Rudy, Felix’s grandfather in Curve of Departure, was one of nine kids, born at 99 Hester Street in the 1930s, raised in the Lower East Side of the 1940s and ’50s. Several times over the course of the late evening and early morning before his son’s funeral, he spins out stories of his childhood, his family, and the city that formed him.
In a play about characters struggling to define their home and legacies, the New York City of Rudy’s childhood memories burns as beacon and Atlantis, indelible if forever out of reach. It also stands in for the larger sense of a home that is both stable and forgiving—one that can let a person mature and change while fulfilling a child’s sense of security.
Here are Rudy’s—and others’—reflections on a city known for its landmarks and history but moreover, its pull on the imagination and plans of generations.
“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”
― E.B. White, “Here Is New York”, 1949
“Sometimes—when I am feeling expansive—my life seems to mirror an urban essence I prize. At other times I stare out the window, thinking, ‘What a fool you are to glamorize life in the city.’ Loneliness engulfs me like dry heat. It is New York loneliness... I feel myself enfolded in the embrace of the crowded street, its heedless expressiveness the only invitation I need not to feel shut out. ...They're in the room with me now, these people I brushed against today. I'd rather be here with them tonight than with anyone I know. They return the narrative impulse to me, remind me to tell the story I cannot make my life tell. I need them, and I have them. If everyone I know died tomorrow, I'd still have them. I'd have the city.”
—Vivian Gornick, “On the Street”, 1996
“A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism forever dying and being born, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure…a destination and a point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost and some find what they’re looking for, an argument about how to live, and evidence that differences don’t always have to be resolved, though they may grate and grind against each other for centuries.”
—Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, 2016
“There’s no city that’s a city like New York. THAT is a city… because New York. New York has these pockets of secrets, these pockets full of secrets that you might never know about, even if you live there your whole life, there are things you won’t ever know, things she’ll keep from you on purpose, or let you see only small flashes of…she’s like a very beautiful and damaged woman—the sort that makes you sick but you can’t get enough of, especially when she lets you into one of those little secret pockets, and you feel like you’re seeing something no one else will ever see, it’s just for you, and she chose to show it to you and you only, and only you will ever see it up close, and it’s majestic, it quickens your blood and then just as quickly she takes it away. It’s a dance, like that, you’re sick and you’re alone, and then you turn the corner and you’re fill of life and wonder and then, just like that—you’re alone again. That. Felix. My grandson. Is a city.”
—Rudy, describing New York City, in Curve of Departure, 2017