Erika Dickerson-Despenza has a thing for water. At least she does on the evidence of last year’s first-rate cullud wattah at the Public Theater, which deals with Flint, Michigan’s pollution crisis, and now shadow/land, about New Orleans’ hurricane Katrina victims, also at the Public. In addition, Dickerson-Despenza seems to have an aversion to capital letters but that’s much less significant than her attention to how women (no men to be seen in either work) handle these sorts of harrowing events.
Whereas in cullud wattah the women of three generations grapple with conflicting Flint, Michigan issues, only two are caught arguing pros and cons of hanging on to a family jook joint called Shadowland in the second Dickerson-Despenza play, where it was given a 2021 Public audible presentation.
A program note on the full production explains, “While the story is rooted in real life events and re/visioning deceased New Orleanians, shadow/land is a work of fiction.” Perhaps patrons ought not be accused of wondering how fictional it might be when (a spoiler alert coming?) it’s revealed that the name Despenza is attached to one of the characters. The reference occurs only shortly before lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew blacks out the stage at 90 minutes or so.
Magalee (Lizan Mitchell, a brilliant cullud wattah alumna) is that character. She’s the mother of Ruth (Joneice Abbott-Pratt) and begins these ill-fated proceedings in the lowlands establishment the family has owned and run for decades but is considering selling. (Yes, theater lovers, unloading family valuables is a familiar plot device, as, among others, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson attest.).
Magalee and Ruth are having it out in front of the Shadowland bar while fully aware of August 23, 2005 hurricane warnings. Their disagreements are so heated that they’re still quarreling when the rains come. And forceful they are, which has already posed a challenge for set designer Jason Ardizzone-West and the production’s technicians, certainly for sound designer Palmer Hefferan.
The on-stage weather is so violent that one apparently cherished item instantly drops off a wall, prompting Magalee and Ruth to remove and wrap another surprising decoration: a trombone that is eventually played, if only briefly. That’s the least of it, though. Rain in crucially lighted sheets pours down the two large Shadowlands windows, part of the (unseen) roof blows off, and the floor opens. Before you can say “a dozen beignets, please,” the waters have reached so high and so visible on the partially open stage floor that Magalee and Ruth are now stranded atop the bar.
While searching aircrafts occasionally fly noisily over the mother and daughter, no matter how they cry out and furiously wave, they remain unnoticed — left to continue dealing with each other’s past and present as they carefully share the little food and potable water they have.
There’s no question that the straits they’re in are dire, but unlike the unexpected developments Dickerson-Despenza creatively lays out in her enthralling cullud wattah, she isn’t quite capable here of effectively increasing the drama between Magalee and Ruth. As they attempt to withstand the lengthening days during which they eventually run out of supplies and even strip to their scanties, insufficient tension grows. On the other hand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unforgettable phrase “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink” very likely has occurred to more than one patron.
So much time passes as the Magalee-Ruth ordeal mounts that spectators might silently start asking themselves questions like, Why aren’t the women more enervated and somehow looking more emaciated? (Admittedly, such changes are difficult to achieve under stage circumstances.)
Early in the play it’s mentioned that Ruth has a husband and son. Wouldn’t it make sense for one or both to suspect where these missing family members might be, whether they’re initiating a search?
Not that Magalee and Ruth remain unaccompanied. A fantasy figure identified in the program as The Grand Marshall (Christine Shepard) appears regularly in several flashy outfits. She’s first seen whirling an umbrella and serving as a hyperkinetically dancing prologue and then wends her way through much of the ensuing action as unspoken observer. (Azalea Fairley is the costumer, Delfeayo Marsalis composer of the original music.)
Shepard is something of a scene stealer by way of the sheer high stepping she goes through under movement director Jill M. Vallery and the knowing expressions she’s asked to spread around by director Candis C. Jones, who serves all three actors well.
A slip inserted in the program announces that “shadow/land is a work that asks questions about public health, capitalism, state-sanctioned disasters & the Black women left in the balance.” Granted, Magalee and Ruth are literally abandoned during the disaster, and there are flickers of other political topics mildly stated. But that’s as opposed, say, to Dickerson’s grappling with them head-on in cullud wattah. This time, however, the crucial concerns are not so adequately and outspokenly confronted that they raise Dickerson-Despenza’s follow-up Public piece nearly as high as the etched-in-memory Katrina waters rose.
shadow/land opened May 4, 2023, at the Public Theater and runs through May 28. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
