Midge Guerrera, founding director of Red Bank Regional’s Performing Arts Program, recently debuted her play about 9/11 in an Amsterdam theater
Midge Guerrera’s play “Email 9/12” was recently produced in Amsterdam at the Polanentheater and received a warm audience reception. COURTESY MIDGE GUERRERA
By Eileen Moon
In the early hours of Sept. 12, 2001, Margaret “Midge” Guerrera was awake and alone in the silence that settled over the turbulence of a terrible day.
A Monmouth County performing artist, writer, arts educator and administrator, she had been on the train to Rutgers University to teach a public speaking class Sept. 11, 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Center occurred. As the train approached Newark, the conductor announced that all PATH train service to Manhattan had been canceled.
The details unfolded one conversation at a time.
“It was a horrific moment,” she recalled recently as she prepared to travel from Pontelandolfo, Italy, where she has lived part-time since 2010, to Amsterdam, where her play, “Email 9/12,” was set to debut Sept. 11.
That play, published by Next Stage Press, was inspired by the responses she received from a widening circle of family, friends and acquaintances who, like Guerrera herself, needed some human connection as they worked through the devastation of a day that had begun like any other, then took a turn they could not have imagined.
Guerrera’s husband, Jack Huber, an emergency preparedness consultant to the nuclear power industry, had immediately been deployed.
It was not a night to be alone.
“I literally sent an email to everybody I cared about,” Guerrera said. She is a Flagtown, Somerset County native who was the founder and first director of Red Bank Regional High School’s Performing Arts Program in the mid-1980s. “Tons of people responded.”
The act of listening was a prayer, sent back and forth in the light of a laptop screen. While she didn’t realize it then, those email exchanges would become the foundation for her play.
A year passed before the idea to write about that experience was born. “Inspired isn’t the right word, she said. “I felt compelled.”
She wanted to express “the emotions of the moment from the people who were there,” Guerrera said, focusing not on the tragedy itself, but on how each person experienced and responded.
In the wake of the war and violence that have consumed the world in the years since 9/11, she sought to create a deeply personal remembrance that would resonate across time. But as she wrestled with the material, she realized the power of her project lay in connection and community, in the bonds formed as each individual reached out to tell their stories, to console and be consoled, and to reclaim their humanity.
“I took it back to the drawing board,” she said.
On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, her friend George Hensel, then owner of the Black Box Theater in Asbury Park, directed and produced her revised version of “Email 9/12.” Additional productions took place in New Jersey, Texas, Philadelphia and New York City in 2011.
Each production brought Guerrera closer to her vision for the script. In 2021, the final version of “Email 9/12” was published by Next Stage Press.
The story is told through the voices of children and adults whose experiences come across in brief encounters and deeply personal reflections.
“It’s really about the people – what people feel,” Guerrera said. “It’s humbling. It’s human in the broadest sense.”
Having worked with children and teens for much of her career, she was particularly sensitive to making the play interesting and accessible to kids. For them, she said, “This is ancient history. How do you make this relevant to people today?” She wove those answers into the script as well.
The play took on another international element when Hensel, who had retired to the Netherlands, called from Amsterdam to ask about staging the play in his the- ater company there. With its huge, English-speaking expatriate community, Hansel believed the play would find a receptive audience in Amsterdam on the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
Guerrera adapted the play again, this time to include Dutch and Dutch Caribbean voices. Even thousands of miles away from the site of the attacks, people had experienced profound responses to 9/11.
Performances in Amsterdam took place Sept. 11, 12 and 13 at the Polanentheater, garnering glowing reviews from the audience.
“Not many Dutchmen would call themselves American patriots,” wrote one attendee whose comments Guerrera included on her Facebook page. “It wasn’t a story for patriots. It was a story for people who fear, who hope, who love, who grieve, who laugh and who give each other comfort. It’s a very human play.”
“The point of the play is not to engulf you in fear of terrorism,” Guerrera said, “but to understand that we are all human. We all have feelings, and we need to talk to each other.”
This article originally appeared in the September 24-30, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
