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The Human Rhythms of Hurricane Katrina

“This is a waterlogged play; all of the water is real,” a note at the start of the script for Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “shadow/land” declares. I like that emphatic, underlined “all,” which insists that, in the realm of theatrical artifice, some things should simply be themselves. And I especially like knowing that the water is meant to be there, because, for the moment, it isn’t. “shadow/land,” which is set during the five late-summer days when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, is a play crying out for a stage. Until one can safely be provided, the Public Theatre has stepped in with a topnotch audio production, directed by Candis C. Jones, and listeners will have to picture for themselves the lashing rain and the brackish floodwater that rushes in after the levees burst. A storm has a sound. Here, it is sound itself, represented by a trombone’s cat howl and a frantic clatter of drums as the musical city comes undone. But floodwater rises with annihilating, quiet persistence, and that blanketing silence is just as terrible.

The play begins on August 29, 2005, as Katrina is making landfall. Ruth (Michelle Wilson), a Black woman born and raised in New Orleans’s Central City, is on her way to the Superdome, where her husband and daughter have gone to take shelter. She’s stopped off at Shadowland, the family’s old jazz club and dance hall, to grab a few protein bars and bottles of water. Her elderly mother, Magalee (Lizan Mitchell), is in the car, but Magalee won’t stay put. The prospect of a little rain doesn’t worry her. So what if the city has been placed under a mandatory evacuation order, and the weatherman on TV looked as if he had seen the face of death? “I was two when they blew up the caernarvon levee with dat damn dynamite boomin like a st. augustine bass drum,” she tells Ruth. “I was 40 when betsy came through blowin her trumpet / & im still here / & ima be here afta katrina hardens into a gnarled cackle.” (Dickerson-Despenza, who describes herself as a “Blk, queer feminist,” calls her style “jook joint writing”; you can hear—and, on the page, see—her declared influences, which include Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Suzan-Lori Parks, tumbling together as she searches for her own vernacular.)

Katrina isn’t the only thing threatening to uproot Magalee. Ruth has been pressuring her mother to sign off on the sale of Shadowland to a developer touting “urban renewal.” Magalee will have none of it. She suffers from middle-stage dementia; she can’t remember what she had for breakfast, but the whole history of Shadowland is alive and well in her mind. Her late husband’s ancestors—a Sicilian dockworker and his wife, a femme de couleur libre, according to Louisiana’s baroque racial-caste system—bought the land that the club sits on. It was her husband, a trombonist, who expanded Shadowland into a hotel, the first in the city to provide air-conditioning for Blacks, and turned it into a haven for musicians. Magalee can still hear them playing. (Palmer Hefferan’s vibrant sound design, which puts original music by Delfeayo Marsalis, a son of New Orleans, at the center of the story, lets us hear them, too.) Besides, she doesn’t think of herself as Shadowland’s owner. The land is “heir’s property,” passed down without the benefit of a will. She is just its latest guardian, keeping it safe until the next generation can take over.

Ruth, on the other hand, knows that Shadowland’s glory days are long gone. Its clientele has dwindled, the neighborhood is rougher than it used to be, and property taxes are doubling. Ruth needs her mother to loosen her claim on the past so that she can clear a way to her own future, though that will require more than signing a piece of paper. When she thinks Magalee is out of earshot, Ruth makes a covert call to her lover, Frankie. She respects her husband, and loves her daughter, but with Frankie she comes alive. Can she bear the consequences of chasing that feeling? Onto these questions crashes the indifferent storm, trapping Ruth and Magalee in the present, inside Shadowland. Ruth’s car is crushed by a tree; soon, a neighbor’s bloated body floats by, followed by a news crew that snaps photos of the women, then drifts away, leaving them behind.

Dickerson-Despenza is a writer at home in human rhythms. She likes to pile the voices of her characters on top of one another, and to hand them moments of silence to tug back and forth like a rope. Her script calls for “dark liquor voices”—“no thin gin here,” she warns—and Wilson and Mitchell deliver on that demand, beautifully, with Mitchell’s flinty, assured comedy in productive, affectionate friction with Wilson’s pragmatic urgency. To act without the benefit of a body, in a play that is so much about the body’s struggle to survive, is no small feat, and the warmth and richness of the actors’ sound, in this hour-plus duet, gives the production the vitality it needs.

One challenge, in a play that begins with the heightened drama of disaster, is to sustain tension. Dickerson-Despenza takes her cues from the strange, lurching beat of a storm. After the wind and rains batter Shadowland, destroying a window and blowing off half the roof, we get an unexpected reprieve. It is nighttime, and the sky fills with stars. It reminds Ruth of how she feels when she is with Frankie: “just sky / all the time.” Metaphor is her mirror; she can see herself best when she thinks figuratively. The starry pause is luxuriant, and short-lived; a levee has given way, and the water begins to rise. “Dat’s all wawdah know how to do is return,” Magalee says. Seen that way, Shadowland, sitting on a drained swamp, belongs as much to the floodwater as it does to the women.

Dickerson-Despenza is twenty-nine, and her ambition is exciting. She just won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for “cullud wattah,” a play about three generations of Black women in Flint, Michigan, which, before the pandemic had its way, was meant to première at the Public, where she is in residency. (The theatre plans to stage it in the in-person future.) “shadow/land” is the first in a planned cycle of ten plays, which aims to show the effects of the Black exodus from New Orleans that Katrina helped bring about. Dickerson-Despenza likes to refer to herself as a “cultural-memory worker,” which makes her sound a bit like a social worker crossed with a shaman, offering up her talent as a medium for other voices to speak through.

Cultural memory is made up of individual memories, and there are times, in “shadow/land,” when Dickerson-Despenza’s characters wobble under the pressure of all that she asks them to represent. Ruth, in particular, can seem not so much a person in a difficult situation as an embodiment of the situation itself—the exhausted daughter, the trapped wife. Until I read Dickerson-Despenza’s script, and saw Ruth described as “a queer woman in a strained heterosexual marriage,” I missed the fact that her lover, Frankie, is a woman. Ruth’s yearning and frustration are transmitted loud and clear, but the source of those emotions can get swallowed up in the abstract enormity of the language that Dickerson-Despenza uses to express them.

There’s a third voice in “shadow/land.” It belongs to a character called Griot (Sunni Patterson), who both describes the action and comments on it, like a Greek chorus of one. Griot, like the West African storytellers she is named for—and like Dickerson-Despenza herself—is a memory keeper and a kind of spiritual translator:

memory unravels every kind of hunger,
makes us empty an empty bottle
into a dry mouth, wishing for rain.
nevermind how water makes us scavenge,
name any crawling critter food. look at our leveled lives: puckering
plastic & timeworn pocketbook.

we swim the edge of every escape, hoping for dry landing.

This linguistic lushness carries us into the realm of myth, but where else does a city swept away by water belong? The tragedy of Katrina, of what it did to New Orleans and its people, is an epic song to sing, and though she has just begun, I’d bet that Dickerson-Despenza has the lungs for it. ♦

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