The Riverside Drive Apartment Where a Broadway Play Was Born

The world of “Between Riverside and Crazy,” the Stephen Adly Guirgis play that opened on Broadway last month, is confined to a rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment building, where the dark comedy spools out over kitchen table bickering and rooftop joint passing.

It’s the kind of New York City apartment that has stayed in the family despite rising rents and a landlord bent on eviction — the kind of apartment that Guirgis himself inherited from his father, an Egyptian immigrant who managed a restaurant at Grand Central and had little else to pass on when he died.

Like the one in the play, the real Riverside Drive apartment is a “grand old railroad flat with chandeliers and a river view,” as Guirgis’s introduction to the play reads, with “beautiful fixtures, family mementos and antique furniture competing for survival with dust, stains, garbage, leaks and unattended junk.”

About a decade ago, Guirgis started gathering actors there to read his developing play, about a Black New York City police officer who was shot while off duty at a bar by a white officer and has been seeking justice ever since.

A fixture of the living room readings was Stephen McKinley Henderson, a friend and frequent visitor whom Guirgis had imagined in the lead role from the beginning. A parade of well-known actors participated in the readings on Riverside Drive along the West 80s, including John Leguizamo, Ellen Burstyn and Chris Rock, whose Broadway debut was in a Guirgis play.

“The first time I read it, it was 15 pages,” Henderson said. “And as it grew, it grew on me.”

The play that developed from those readings became a patchwork of autobiography and fiction, organized around an idea based on a local news story from the 1990s. Directed by Austin Pendleton, “Between Riverside and Crazy” went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama after premiering at Atlantic Theater Company in 2014 and running Off Broadway for a second time in 2015. (In that production, Ron Cephas Jones, a friend of Guirgis’s who once lived at the four-bedroom Riverside Drive apartment, played the lead character’s son, Junior.)

Eight years after its premiere, the play has landed on Broadway — the Second Stage production at the Helen Hayes Theater still stars Henderson, with Common now playing Junior — in a radically altered landscape.

Since the actors first gathered at Guirgis’s apartment, police shootings of Black men have fueled waves of protest. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020 reignited the movement, with myriad industries, including theater, facing calls for large-scale racial justice efforts. In addition, rent rates in New York City have been soaring, boxing out lower-income residents from once-affordable neighborhoods, and evictions have picked back up after a pandemic lull.

The actors who have inhabited their characters for years say they approach the work with a new depth and personal understanding, but the dialogue remains almost entirely the same. One short line was added, from Junior, a parolee who struggles to get the kind of love from his father that he received from his recently deceased mother.

“Pops, it’s 2014,” Junior says, situating the audience in time. Guirgis said he asked that the line be added to prevent references to Donald J. Trump and Rudy Giuliani from sounding outdated.

The actress Liza Colón-Zayas, who has been involved since early script readings as a character called the Church Lady, said people who have seen this production and previous ones (including her mother) are convinced that the play has been significantly altered over the years.

“The writing didn’t change,” Colón-Zayas said. “The pain, and the years, and what we’ve survived has changed this play in ways that I can’t exactly articulate.”

The seed for the story came in 1994, when a white off-duty New York City police officer opened fire on a Black undercover transit officer on a Manhattan subway platform, seriously injuring him. The white officer, Peter Del-Debbio, said he was responding to a shotgun that had discharged and had fired when he saw the plainclothes transit officer, Desmond Robinson, running with a gun.

Part of the white officer’s defense was that the Black officer wasn’t wearing his badge or the color that would identify him as a plainclothes officer, so Guirgis remembered the story as the “color of the day” case. Del-Debbio was convicted of second-degree assault and was sentenced to probation and community service.

“It always stayed with me,” Guirgis said.

Years later, the playwright said, he was visiting Henderson when the veteran actor, having health troubles, remarked that his career would be slowing down.

“I just lied and I was like, ‘Oh I started writing two plays for you: one where you’re the lead and one where you’re the supporting,’” Guirgis said. “When I went home I was like, OK, now I’ve got to come up with something.”

By the time he started holding script readings, Colón-Zayas, who met Guirgis when they were students at State University of New York at Albany, had been visiting the Riverside Drive apartment for decades. When Guirgis’s mother died in 2006, he recalled, his family returned to the apartment to find Colón-Zayas and other friends cleaning it.

After his mother’s death, Guirgis moved into the apartment, getting his father a dog, Papi, for additional companionship. The apartment became a haven for friends who needed one, Guirgis said, including a recovering addict who started to see Guirgis’s father like he was his own.

“Anybody who walked into my apartment with me or with my sister was automatically given a blank check of love and acceptance,” he said.

The unconventional household is intimately depicted in the play. The ex-cop, Walter Washington, welcomes his son’s sweet but clueless girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón), and his friend Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), who spent time in prison and is trying to stay sober.

Like Guirgis did for his father, Junior brings a dog into the household to keep him company; Walter calls the dog by a choice curse word instead of his name, but the emotional attachment is apparent underneath the derision. (Papi, the fox-like mutt that Guirgis had adopted for his father, died recently, and the cast has mourned the loss of an original attendee of those early script readings.)

A stubborn and ailing alcoholic, Walter gripes about his housemates and expresses love begrudgingly, but the core of the play is his inclination to welcome them into his home no matter their mistakes.

“As with all of his characters, it’s a lesson in, ‘Who are we to judge anybody, really?’” Colón said.

Common, who is making his Broadway debut as Junior and has done advocacy work within the prison system, said part of what attracted him to the role was the message of redemption.

When he entered the cast as the only newcomer in a tight-knit group of actors, he received a welcome not unlike the kind Walter tends to give: matter of fact but unconditional.

“One day Liza came up to me,” he recalled, referring to Colón-Zayas, “and she said, ‘You aight, you aight. You can roll with us.’”

(Colón-Zayas was replaced in the role this month by Maria-Christina Oliveras because of a scheduling conflict.)

In the play, as Walter fights to hold on to his home and win his long-running lawsuit against the New York Police Department, a series of characters passes through the apartment — ostensibly there to help a solitary widower. Two police colleagues gather for dinner and a serving of nostalgia; the Church Lady comes to chat and give communion.

But in “Riverside,” the intentions of the houseguests are never clear-cut. The relationships get messy, and the underlying politics of the story even messier.

Henderson’s character is portrayed as both noble and, at times, misguided. He maintains both a righteous grudge against the New York Police Department and a fierce pride for it. His children, biological and not, are both trying to change their lives for the better and backsliding into old ways.

Guirgis is well aware that the persistent character flaws have the tendency to rankle some audience members who would have preferred to see their worldviews affirmed more emphatically. But he’s interested in telling a more complicated story, and says he thinks present-day audiences will see that, just as they did in 2014.

“If the characters all just have white hats and black hats, then we’re watching a cartoon, and there’s nothing to learn from it,” he said. “I try to make it messy but I try to lead with love.”