pathfinder Theatre remembers 9/11 with inaugural production

A few months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Flea Theater in New York premiered The Guys, a play by Columbia University professor Anne Nelson, starring Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray.

This September, Pathfinder Theatre, a new theatre company committed to “telling stories that matter,” will present a staged reading of The Guys as its inaugural production. Performances will be held at the Greensboro School of Creativity on September 9 and 10 at 7 p.m.

Pathfinder Theatre began as a creative vision for artistic director Katrina Breitenbach, who drew up plans for the theatre company in January 2003. Those plans remained locked away in a computer file for nearly six years, until a conversation with another theatre enthusiast in December 2008 reawakened the dream and fanned this small ember of an idea back to life.

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August 15, 2011
Pathfinder Theatre to present Anne Nelson play as inaugural production

In 2001, the week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Columbia University professor Anne Nelson was visiting her sister in Park Slope in Brooklyn when one of her sister’s friends called. The friend had met a fire captain who had lost eight men, and he was struggling to write their eulogies. Nelson, a former reporter and war correspondent, met with the fire captain that afternoon and began helping him to compose the eulogies.

A month later, Nelson and her husband attended a benefit dinner for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Seated beside Nelson was Jim Simpson, artistic director and founder of the Flea Theater, located just blocks from Ground Zero. One of Simpson’s young actors in the repertory had recently asked him to find a play addressing the 9/11 tragedy. Simpson searched through the classical and traditional repertory — and came up empty.

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