Playwright Charlotte Meehan: "I wanted to convey how askew I felt."

Nicki Pardo

Charlotte Meehan calls her latest play, Sweet Disaster, a form of “fractured realism.” But she might just as well think of it as a surrealist’s snapshot of life as she’s known it.

Meehan, who teaches playwriting at Wheaton College, has gone through a series of disasters of her own, starting with the September terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. She was living in lower Manhattan with her professor husband and three-month-old daughter at the time, teaching at New York University.

She and her family had not been back a week from a restful summer in England when she heard the first plane fly over and felt her apartment building quake.

Even though her home wasn’t damaged, Meehan said that after the collapse of the twin towers she felt as though she were “living in the street among the pebbles.”

She couldn’t help but worry when another attack might occur. She felt exposed, living in a space without walls. And she wanted out of New York.

Within a month Meehan was applying for work outside the city. That March she landed the job at Wheaton, and by June she had relocated to Norton, Mass. Then a second disaster struck.

Within a year, her husband, a documentary filmmaker from England, was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. He died four years ago at the age of 64.

But before David Hopkins became ill, he and Meehan had planned to work together on a play about the World Trade Center disaster that would use material from some of his short animated films. It would not be until after his death that she took up the project in earnest. Time was needed before she could deal with such painful memories.

Sweet Disaster became their final collaboration, said Meehan. Writing the play became a way of hanging on to her husband.

Meehan spent the next four years laboring on the script, which deals with a series of more or less abstract characters who “sit on the precipice between catastrophe.

“Each scene,” said Meehan, who got her master’s degree in playwriting from Brown University in 2000, “exists either before or after horrible things have happened or will happen.”

Meehan, 46, refers to her 80-minute play as more “associative” than linear. Rather than follow a traditional narrative, the script often turns out to be a string of absurdist non-sequiturs that may baffle audience members, but somehow makes sense to Meehan in “my own associative brain.”

In an exchange between a teacher and several characters named after letters of the alphabet, B says, “I try to get my nails done once a week.”

The teacher replies with talk of air rights over buildings, then character E interjects, “He came back and he was really old. Like 100.

“There’s so much talk about Ohio in the paper these days,” adds D. “I never thought about Ohio, and I don’t care about it now.

“Such a bad dream,” concludes E.

While dialogue such as this is a little hard to penetrate, Meehan said she doesn’t expect the audience to follow the text in a traditional manner. People should just “be there and stay in the moment” she said

“I’m not trying to trick you,” she said. “I just want you to be there with me.

“I want you to have a little conversation with yourself as a way of engaging, so everyone comes away with their own associations. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

Meehan described Sweet Disaster as “the ruins” of a play, a script cobbled together from fragments, as though someone gathered up all the letters and documents that fell from the collapsing World Trade Center. It’s a script that reflects the chaos of life, rather than describes it, she said.

“I wanted to convey how askew I felt living through 9/11, having a baby, coming here, having my husband diagnosed with terminal cancer, and having him die a year later. Talk about episodic.”

Sweet Disaster takes place in 10 locales — the waiting room of a life insurance company, a hospital, a church, and a car dealership, to name a few. But none of these places is clearly spelled out. They are more dream-like and flow together.

Interspersed between these scenes are snippets of Hopkins’ films from 20 years ago, including a short about arms dealers by Aardman Animation of Wallace and Gromit fame. All of them are tragic-comic takes on the end of the world.

The play ends with excerpts from letters between Meehan and Hopkins (“a special, genteel man with a terrible stutter that made me love him all the more”) during the months after they first met 11 years ago in England. They got together to talk about putting on one of Meehan’s plays, but ended up discussing everything under the sun.

Meehan said during that four-hour conversation they knew they would be together.

“We were married when we met,” she said.

But it would be another 14 months before they saw one another again, when Hopkins came to New York. During that time they wrote one another constantly.

“This is what happens when I think of you,” says Hopkins’ character in the play, Him. Together Him and Her say, “We are lying next to each other in bed looking up at the ceiling. On the ceiling there is a pattern of light that is moving slowly as though it were being blown by a gentle wind. We are holding hands very tightly, about to part, and not wanting to let go.

“When I read your words,” continues Her, “I feel you are breathing some life into me, some hope, some deep and distant understanding I could never have dreamed of.”

Sweet Disaster opens tomorrow in previews and runs through May 11 at Perishable Theater, 95 Empire St., Providence. Tickets are $10 for previews (through Sunday), $20 general admission, $15 for students, seniors and members of the military. Call (401) 621-6123, or log on to www.arttixri.com.

cgray@projo.com