‘The Wind and the Rain’ Review: How Sunny’s Bar Weathered the Storm

How do we hold our shared history? Like a drink? Like a lover? Or does it slip through our fingers, like water from the bay? “The Wind and the Rain,” a new play by Sarah Gancher (“Russian Troll Farm”), which reclaims the recent past as pageant, offers one model.

The play, which Jared Mezzocchi has staged on a barge that doubles as the Waterfront Museum and in the blocks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, just beyond, is ostensibly about Sunny’s, a bar that has occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Conover Street since 1907. Opened by Antonio Balzano and his wife, Angelina, each an immigrant from Italy, it survived world wars; prohibition; the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; urban blight; Hurricane Sandy, which sent the basin surging into the bar; and legal challenges. Now presided over by Tone Balzano Johansen, the bar remains a neighborhood stronghold. (Johansen is the widow of Antonio Balzano, an actor and painter named for his grandfather, and affectionately known as Sunny.) Every Saturday it hosts a bluegrass jam session. Johansen often sings.

From a window of the barge, Sunny’s can almost be seen. Out another window, the Statue of Liberty beckons. The Vineyard Theater produced this show with En Garde Arts, a pioneer of site-specific and site-responsive performance. As the actors strut and a bluegrass combo strums and sings, the barge lurches underfoot.

The play, performed by four actors on a narrow strip of stage in the barge’s center, is mostly Johansen’s story. Much of the text derives from interviews with her (Gancher is a Sunny’s regular) and she is played by Jen Tullock with lucid good sense. (Pete Simpson plays Sunny; Jennifer Regan and Paco Tolson fill out the other roles. Ample audience participation is also a feature.) Other vignettes are based on research, some are wholly invented. In a corner the band plays.

The whole is affectionate, emotive, playful, but with a fuzziness around the edges — the way the world looks after one too many Manhattans. Instead of focusing only on Tone or on Sunny’s more generally, the play also offers a deep history of the neighborhood (from the British to the Dutch to the Lenape to the Laurentide ice sheet, all the way back to the Big Bang) and it lingers for a long time, too long, with the fraught love stories of Sunny’s grandparents and Romeo (Simpson again), a longtime bar employee.

These discursions and the script’s fondness for philosophical postulates (“How do you make a play where everything past and future exists at once?” “How do you talk about time?”) tend to distract from the play’s core — the place of the bar within the greater community, the bar’s recovery after Sandy. The story of the bar is the story of the neighborhood, about a community coming together in the face of something as indomitable as a hurricane. It is a kind of living history, a collective memory in Christmas lights and scuffed wood.