There’s no curtain call at Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s remarkable and, I suspect, indelible Cullud Wattah. The uncommon decision doesn’t allow the patrons to applaud (and standingly ovate?) the five actors who’ve just done a bang-up job. The reason is clear: the play’s subject matter is deemed too serious to give way to standard theater protocol.
In other words, Cullud Wattah is a protest play. Among current developments calling for protests, it’s hardly less warranted than any other in today’s benighted world. Dickerson-Despenza’s outcry is set in Flint, Michigan. Yes, Flint Michigan, where at the performance I attended it was announced that 2,759 days had passed since the local water has been corrupted and no satisfaction has yet been achieved.
In describing her raised-voice work, the playwright refers to it as “water-logged.” What she’s calling attention to is that throughout the two acts she repeatedly finds opportunities to discuss or demonstrate the presence of “clean” and “dirty” water. She bookends the action with a filled tub. At one point, a pregnant women’s water breaks. That’s right, Dickerson-Despenza leaves little out.
Designer Adam Rigg helps drive home the point by making certain his stunning set of a very livable middle-class home includes a kitchen sink, a toilet, and that downstage tub, all of them put to usual use. Surrounding the set on three sides is a glittering curtain of bottled water, the sort Flint habitués spend significant amounts of monthly income so’s to have potable drinking water.
Living often at odds with each other in this afflicted Flint dwelling is a family of five women, with men only occasionally mentioned. The three generations are strictly no-nonsense Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell), daughters Ainee (Andrea Patterson) and Marion (Crystal Dickinson) and her daughters, Plum (Alicia Pilgrim) and Reesee (Lauren F. Walker).
Important to their dire daily living is, most distressingly, nine-year-old Plum’s leukemia diagnosis; attributable, there seems no doubt in their minds, to the “dirty” water. Plum, a good student, is mostly preoccupied with her impending death. Almost as troubled is Ainee, who has had six miscarriages and is pregnant again. She’s so unsure that she won’t consider names yet, too much of a jinx. Reesee, an outspoken lesbian, has given up on the family’s Catholicism after deciding Jesus has denied her prayers on Plum’s account. Now she worships a water goddess.
Big Ma is a former General Motors assembly-line worker. Marion has been on the line for some years, too, but has recently been given a middle-management position worth an annual $83,000. The promotion, however, requires her to quit the union, a happenstance with which none of the others are in the least comfortable.
Why should they be, when in large part it’s the GM sludge causing their seemingly never-ending crises, their continuing afflictions? Even Marion, though she attempts to hide it, is suffering from a rash caused by the contaminated water. She’s dealing with it, because In her view, the $83,000 influx of cash more than compensates for a distressed body. She can live with that, the daily financial strains, no.
Dickerson-Despenza shrewdly presents Cullud Wattah as that familiar American piece, a dysfunctional-family script composed of a series of potent intramural confrontations. The difference here is that while most plays of the kind expose various families grappling with often lengthy specific dysfunctions, this family of five women going through routine activities (cooking, ablutions, et al) may be fighting their own particular skirmishes but with a devastating overarching one: the persistent Flint water, where even the city name could be appropriated as a flintily irreconcilable predicament.
Though having to forgo their on-stage applause, Mitchell, Dickinson, Patterson, Pilgrim, and Walker are going to receive it here. There is no first among equals, which may owe their ensemble playing to being on so high a level that there’s no possibility of rising higher. The raised standard is also due to director Candis C. Jones, who thoroughly understands the script’s magnitude and sees to its full realization. The same for costume director Kara Harmon, lighting designer Jeannette Oi-Suk Yew, sound and composition designer Sinan Refik Zafar, and movement designer Adesola Osakalumi.
Debate over whether works of art, no matter how fine, can affect the course of actual life has never been resolved. It may be that Dickerson-Despenza’s assiduously composed Cullud Wattah won’t have the surely desired effect sought not only by her but by the Public Theater (which has added a companion installation elsewhere in the building). A widespread outcome is up to uncontrollable circumstances. For the moment, Dickerson-Despenza deserves gratitude for framing such a national issue as an intimately human, and therefore extremely relatable, protest.
Cullud Wattah opened November 17, 2021, at the Public Theater and runs through December 5. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
