While the building—its size and scale, its history, its symbolism and 80-foot ceilings and epiphanies and imperfections—is undoubtedly a character in the show, “the grounding element of the whole work are the kids and who they are inside—not just singers,” says Grindstaff, the production’s director and a co-librettist (and the co-founder of Phantom Limb Company).

Interspersed with, and sometimes woven into, the chorus’s songs, which reflect on the oft-overlooked past of the Agger Fish Building and Navy Yard, are audio collages from historian Howard Zinn, activist Clarence L. Irving, Sr. (who worked as a riveter in the area), among others. We also hear Eugenia Farrar sing the first song with a human voice ever broadcast over radio (from aboard a battleship docked in the Navy Yard), all gathered and created by Abumrad.

Photo: Toby Tenenbaum

Taken as a whole, the collage tells a multifaceted story of a multivalent, essential space, albeit one with perhaps some questionable karma. Even before these oral histories, Port(al) actually begins outside the hulking building, with the audience learning about the area’s flora and fauna and its habitation by the Lenape tribe centuries ago, as well as discovering that they’re also literally standing atop a road of bones (many of them remnants of the thousands of bodies dumped overboard prison ships anchored in adjacent Wallabout Bay).

Later in the piece, as the audience is ushered into a decadent cabaret space carved out of the Agger Fish Building, another amazing and largely untold tale is teased, revealed, and spun. “Cynthia Hopkins is this incredible theater-maker and performer who has been in retirement for about a decade,” Grindstaff says. “She’s playing this character, Rusty Brown, whose life is such an amazing, amazing story.”