A Play About a Bar, on a Barge Next to the Bar

"The Wind and the Rain," a play about Sunny's Bar, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, begins in the fall of 2012, as floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy rise through the floorboards, laying waste to a gentrifying neighborhood and its most beloved institution. The play is staged on a railroad barge—the Waterfront Museum, a long fly ball from Sunny's—and, if a recent rehearsal is any indication, audience members will have little trouble reckoning with the persistent threat posed by the harbor. "I could be a witch!" one cast member recited, in the middle of a flirtation scene, and the barge lurched, as if on cue from Poseidon. (More likely: wake from a passing ferry.) Bells clanged. Actors swayed. Laughter.

Not long afterward, in the barge's southeastern corner, a professional juggler in bare feet opened a refrigerator and retrieved a drink, not because the script called for it but because he lives on board, and it was Friday. "It's like college has let out, and a huge group of kids has come home," he said, gesturing at the cast and crew. His name was David Sharps, and he met Sunny Balzano, the eponymous barkeep, in 1994, after Sharps and the barge, which he bought for five hundred dollars, had moved from Hoboken to a new berth in Brooklyn, on the edge of a lapsed Mob stronghold that had been colonized by wild dogs and drag racers. "There was nobody down here," Sharps recalled. "My kids would come home from school, and we didn't have neighbors, except for Sunny's Bar. So we'd go across the street." The bar—then a speakeasy, open only on Fridays—had been in the Balzano family since 1917. A scene in the play features a Sunny Special—a colorful non-alcoholic drink invented for the benefit of Sharps's daughters, who are now grown.

"Sunny was in the first play that we did," Sharps went on, explaining that he had always envisioned the barge as a kind of showboat. It was "Waiting for Godot." Balzano played Lucky. Years later, in the weeks before Sandy struck, the barge hosted a production of "Anna Christie," by Eugene O'Neill, which features a barge captain. "He doesn't want his daughter to marry this guy that comes off of a ship," Sharps said. "And he's, like, 'That old devil sea!' He's always shaking his fist at the 'old devil sea.' And I remember thinking, Oh, man. You got to be careful who you shake your fist at these days. You're angering the gods! In that spell of time, about three years, we had two hurricanes, a tornado, and an earthquake."

Sharps was talking to a former resident of the neighborhood who had dropped by the rehearsal out of nostalgia. Sandy, with its extended blackout, had marked the beginning of the end of the nostalgist's own Red Hook days. The mention of the tornado, long since forgotten, stirred a vivid flashback: an image of an irredeemably inverted umbrella. He'd been on his way to the ninetieth birthday party of a revered colleague, on the Upper West Side, and making the interminable trek to the subway when the storm spun up the Gowanus. No one else at the party looked rattled, let alone dishevelled, when he arrived. Red Hook could make you feel like an alien.

And Sunny's, you might say, was its mother ship. Balzano died in 2016. His funeral included a jazz-band procession through the neighborhood. "The Wind and the Rain," which runs through the end of the month, concludes with a procession of its own, off the barge and across the street—to Sunny's, which is now owned by Tone Johansen, who was married to Balzano. She grew up Pentecostal on a remote Norwegian island and found herself pulled back to the water's edge. Disembarking audience members are given headphones and invited to imagine that the ground beneath their feet will inevitably be reclaimed by rising tides. "It'll happen again," Sharps said, fatalistic, as the rehearsal wrapped.

It had been twelve years since the nostalgist visited Sunny's, and he decided to replicate the procession, accompanied by Johansen and by Sarah Gancher, the playwright, whom for years Johansen knew only as a participant in the bar's weekly bluegrass jam. "It's funny with the jam, because it's, like, I don't know what people do," Johansen said. "I never really asked about that. I know them by instrument."

"I remember being out with a group of friends and taking a wrong turn and being, like, 'Where the fuck are we? This feels like where they drop the bodies,' " Gancher recalled of her first visit to Sunny's. That night, she spotted a fiddle lying on the bar, unattended, and asked if she could play it.

"We were a strange and hardy bunch," Johansen said.