Last Night in New York

Last Night in New York takes us back to the streets of Manhattan in the immediate days and weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Centre. New Yorkers express their horror, outrage, and confusion at the attack. But as days pass, voices are also raised against war and American foreign policy. What emerges from the anguished diatribes, the arguments, the calls for revenge or peace, is the wounded yet resilient spirit of the city itself.

'Last Night in New York' is a journey through the voices of New Yorkers trying to find their balance in a dramatically altered landscape at a pivotal moment in history.The program moves from New Yorkers' responses to Kennedy's own narrative, presented in vignettes woven throughout the documentary/performance - part poetry, part performance and part journalism, a unique and very personal hybrid from an outsider fused to the city by catastrophe.

Brent Clough.
ABC Radio National. The Night Air.

News programs show us one side of America. Like them, Kennedy does not present an 'objective' America. Rather, she goes to the other side to balance the view. We see New York through the eyes of a foreigner attracted not by the postcard, but by the streets and their life -- artistic, dissident, alcoholic.

Last Night's New York looks fragmented, not united. Even when a fireman hugs people in a crowd, the crowd remains a collection of fragments -- individuals. This reminded me of a New York that 9/11 had made me forget, the place where millions come in order to be alone together. Kennedy's world exists. It's not the only world, but it's one world. Last Night in New York rescues our ideas on post-9/11 New York, rescues them from the neat drawer where most documentaries had kept them filed.

Aeroplanes flying into skyscrapers. Images of everlasting horror. The impossible made real, and the world changed forever.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, touched us all, even here, 22 nervous flying hours from the epicentre.

After the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were reduced to rubble, the public response was left to George Bush and his cronies in America and around the world. Talk about compounding a tragedy.

The exception was the performance poet and actress Wednesday Kennedy. Originally a Sydneysider, Kennedy happened to be in New York that day, and for the next month she filmed, recorded and interviewed her way into the heart of the trauma. The results have been edited and interspersed with her delivery of a live, spoken-word component

Kennedy's perspective helps make the unreal real, and even if we cannot make sense of it, we can sense the making of the America that would soon wage wars in response.

John Shand. Sydney Morning Herald. Sept 2004

Last Night in New York speaks to the shape memory has taken since September 11th and the way thoughts and experiences have lost their original separateness. It has quite an emotional impact.

Jad Abumrad
WNYC Radio NPR America