Theatre in Review: shadow/land (The Public Theater/Public Play Now)

In this spring roiled by police violence and unrest in the streets, Erika Dickerson-Despenza's audio play draws on New Orleans' rich and terrible history to present another angle on American racism. The central event in shadow/land is Hurricane Katrina, which traps the elderly Magalee and her daughter Ruth in the dance hall of the title. (Dickerson-Despenza's family once owned such a venue, so she knows whereof she writes). The storm hits before the women can join Ruth's husband and daughter in the Superdome, where the rest of the city's population -- those who couldn't manage to flee -- are sheltering. Stuck in place, Magalee and Ruth are left stranded for days, waiting for rescue, hovering between past and present, devastation and survival.

Even before the rain begins to fall, mother and daughter are at odds. Ruth wants to sell the dance hall -- which has seen better days and will soon have part of its roof torn off -- to a developer who is snapping up properties in the neighborhood. Magalee clings fiercely, almost desperately, to the place, the repository of her past's most meaningful moments. Magalee also catches Ruth making an intimate phone call, prising out of her daughter the admission that she is deeply attracted to a female friend. Adding to the thick atmosphere of familial conflict and deadly peril is Magalee's middle-stage dementia, which renders her lethally mordant one moment and frighteningly disoriented the next; her condition will not improve as days pass, Ruth's cell phone fails, and their meager stock of food and water runs out. It's a situation that could turn melodramatic in a Tennessee Williams kind of way, with mother and daughter battling out fundamental issues of family heritage and identity against a background of natural disaster and the chaos that follows. But one disappointment of shadow/land is that the play's various conflicts don't coalesce into something powerful enough to stand against the characters' life-threatening circumstances. Both the struggle over the fate of the dance hall and Ruth's midlife coming to terms with her sexuality want deeper exploration than they get here.

To be sure, this is inherently dramatic material. The dance hall is a ghostly reminder of the city's tumultuous postwar years when, as Magalee recalls it, the city's Black neighborhoods exploded with jazz and color and excitement. The building's fallen state speaks volumes about New Orleans' history of inequity. Ruth's momentous decision to risk her apparently happy marriage (and motherhood) to reach for a deeper fulfilment is also an act of defiance against Magalee, who comes from a generation that never wanted to deal with issues of sexual identity. But these conflicts are subsumed by the terror of being trapped in a storm of Biblical proportions, clinging to life as hope runs out. This is especially so thanks to Palmer Hefferan's sound design, which gives Katrina a terrifying immediacy. (Also fine is Delfeayo Marsalis' haunting musical score.)

Then again, Dickerson-Despenza's dialogue sparkles, turning the local vernacular into stubborn, often scalding, poetry. Anticipating the storm, Ruth describes how the television weatherman "stared into dat camera and told us to leave like a man on a first-name basis with death." Ruth defends her preference for a Polaroid photo: "I like its urgency/how it ripens like a peach before your eyes." Here's Magalee, complaining about the weather: "The heat is on hell today and the sky too stubborn to open her legs for a cool breeze to run round this way." She also has an electric aria about the dance hall's halcyon years -- "my scuffed dancefloor done made a lady once a whore/done been the point of conception and dat's/dat's my feeble stage/where players come lay they burdens and brass/and ova there's where a clatterin' tambourine summons the uptown Indians/all beaded and braided/peacocked and masked." If at times shadow/land's narrative of endurance feels a bit static, whenever the characters take off on verbal flights like these you know you are hearing the words of a playwright, and a gifted one at that.

Dickerson-Despenza's lyrical style threatens to go into overdrive in the passages spoken by Griot, a kind of narrator/stage manager figure who might be unnecessary if the play were seen in a theatre, as I imagine it will be in seasons to come. (To be fair, Griot fills in some necessary details, and she contributes an especially powerful passage, about "a blinding flash of light from a news crew [that] raids the door frame and delivers a blow to Ruth's face.") Anyway, Sunni Patterson handles the role with considerable authority and grace. And, under the direction of Candis C. Jones, the two leads make a most convincing mother -- daughter pairing, tied by bonds of love, need, and exasperation. Lizan Mitchell nails Magalee's constantly shifting mental state, leaving one anxiously wondering if her next line with be a zinger or a deluded murmur; she also makes something deeply felt out of her profound attachment to the dance hall. The irritation in Michelle Wilson's voice will be amusingly familiar to any middle-aged person dealing with a difficult parent; equally real are her groping attempts at articulating her changing sense of self and her furious attempts at keeping her mother alive.

If, in the end, shadow/land ends up pretty much where one suspected it was going all along, it remains a striking piece of work by a writer having a breakthrough moment -- Dickerson-Despenza recently won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for another play, Cullud Wattah -- and it is the first in a ten-play examining Katrina and its aftereffects. I am already avid to find out what happens next. You can access shadow/land at https://tinyurl.com/v3am3t44. - David Barbour