The Seward Park High School takes up what looks like an entire city block, like Macy's. We enter the building and come into a kind of open lobby area which leads into the auditorium, the entrance of which is flanked by proud wall-mounted plaques boasting of such famous graduates as Walter Matthau and Sammy Cahn. We buy our tickets and are given laminated badges in a specifc color (there are several groups, like color war in camp) that are attached to necklaces of matching gift-wrap ribbon and we sling them over our heads. I wonder where we will be sent, thinking of the immigrants to Ellis Island who had identifying numerals drawn on them in much the same vein as we wear these blue rectangles of plastic.

We have some time to kill so we wander the hallways, which have lots of visual encouragement for the students in the form of head-shot quality portraits of recent graduates, their particular academic strengths written below. The interior architecture is undifferentiated. We could be almost anywhere in America. Wooden doors have large square panes of glass; we peek through and see a familiar picture--generic office chairs, institutional green on the walls. The only difference is that now there is a gigantic computer monitor monopolizing one of the desks, sitting on top of it like Plymouth Rock or The Blob. The doors all have stenciled words: The Assistant Principal's Office; a small confessional-booth size payphone closet-- For Teachers Only.

At the end of the hallway is an elevator (!) which we ride up to the 5th floor and are led into an open area and deposited to sit with other members of our color group. During the day this is where the cafeteria is set up. There are a few dispenser machines turned with their backs toward us like out-of-work voting booths. Are there usually lunchroom ladies wearing hairnets and white uniforms or does all the food now come out of machines? The tables and chairs are all pushed and piled at the other side of the room.

Each color war group has a female guide, in black trousers and a cherry-red shirt and before we are taken up the stairs to the roof we are given a little background information about her personal life, and the specific twists of fate that led to involvement with En Garde Arts, the producer of tonight's spectacle. The tale of the guide of the blue group, a strikingly dimpled and curlylocked Lower-East-Side born Jewish NYU theatre arts student, was one of serendipitous anaphylactic shock, fortunately attended to by the director of En Garde Arts, Anne Hamburger. Details of a mostly motherless childhood, part of which was spent in an orphanage, were listened to attentively by the group of blue-badged people. For the skeptics among them it was the evening's first inkling that the veracity of the autobiographical presentation was to be taken with a large grain of kosher salt.

Finally we are summoned to join all the other color groups and form one large herd that is led up another flight to the roof. The audience is mostly grown-ups, including a large white-haired contingent and I pondered the fate of those for whom climbing the up-the-down-staircase is not an easy task. Anyway, everyone makes it to the top.

It is hard to identify exactly what kind of space we are in. During the day it is used as a gymnasium; there is a trio of netless basketball hoops in one section. It is vast. The floor plan is basically rectangular with offshoots at each end, forming a letter c, more or less. Open yet enclosed, with yellow brick walls going up to the ceiling and massive windows along one entire side through which are glittering and wondrous views of the entire east side of the city. But there IS no ceiling! Looking up through girders and metal netting, a nod to prison architecture, hamster cages and chicken coops world-wide, I realize that the sky is the roof and although it is dark I can still make out lots of small elonganted clouds slowly shifting by in Morse Code pattern over the deep blue. There is a grandness to this space and its powerful ready-made theatricality is tough competition for a piece of theater.

The evening, and the space, is broken up into segments. There are three long monologues separated by several shorter vignettes, all inspired by the history of the Lower East Side. The color war groups are led around, according to color, to view the pieces; by the end of the evening each piece will have been seen once by each color group and will have been performed by each actor three times. The main works present a psychotic gravedigger, an immigrant Chinese woman and a speakeasy-era Jewish gangster.

Our dimpled guide pushes aside an immense wooden scrim, revealing the gravedigger. The audience sits on wooden bleachers. There is a large puddle with old suitcases and junk strewn about; scrappy shoes and bits of clothing are tied to the metal grid that covers the enormous windows. There is a lot of screaming, a lot of scrambling up the wall, Gene Kelly style, to hang by the window bars. It is hard to tell if this is suspension of belief or of disbelief but whatever it is it goes on for much too long. Things seem to point to a welcome end but it is only a tease, rolling on again with the gravedigger darting about like a West Side Story Jet. I busied myself for a while with looking at the black caps covering his teeth, a theatrical effort to appear toothless.

At last it's over and we are led to a small stage, a square platform upon which part of a brick wall, complete with arches, has been built to delineate the corner of a building. We watch a short episode from an early 20th century bar room, complete with brawl, and its mix of denizens. The costumes are perfect; newsboy caps and knickerbockers, laced-up boots. The actors are young and highly spirited. The problem, and this held true for almost the entire evening, lay not so much in the acting--although there was a lot of over-the-top emoting going on--but in the writing. I found myself doing a good deal of mental wandering. Luckily it was the perfect environment in which to do so.

The second long monologue presented a Chinese immigrant woman. A facsimile of a school room was set up, with those high school all-one units comprising chair, apostrophe shaped arm-resting table flap and a slanted wire bin where books will reside until the next bell rings. (In fact, buzzers do go off to signal the end of each piece causing the audience to scurry on to their next stop; part high-school, part Pavlov dog.) Yellow, orange and red paper lanterns lie in a string along the floor like floating swimming pool lane dividers. The stage is surrounded on three sides by basketball hoops. A photocopied flyer is plastered in rows filling up an entire wall; the smiling face of a little Chinese girl and the sober composite police sketch of a generic Bad Man are paired improbably in a repeated pattern making disturbing wallpaper. The two faces are also on the other walls singularly, as enlargements, almost campaign-poster style. This was the only monologue not written by the En Garde Arts team, but rather by the performer herself, Alice Tuan, a woman of enormous and awesome talent. She gave a not quite narrative cut-and-paste collage-like performance where she seemed to be possessed by a variety of different characters all woven together to convey a layered amalgam of personal and collective immigrant history. She switched rapidly between characters using distinct and impeccably performed accents. Many associations were made: English lessons, patriotism, citizenship, Mao, the subjugation of women, chicken feet, Emma Goldman (although this may just have been MY imagination). A canopied food-vendor cart was a moving prop. The desks were used as stepping stones. A naked basketball hoop was magically transformed into a stage. Beautifully written and poetically performed with admirable physical stamina, this half hour was a flawless example of transcendent theater. The entire production could have been limited to Alice Tuan's monologue alone. She does, in fact, present solo performances.

At this time, an hour and change into the evening, the temperature began to drop; from this moment until the end of the production remaining on the roof became a personal challenge. The next short vignette was more or less about media sensation in the form of a young Chinese woman combined with confessional TV talking heads.

The last vignette was a blur. Our guide had made an earlier promise of something called 'Yiddish theater' but what we saw was a bunch of actors all talking at the same time in a Babel of fake language. Our guide took to the stage, literally getting into the act, wailing and prostrating in a catharsis of her personal history. I put another sweatshirt on over the first one.

The third long monologue portrayed the Jewish gangster. There was talk of Lansky's Lounge, tenement life and the bittersweet love of an Irish girl with red pubic hair and rosary beads. We were sitting on upturned white plastic buckets. They had warning labels showing a waving baby tipping precariously, a 'no' line superimposed over the figure. By this time I was shivering. The grown-up people with white hair had their hoods on. It was as if we were all waiting for the M2 bus in November. I looked up at the black sky and watched helicopters making their evening rounds, going from point A to point B, blinking like fireflies. I watched a light which turned out to be a star. I turned to the windows, with their regal picture of buildings lit in primary colors. I thought of all the people in all those buildings, and the lives I imagined them to be living. I thought of all the people who have ever lived in this city, and the tumult of the sum of them as if combined and I thought about the archeology of history and the ruthless forward motion of time.

There seemed to be some stalling after the end of his performance. Our guide had a kind of 'serious talk' with a member of the crew. Fake? Real? Buying time to coordinate the entire group in order to bring them all together for the big finale? Who knows? At this moment we were promised 'a Gershwin song' and guided back into the main space, all the groups together. There was a brief moment of suspense as the entire cast, en masse, walked quickly towards the meekly standing audience. It seemed like the whole cast of characters was gathering for one tremendous curtain call or for that final musical number where everyone comes together singing happily. Then the crowd seemed more an angry mob daring the audience members to jump out of the way or be knocked down. They nimbly and innocently passed right through us and clambered onto the bleachers and we were treated not to the much-awaited Gershwin tune but to the dramatic spiritual bellowing of a little black girl with overalls and major lung power who moved slowly along the edge of the puddle while singing a Gospel dirge with simple and moving sincerity.

The evening had come to a close. It was past 10:30. We took off our necklace badges and handed them in, received programs and rode the elevator down to the Lower East Side, each one of us back to our own life.