From the Ground Up: an exciting new troupe
Talented young theater artists tell a sprawling tale of interconnected lives before and after Sept. 11.

Christine Dolen, Miami Herald's Theatre Critic

Though Miami's new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts has been getting all the ink lately, it's worth remembering that theater doesn't have to be expensive or elaborate to matter.

A theater community also grows when young artists with talent make opportunities for themselves. Ground Up & Rising is a company whose ambitions are as grand as its productions are simple. It wants to nurture new work. It wants to give meaty roles to South Florida actors. It wants to create theater that speaks to a younger audience.

With its world premiere production of Arturo Fernandez's September 10th, it does all three.

Like Mad Cat's Paul Tei, Fernandez is a quadruple threat: a company founder, playwright, director and producer (both guys act, too, though Fernandez focused on the other four tasks in September 10th). The new play is the first result of a program Ground Up & Rising calls ''Workshop 2 Product'' -- meaning that a script is evaluated, rehearsed and refined, then produced.

As with most new plays, September 10th isn't flawless. At more than 2 1⁄2 hours and with more than two dozen scenes ranging from fleeting, wordless moments to fully developed encounters, the script feels like an overlong hybrid of theater and screenplay.

It's meaty and well-written without suggesting the arrival of a distinctive new play-writing voice. Yet a few of the monologues -- notably one delivered by Kameshia Duncan as a woman determined to demand the better job she's earned, and another by Bechir Sylvain as a man too quick to call his fellow soldier a racist -- have the visceral punch that only powerfully acted, deftly crafted theater delivers.

Within the black-draped walls of the simple Performing Arts Network space in North Miami, Fernandez takes a clearly engaged audience on a journey from innocent dreams to altered reality. The dividing line, the event that marks the before and after in all the characters' lives, is Sept. 11.

In one small scene after another, the connections between apparent strangers gradually become clear.

Jamal (Sheaun McKinney) and Sarah (Heather Gallagher) are engaged, both passionate students out to change the world. Sarah is counseling Mike (Andrio Chavarro), a wannabe artist who's trying to stay out of prison. Mike pays the bills doing cleaning crew work alongside Eddie (McKinney), Jamal's uncle and a man who gave up his own dream of being a jazz musician.

Tom (Arnaldo Carmouze) is an egomaniacal stock broker who keeps promising his assistant Angie (Duncan) a job she'll never get, mainly because he doesn't want to have to train someone else if she quits. Darius (Sylvain) and Roger (JosÈ A. Paredes) are soldiers whose tedious days turn lethal after Sept. 11.

Drawing uniformly strong work from his talented cast, Fernandez explores nothing less than the post-traumatic stress of a generation. From a feeling of determination sparked by a national tragedy, character after character lets resolve slip away. Things get put off. Dreams get abandoned.

September 10th is, in many ways, a play as distressing and sad as so much of life has been since Sept. 11. But it feels very real. And, in the way that theater can reflect and help us process our own experience, it matters.