The Music

“Twin Towers” can be said to be a play about creation. Music is an integral part of the story of this play because I observed in Crown Heights and while volunteering in Harlem that music is woven into the fabric of every day life in African and Caribbean communities (as well as many others I’m sure).

In “Twin Towers” we meet to friends reunited after both living overseas for several years, Jamal in the Peace Corps and Trevor as a soldier in Iraq. Both are singers by a virtue of their upbringing in the Bronx, and as friends they invented rap songs together. In Act I we find Jamal trying to write a song, albeit unsuccessfully. Trevor is able to finish the song only after he comes to the cataclysmic realization that he is not the man he thought he was, and certainly not the hero and savior his friends and family are expecting him to become. It is only after the trauma of rejection and the realization of the awful truth about himself that Trevor can finish the song that Jamal could not. It is a reminder that destruction is a necessary cathartic force, clearing the way for new ideas and inspiration. It is a theme that flows throughout the play, with each character understanding the nature of creation and destruction to varying degrees.

Below is an excerpt from Trevor’s song:

Your words penetrate me
Armor piercing round
Like a rolling thunder
Recoil at the sound

I yield to your touches
Your fingers they invade
No shield can protect me
From the fate that I have made

Under cover of darkness you take me
To a place where madness will break me
And all my fears I thought over
Come alive in the shadow