Bryan began his lecture on Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America today with a brief clip from the video of the “Central Park Sunset Tour” that Timothy “Speed” Levitch took us on three years ago. By that time, we’d been showing excerpts from The Cruise, Bennett Miller‘s documentary about Levitch and his Grayline bus tours, for a couple of years, and when one of our TAs turned out to have a connection Levitch and found out that he was going to be in town . . . well, we jumped at the chance to have him lead us and some of our students on our tour.
Levitch began the tour auspiciously, for our purposes, talking about Central Park and cosmopolitanism, and he then led us to Bethesda Fountain to talk about the “healing waters” of the Croton Aqueduct. It’s that moment that Bryan showed this morning. (Those of you who know the play know why.)
Spring 2006: Speed leads the “Central Park Sunset Tour” to the healing waters of Bethesda Fountain.
Recently, a couple of our former students saw Speed filming outside of Grace Church. They introduced themselves and told Speed the latest about the Writing New York course. Speed wasn’t in town long enough to lead us on another tour, but in an e-mail he told us, “I was with a few Texans. Mystical Texans. Richard Linklater, me, Franklin and Kevin … when we met the gals, we were finishing up a three-day-guerrilla-shoot for a new show we’re working on called Magical History Tour.”
If you’re interested in a quick Levitch fix, check out this interview with Speed, conducted by our former student Toni Cruthirds, who has a blog devoted to New York City experiences.
And you can read Bryan’s account of the Sunset Tour on the site The Great Whatsit.
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