44 Lights
Book and Music by Tim Tuttle; Directed by Abigail Zealey Bess
The Chain Theatre | 312 W. 36th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10018
November 5 - 15, 2025
Note: This production is a work-in-progress. This is a featured article.
The house opened. There was silence. The spacious room of The Chain Theatre’s 3rd floor felt stripped down. While I looked for a favorable place to sit, I heard someone say “overture,” from the pit positioned upstage.
Sounds of an electric guitar filled the room. Suddenly, it didn’t feel as spacious. Layered with the electricity of the guitar were acoustic guitar, and drums. The room felt upbeat and welcoming. A violin added to rock-filled layers of melody and harmony, shooting soundwaves to the back of the house. Now, the room was hopeful.
I took out my notebook and pen to notate the positioning of the set, which designated different locations and the general atmosphere of the room. My pen wanted to take in every single detail.
The cast of 44 Lights trickled in during the overture dressed in business suits, button downs, casual street clothes, and leather jackets, blurring the lines between show and audience, past and present, as they chatted with each other. They could’ve easily been any one of us up there.
After a few minutes, the door to the house closed, the music crescendoed, the lights shifted, and…I put my pen down.
44 Lights is a new musical written and composed by Tim Tuttle. It’s safe to say that for anyone alive in 2001, especially in New York, remember exactly where they were and what they were doing on Sept 11. They remember the rush of emotions flooding through their body. They remember the shakiness of the city and world they knew crumbling right on top of them. They remember the uncertainty of tomorrow. 44 Lights is Tim Tuttle’s story.
The road to the musical 44 Lights is an interesting one. I got to speak with Tuttle before seeing the off-broadway debut of this new work. What first started out as one song turned into Music From Ground Zero, a concert honoring those lost, turned into a documentary, then became a one-man show, and thus became the workshopped musical today.
Six months before 9/11, Tuttle, then a commodities broker, was thinking about going to music camp. He’d let his guitar sit in a corner for a very long time. In Tuttle’s words, he’d “give it up and pick it up and give it up and then you know, then this thing happened and I just rushed to it as if it was mine.”
It was his way of releasing his grief of all the friends he lost on September 11th, 2001. It was the path to healing.
At first, he didn’t want to go to guitar camp, but his wife/biggest supporter, Barbara, encouraged him. There, he discovered something.
In our conversation he told me, “What I didn’t know was that it was just going to completely obsess me and take over me and I was just going to start to live in the studio…I couldn’t stop it once it started. The gates just started to flood open because as I wrote and I sang, I felt the wonderful feeling of love that I could remember all my friends and see them as I was writing.”
Through music, he was connecting to his lost friends on a spiritual level. He kept them alive. Something bigger was calling to him.
So, he quit his job. He stopped living the routined everyday soulless, miserable life. He no longer was the guy that went to work, got drinks after work, watched football, slept, and did it all over again the next day. He started to live because he had something to live for.
With music, he finally felt he had a purpose and his life had meaning, which so many people hope to find. So he took the plunge and followed his heart to keep connecting not only himself, but all of those affected by 9/11 with the healing power of music.
The story of 44 Lights closely follows the lives of 10 people directly affected by the Twin Tower attack. 8 of them were on site. But this musical isn’t just about the attack itself. It’s about the human experience and relationships that just so happen to be in the context of this tragedy and its immediate aftermath.
This is a musical about humanity and all of its complexities. With a cast of 12, each character represents a unique display of life, love, grief, and death. Layered within each one are developed personalities with different emotional responses and capacities, highlighting the importance of awareness for oneself, one’s mental and one’s emotional health. It says “you’ve got one life to live. Live it.”
One particular character represents Tim Tuttle’s personal journey. Nick, played by Tom Frank in this off-broadway debut workshop, has been Tim Tuttle’s pick from the beginning. “He really gets it. He really gets us,” Tuttle told me.
“He believes totally in the play and that’s what I needed. I needed somebody who believed,” Tuttle said. When talking about the character Nick, Tuttle revealed what he was thinking during the audition process. “If you’re gonna play me in my thing I need you to understand me fully and understand why I wrote it and what was in my heart,” he said. He found that in Tom Frank, an actor from California, after watching more than 900 submissions for this project.
I got to speak with Tom Frank as well. In contrast to his usual commercially-toned projects, Frank had found one he valued with 44 Lights. He was looking for a project with substance. Something that, in his own words, “has a value beyond. That’s really rare.”
44 Lights has been over 20 years in the making. With it, comes its emotional and technical struggles. Tuttle has had to overcome re-living that day over and over again, facing his lost friends and infusing tragedy into his work.
He has had to embrace grief while feeling the comfort of keeping his lost friends alive. Creating is an all-encompassing act of embracement itself, feeling and acknowledging the good, bad, sad, beautiful, and endless accounts of what being human is. Tuttle went through that process while also fusing it into his characters for 44 Lights.
He has had to figure out how to take his work from one step to the other without ever having been a writer, professional musician, or involved in the entertainment industry prior to this experience. Through it all, he’s had his wife, Barbara, as his grounding presence.
“There’s a lot of anger, there’s disillusionment, there’s heartbreak, there’s everything that’s going through you and you could easily dull the pain through, you know, falling off the cliff pretty easily and that confusion inside you, but she stayed right next to me.”
44 Lights is Tuttle’s way of honoring and remembering all of those lost on that tragic day. It’s his way of bringing people together and to never give up hope for a sunnier tomorrow. Tuttle hopes audiences feel love that fuses through human nature, to embrace each other under the call of something bigger, and put your pen down (or to paper, depending on which way you look at it) to go for it.
44 Lights ran at the Chain Theatre through Nov 15th, 2025. After this workshop, 44 Lights will take its next step, whichever one that may be. But one thing’s for sure: it will be to the tune of Tim Tuttle’s heart.
Editorial by Amanda Montoni.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 12, 2025 All rights reserved.