The New York Times writes about New York State Athletic Commissioner Ron Scott Steven's foray into playwriting. His play, about a fictional firehouse, is set in Brooklyn Heights.
"Ron Scott Stevens sat at a white table in a rehearsal room on Eighth Avenue one night last week, pages from his new play spread out before him.
Around him in a ragged circle sat eight actors in search of their firefighter characters in Stevens’s drama, “Cherry’s Patch,” which is set in a Brooklyn Heights engine company in the nine months leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
Stevens said he had long wanted to write a play about police officers or firefighters. He found inspiration by knowing two firefighters and began what became “Cherry’s Patch” in the early 1990’s. One of the firefighters, Vernon Cherry, of Ladder 118 in Brooklyn Heights, sang the national anthem at boxing cards that Stevens promoted for Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn.
Stevens also befriended Lt. Patrick Brown, who commanded a four-man team from Rescue Company One in Manhattan that rappelled down the roof of a Manhattan office building in 1991 to carry two men to safety from smoke-filled 12th-floor windows in an office building on West 43rd Street.
Cherry, whose design of a sleeve patch for Ladder 18 intrigued Stevens, and Brown, who was briefly transferred for violating fire department rules when he spoke to a reporter about the impact of city budget cuts, were among the 343 firefighters who died on 9/11."
