Then coats started rustling, whispers became impolitely perceptible, and the audience grew ever more restless. The Kaufmann Auditorium in the 92nd Street Y was turning into an unhappy, however cultured, hubbub.

But David Mamet droned on, inexorably reading what I remember as the manuscript version of his Dr. Faustus. And he seemed amused that the audience wasn’t amused.

The evening had taken an odd turn indeed. After being lushly entertaining in his cultured Robin Williams way, he had squandered our good will and anticipation with a vigorous reading of the kind of play-in-verse that could give plays-in-verse a deadly dull reputation.

At first I worried about the people who huffed and puffed as they walked up the aisle. They seemed rude. I sat up straight, attempting to parse out recognizable details from Mamet’s increasingly sedative murmur from the stage. I paid attention harder than ever.

Kaufmann Auditorium is a cozy, elegant hall with coffered wood-paneled walls, around the top of which are emblazoned the venerable names of Moses, Isaiah, Jefferson, and Washington. Regulars know that the audience is normally very well-behaved and never very aggressive. We sit in plush velour seats–calm browsers of the facsimiled scribbled-up manuscript pages inside the programs.

Nevertheless, things got worse. Members of the audience down front stood up and excused themselves from deep in their rows, center stage. Plenty of them for Mamet to notice, who I don’t think was being sadistic–not exactly sadistic–in reading his Faustus. But he read on.

I had the dark realization that the people leaving were right. And I started to think it was a pretty bad personality flaw that I couldn’t get up and walk out like the others.

On his side, Mamet commented mildly as literally half of a very full auditorium made for the exits. He was bombing, and he did seem to enjoy it, as if he was involved in seeing what would happen if he persisted. If his play-in-verse lacked drama, at least he could enjoy the drama of human nature.

When all the brave ones had left, the Kauffman audience looked like a tooth had been extracted and it felt that way too. Somewhere between the seats and the podium lay one of the darker impulses of human nature, that is to be polite, to allow ourselves to be tortured, even by a humanist, even by an epic in which humans are predictably doomed.

The closely-cropped little man from Chicago and Hollywood read for what was probably an hour. When he finished, the surprise ending to the play-in-verse was that the character of David Mamet returned, sharp and witty as ever, and even a little entertaining at his own expense.

Jean Paul Cativiela is the managing editor of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

During the nineteenth century, the accelerating sprawl of New York City forced the relocation of almost all of Manhattan’s dead. From 1846 to 1851, nearly 20,000 bodies were moved off the island, and by the Civil War most of the cemeteries in Manhattan were gone—taken to large, park-like cemeteries like Cypress Hills and Green-Wood.

Of the handful of cemeteries that remained—and still remain—in Manhattan, three belong to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of Shearith Israel. In odd and somewhat obscure corners of Manhattan, these three cemeteries bear the marks of the city’s intense urban growth. They are small, shabby, and hardly noticeable, but their centuries-long survival in New York City is both impressive and provocative.

The Sephardic founders of the Shearith Israel congregation were a sort of Mayflower group in American Jewish history. In 1654, 23 refugees from the Portuguese Inquisition arrived from Brazil, becoming the first permanent Jewish settlers in North America. Now known simply as “the 23,” the refugees fought off the anti-Semitic peg-leg Peter Stuyvesant’s efforts to expel them, and went on to found some of the most prominent American Jewish families.

The congregation of Shearith Israel built their first cemetery almost 100 years before the American Revolution, in an area that is now just south of Chatham Square on St. James Place. Extending from the lower Bowery almost to the East River, it was one of the largest burial grounds in Manhattan, large enough to be fortified with artillery during the Revolution and for British troops to use as a parade ground.

But in the 1830s, the City of New York nibbled, then chomped at the First Cemetery’s edges, finally pressuring the congregation to move the cemetery completely. Shearith Israel did sell a large unused portion of the grounds, and eventually moved many of the bodies uptown. However, the congregation refused to move the entire cemetery and succeeded in keeping a quarter-acre lot intact.

Today, the First Cemetery is a small trapezoid stuffed behind an apartment building in a neighborhood of drab government towers. It stands an incongruous five feet higher than the sidewalk beneath it, the result of the city leveling a hill to extend a nearby street. It is nothing like the picturesque verdure of the Trinity Church graveyard near Wall Street, where the graves of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton preen side-by-side for tourists.

Nevertheless, there is a certain dignity to the First Cemetery. In fact, a first encounter with any of the Shearith Israel cemeteries can be one of those rare and improbable moments when you feel you’ve discovered something no one else knows about Manhattan. As one of a pair of nice, pear-shaped women put it recently, as she stretched on her tiptoes to see into the First Cemetery, “You could walk down this street a thousand times and never see it. But see how nice it is.”

Shearith Israel’s Second Cemetery at Sixth Avenue and 11th Street was also once several acres large. Many Jewish victims of the yellow fever outbreak of 1822 were originally buried here, but in 1830 the construction of 11th Street hacked off all but the tiny triangular patch of twenty-odd graves that remains today. The tombstones inside lean flush against the wall in a crowded line that suggests they no longer mark individual graves.

It is remarkable that the Second Cemetery survived in any form. Besides the threat of the city’s expanding grid, yellow fever cemeteries were the target of public hysteria. Greedy real estate developers and other agitators inflamed public fears of toxic outgases from decaying corpses. The hysteria accelerated the removal of bodies from Manhattan, while other yellow fever burial sites were converted into public parks or were simply left unmarked. Somewhere between 10,000 and 22,000 are still interred in the hidden potter’s field underneath Washington Square Park.

“The city just paved over a lot of the other cemeteries,” explained the leader of a recent walking tour for the Tall Club of New York City (literally a club for New York tall people). “There are all sorts of stories of Con Ed accidentally digging up unmarked graves in the 70s. The bodies were still wrapped in their yellow shrouds.” As he spoke, the rapt members of the Tall Club tour, as perhaps only they could, were peering over the Second Cemetery’s wall, absorbing the anonymous and pleasantly overgrown red brick enclosure within.

The Third Cemetery, at West 21st Street and Sixth Avenue, is about an acre in size, and some of its graves contain bodies originally buried in the First and Second cemeteries. James Thurber wrote about it for The New Yorker in 1928, reporting a department store’s bizarre plan “to arch a building over the cemetery” that would supposedly leave it “undisturbed.” Had it not been rejected, however, the plan would have reduced the Third Cemetery to something like a dark crawlspace.

Today the Third Cemetery is anything but undisturbed by department stores. Tall retail buildings box the cemetery into its cramped lot, while large air vents behind the Scuba Network outgas hot air onto the cemetery’s array of foundering tombstones.

Worse yet, in June of 2006 several dozen headstones were damaged by falling debris from the “luxury apartments” under construction next door.

Like the other two Shearith Israel cemeteries, the Third Cemetery has somehow kept up its trick of endurance for several centuries now, accumulating its share of disfigurement in the process. And, again like the others, the Third Cemetery possesses an appeal that goes beyond its impairments and dilapidation.

“It’s such a nice place,” says Frank, an elderly man who lives under the scaffolding outside the offending luxury apartments. “You used to be able to go in there. The trees are beautiful, and they have little flowers in the spring.”

Frank speaks with a proprietary tone that borders on defensive, as if he wants to make sure no one judges the Third Cemetery by its rundown appearance.

“There’s a man who takes care of the place. He was in there earlier trying to get things cleaned up.”

He points out the plywood sidewalk set off by yellow “Caution” tape running along the edge of the cemetery.

“You can see they’re going to do some work in there. I don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re fixing it up a little.”

Midway through The Warriors, a lesbian gang called The Lizzies lures a detachment of Warriors back to their party pad, treacherously plying them with music, dancing, and the promise of good loving. Waylaying the Warriors just as Circe waylaid Odysseus and his crew, these jaunty lesbians proceed to transform the street-tough Warrior boys into randy and helpless Sweathogs. That’s when the girl gang springs its cunning trap. “The chicks are packed! The chicks are packed!” cries one Warrior as the Lizzies break out their guns and shoot up the place.

Evoking Homer may seem a bit grandiose for a cult film about oddball street gangs. But The Warriors is spiced with such literary pretensions, and its surprisingly diverse sources include a socially-conscious novel of the mid-sixties and an epic adventure of the ancient Greek writer Xenophon. Such underlying bookishness is all the more surprising given the overall, and unrelenting, hokiness of the film on its surface.

Each of the teenage street gangs in The Warriors is outfitted with a campy theme and a uniform. The gang called the “Baseball Furies” wear Marilyn Manson makeup and dress in full pinstriped baseball uniforms. “The Punks” wear Deliverance overalls and scoot around on roller-disco skates. The Warriors themselves don shiny buckskin vests and Indian bead necklaces. Among the other gangs rounding out the cast: an all-mimes gang, an all-orphans gang, and another gang that can only be described as The Scott Baios.

A rally to unite all these gangs turns to chaos when someone assassinates the vaguely revolutionary leader Cyrus. The assassination touches off a gang war and launches the film’s premise: the Warriors are wrongly accused of the killing and must therefore march through enemy turf all the way from Van Cortlandt Park back home to Coney Island. Along the way, the not very scary Warriors must contend with such not very gritty realities as fighting the aforementioned overdressed rival gangs and puzzling out the MTA’s subway maps. In other business, Deborah van Valkenburgh—later Sarah Rush on TV’s “Too Close For Comfort”—plays a Puerto Rican whore who falls for the head Warrior and delivers a stirring apologia for the life of the hooker as an antidote to growing old.

In his foreword to the book “The Gangs of New York,” Jorge Luis Borges described New York gang life as possessing “all the confusion and cruelty of barbarian cosmologies.” The gangs in The Warriors, in contrast, are fanciful creatures, more native to the two-dimensional realities of comic books than fodder for a bloody Scorsese film. Nevertheless, The Warriors is not just another cult film destined to be ridiculed on VH1 snarkfests (though it has, of course, been ridiculed on VH1 snarkfests). As one of the top films of 1979, grossing about $17 million, The Warriors was a commercial success and was taken quite seriously. Some saw art in it. Pauline Kael, without apparent irony, called the film “mesmerizing.”

Walter Hill, the film’s director, was also taken seriously. And for good reason. He had already made his excellent getaway-driver-as-cowboy film The Driver, and later directed the A-list blockbuster “48 Hours.” In 1980, film critic Robert F. Moss even included Hill in his somewhat shrill denunciation of movie violence in a Saturday Review article called “The Brutalists: Making Movies Mean and Ugly.” Moss groups Hill with fellow “brutalist” offenders Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, and Paul Schrader, accusing them of defining “the urban scene as little more than the sum total of its most extreme forms of decadence.” He singles out The Warriors for its decadent “brutality,” scolding Hill because his “imagination is most fully energized by action sequences.” Significantly, audiences at the time did not laugh off the violence in the film, if only because of gang attacks associated with a number of screenings in Los Angeles and New York.

Sol Yurick’s book The Warriors appeared in 1965, the product of several years of difficult work gathering source material. As an employee of the Department of Welfare in New York City, Yurick had already worked with impoverished families whose children were in street gangs. He interviewed gang members and later spied on gang hangouts from inside a rented panel truck. And in his attempt “to construct a true reflection of the real world in which [his] literary gangs would move,” he went as far as walking through the subway tunnel between 96th Street and 110th Street.

Yurick called the movie version of his novel “trashy.” A more charitable view would simply describe the film as less authentic. The novel The Warriors is far more graphically brutal than Hill’s film. Yurick’s gang, the Coney Island Dominators, commits a random murder and a gang rape, and attempts to rape a drunk nurse in Riverside Park. Though not by any means a great novel, Yurick’s work offers a social commentary and labors to present its subject with authenticity. Gangs like the “Borinquen Blazers” populate Yurick’s novel, gangs more firmly rooted to their racial and economic status. Where Walter Hill’s racially intermixed Warriors are led by a telegenic white guy, all of Yurick’s Dominators are black or hispanic teenagers whose violence is often racially loaded. When the character Ismael addresses the massive gang rally, on the Fourth of July no less, he frames his quasi-Marxist argument in terms of race and power: “Now we’re all brothers, I don’t care what you say. They make us think we’re all different so we rumble in colored gangs, white gangs, Puerto Rican gangs, Polish gangs, Irish gangs, Italian gangs, Mau-Mau gangs, and Nazi gangs.”

It was Yurick who borrowed the plot for The Warriors from Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” a history written over two thousand years ago. The “Anabasis” chronicles how Cyrus the Younger, under the false pretext of a police action, leads a mercenary army of ten thousand Greeks deep into Mesopotamia—modern day Iraq—with the purpose of unseating the Persian king in Babylon. When someone assassinates Cyrus (a javelin in the eye), the stranded Greek warriors must fight their way back to Greece. Xenophon himself leads the Greeks on their bloody retreat.

Beyond presenting an uncanny parallel to our nation’s war in Iraq, the “Anabasis” presumably reflects the kind of “barbarian cosmology” Borges compared to New York gang life. The Greeks march north from Cunaxa toward the Black Sea, fighting through a brutal gauntlet of Kurdish and other barbarian tribes. The reality of barbarians dancing with severed Greek heads is only part of the “cruelty and confusion” that assails the Greeks on their trek up country. When the mercenaries attack one barbarian fortification, the natives rain stones down on them—when the supply of stones is exhausted, the native women throw their babies, and when they run out of babies, the women throw themselves. The men follow, leaving behind only “oxen and asses and sheep.”

It may be tempting to view these comparatively more “brutalistic” acts as further evidence of a “trashy” lack of authenticity in Walter Hill’s film. After all, how did the bloodier, grittier works of Sol Yurick and Xenophon lead to packed chicks and bellicose mimes?

But Hill would seem to have a point. His gangs may organize themselves into absurd, comic categories, but violence inspired by the absurd and the imaginary is in no way precluded from becoming lethal. One perhaps needs look no further than Los Pitufos, the Mexican gang based on TV’s “The Smurfs.” Indeed, as Borges reminds us, early New York was overrun with cutthroat gangs with vividly cartoonish names like the Daybreak Boys, the Plug Uglies, and the Swamp Angels. Many of these gangs wore thematic uniforms, as did the Plug Uglies, whose bowler hats and long shirttails might have provoked laughter if it were not for the huge bludgeons and pistols they carried. Of course none of this makes The Warriors any less of a giddy masquerade of violence, or less of a snark magnet for that matter. But it may help us to reflect upon our own ever more cartoonish tribalisms, and how they are colliding in the real world.