BWW Reviews: THE DAY THE WATERS CAME, The Unicorn Theatre, October 8 2010

"I didn't enjoy it, but I did like it." So said my 13-year-old son and I expect that is the reaction Lisa Evans wanted to provoke when she began to write about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.

In 60 minutes of raw drama, the audience follows Maya, an ordinary teenage American thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Rejecting the easy narrative arc of danger ignored, then confronted and eventually overcome, Ms Evans uses many brief scenes to build a mosaic picture of a modern city plunged overnight into medieval conditions. Maya sees dead bodies in the waters lapping at her feet, sewage floating by, children dying of dehydration in an attic just the other side of a door that might as well be a coffin lid. Amber Cameron as Maya and fellow professional debutant Darlene Charles as her mother capture the bemusement, fear and helplessness of the people of the Lower Ninth Ward from the moment the levees broke and Lake Pontchartrain swept into roads and houses unprepared for such catastrophe. Suddenly, there was nothing to drink, no electricity and, crucially, nobody in charge. Shane Frater and Uriah Manning use a variety of props and costume adjustments to play a number of male roles, from a doctor exhausted and angry to prisoners apparently left to die before the penitentiary authorities remembered them and opened the gates. Though the cast's drawled Louisiana accents do wobble on occasion, they do a magnificent job in being entirely believable urban Americans coping in a disaster that began as an Act of God and finished as an act (or non-act) of government.

The last fifteen minutes of the play is "dry" focusing on the fate of "refugees" from the Lower Ninth, prevented from crossing bridges by armed police, huddled in the Superdome stadium amidst the faeces and urine, then bussed around the country to lodge with fellow Americans who opened their doors to Katrina's victims. Maya and her mother - indeed all the people of the Lower Ninth - though grateful, wanted their own homes back, their own lives to begin again, their city returned to its citizens.

The play's final message is that the fate of Hurricane Katrina's victims was so awful because, from George W Bush downwards, there was no real will to rescue or support the poor, overwhelmingly black, Americans caught in the eye of the storm. Three years later, the rich, white victims of a financial storm were rescued and supported rather more quickly by the authorities - a fact that would provoke an ironic laugh (at best) in the Big Easy.

 

There is an excellent resource pack in support of the play available here.

The Day the Waters Came is on tour until the end of November.

 

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