http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/nyregion/quietly-play-chelsea-bombing.html 2016-09-20 21:12:35 In a Fictional Pub, a Tale of a Bombing. A Block Away, a Very Real Explosion. As two characters talked about a bombing onstage in “Quietly,” at the Irish Repertory Theater on Saturday night, a tremendous bang echoed through the theater. === The curtain had gone up on the play “ They sat at a bar that was the portrait of ordinariness, a place no one would have given a second thought or glance. “You look younger than me — life done you less damage,” Jimmy said. “We’ve seen the same thing,” said Ian. At that instant, a tremendous bang echoed through the theater. The stage shook, the seats trembled. Was it the thunderclap of a late summer night? Perhaps a sound effect? It was neither. Exactly one block north, a bomb had just exploded outside 135 West 23rd A real bombing, during a play about a bombing. “We did not know, and we had no time to be scared,” said Robert Zawadzki, an actor who plays the bartender in “Quietly.” “I presume the audience thought it was part of the show. The story of our play, we’re talking about an explosion.” The weekend’s bombs were not left at glamour targets: They were placed near the train station in Elizabeth, N.J.; in a trash can in Seaside Park, N.J.; on West 27th Without the amplification provided by iconic targets, the bombs leveraged everday-ness. “I’m imagining that having bombs going off in places that people consider normal is about disrupting people’s sense of normalcy,” said Owen McCafferty, the author of “Quietly.” As a whole, the burdens or blessings of memory are not in the baggage of New Yorkers. The tides bring thousands of new residents to the city every week, and carry thousands of others away. Of the 8.55 million people now living in the city, about 3 million were not living here in 2001. Half the people in the city So not many city residents can remember, directly, that in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, an extraordinary number of bombs were set off or planted in New York — 370 in In the 1970s and ’80s, the palette of political causes expanded, with nearly It got to the point where people would not remember one from another unless something terrible happened. Sometimes, not even then. “I’ve heard it said that the people living in Niagara Falls can’t hear the falls,” Mr. McCafferty, the playwright, said. “It becomes part of the fabric.” Mr. McCafferty, 55, lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and spent most of his early years there, during a period of violent conflict. “Belfast is quite small, so you could hear the bombs going off, or shots being fired,” Mr. McCafferty said. “The more that accumulates, the more you don’t hear.” On a Friday in September 1976, five Croatians seeking independence from Yugoslavia hijacked a plane leaving La Guardia Airport, and said they would blow it up if their demands for publicity were not met. As proof of their ability to carry out the threat, they left a bomb in a locker at Grand Central Terminal. A bomb squad removed it. That evening, I stood outside a pizza parlor on Third Avenue in Manhattan and watched a procession of police vehicles roll past, with the device in the back of one. At a range in the Bronx, when the police tried to defuse the bomb, it went off, killing The passage of time has erased the memories of those days for nearly all but those directly affected. This weekend, 10 bombs were attributed to the same person. Two went off. It is always a good day to be lucky, and to be able to hear with fresh ears, to know what is theater and what is just down the block.