Jackson, Miss.; Cape Town, South Africa; Mexico City; Flint, Mich. If you’ve been paying heed the last few years (even weeks), then this much-abridged list might suggest a “Jeopardy!” answer. What cities have been affected by water crises?
Coloradans are no strangers to concerns about water, be they drought-driven, water-rights driven or heavy-minerals-tainted. So, consider going to your tap, filling a glass of water and taking a swig. Now think about how much confidence you have that the tap will work and that what it delivers is safe. (If you’re a resident of north Denver, please use the filtered water pitcher that the city provided as Denver Water goes about the drawn-out process of replacing miles of lead pipe.)
But sometimes that confidence proves misplaced.
What a timely show “cullud wattah” turns out to be then. The haunting drama takes place in a Michigan home shared by three generations of women during the height of the Flint water crisis in 2016. Or, rather, its nadir.
As with many public health disasters — the result of a toxic cocktail of mismanagement, mendacity and systemic malice — the ongoing health and economic repercussions aren’t likely to be known for years. And not a penny of the class-action settlement has been paid to the more than 90,000 plaintiffs as of March, a decade after the disaster began.
The play’s Public Theatre premiere, set for 2020, was forestalled when a different, global public health catastrophe struck: COVID-19. (Curious Theatre Company’s important regional premiere runs through June 16.)
Playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza pours both the ritual and the real into her powerfully poetic script, weaving African gestures with journalistic details. “Cullud wattah” ambitiously deals with the many ways a family can be let down — by a nation, a state, a city, a corporation and sometimes even each other. God’s culpability, too, is considered.
Even while capturing the municipal catastrophe, Dickerson-Despenza pays acute heed to the hurts and the hopes, the mysteriously surreal and the unrelentingly physical that shape the Cooper women’s experiences.
The home belongs to Marion (Alex Campbell), a widow with two daughters (Reesee and Plum). She works at Flint’s GM plant, just as her mother, father and grandfather once did. Her husband was killed serving in Afghanistan. Her mother, Big Ma (Sheryl McCullum), moved in after her own husband died. Marion’s older sister, Ainee (Kristina Fountaine), a recovering addict, joined the household as she began 12-stepping away from drugs and toward carrying her latest pregnancy to term. She has had miscarriages.
Big Ma, Marion and Ainee make a prickly triumvirate, cohabitating more out of economic necessity than familial fondness. Their barbs, inside jibes and grievances with each other are familiar to many an intergenerational drama (and comedy) but the duress they undergo is particular to a crisis that disproportionately affected people of color and the low-income.
Teenager Reesee (Daja McLeod) and her 9-year-old sister, Plum (Sade Houston), soften their elders’ edges. Although Reesee’s devotion to Yoruba religious rituals (as well as her attraction to girls) proves a point of contention with her Bible-quoting grandmother. Big Ma prays to Jesus. Reesee solicits the favor of the Sea Goddess Yemoja. Each is in danger of losing her religion.
For all the squabbles amid the grownups, the play orbits around Plum, who is sick. Her illness hangs over the household. “Am I going to die?,” she asks her mother. She wears a bracelet with a bell because she sleepwalks through the house like an apparition. She’s more of an avatar for all the children of Flint who were endangered and affected by lead-tainted water.
In 2014, a governor-appointed emergency manager switched Flint’s water supply from Detroit’s system, reconnecting it to the city’s old treatment system without proper and preventative maintenance. Quickly, the General Motors factory recognized that water from Flint was corroding its newly assembled engines. The company’s request to be reconnected to a different system was honored but the complaints of rank, discolored, flecked water by Flint’s citizens went ignored.
When the play opens, the women have been living with the rusty, brown and speckled tap water (or, as Plum says, the “durty wattah”) for nearly two years. While the water bill climbs and Marion’s property value plummets, they rely on costly bottled and ineffective boiled water to cook and bathe.
Plum’s not the only one in the house ailing. Marion tries to keep secret a creeping but voracious rash. It turns out to be not the only thing the hard-working, exhausted Marion is hiding.
Weeks from delivering her first baby, Ainee gets involved in activism around the water and a lawsuit. That Marion not only works for the GM but also looks to be in line for a promotion further complicates already wounded emotions, especially when the company is named a defendant in a class-action suit.
The play deftly handles the journalistic information about the catastrophe, sometimes in the dialog. At other times, snatches of the disaster are caught in the ambient sounds of radio and television broadcasts.
One of the play’s most profound salvos is its clever and rending repurposing of the African American spiritual “Wade in the Water,” which the ensemble sings early (and again late) in “cullud wattah.”
“Lead / in thuh wattah / lead / in thuh wattah cheeldrun / lead / in thuh wattah / snyder playin god / with wattah.” (Then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was among those named in a class-action suit, that was settled in 2020.)
Scenic designer Tina Anderson’s set is wide and deep and crowded enough to convey the sense of an abode grown claustrophobic with too many people. The sounds of water, dripping, flowing, swelling or receding is the evocative work of sound designer Joseph Lamar. The interplay of shadow and light (designer Emily Maddox) reinforces moments of the mystical as well as a sense of inundation, of an overflowing.
In her script notes, the playwright suggested a set that eschewed the realistic, in which “less is more.” But director Jada Suzanne Dixon and Anderson make a compelling choice, instead almost overcrowding the stage with the stuff of these women. The overabundance takes on a documentary quality that even more forcefully presses up against the drama’s metaphysical, or as the playwright stated, its “Afro-surreal” gestures.
An emptier space would have invited a different kind of listening. Some of the exquisite poetry gets lost, but never the play’s terrible poignancy.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelancer specializing in theater and film.
IF YOU GO
“Cullud wattah”: Written by Erika Dickerson-Despenza. Directed by Jada Suzanne Dixon. Featuring Sade Houston, Alex Campbell, Daja McLeod, Sheryl McCullum and Kristina Fountaine. At the Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma, through June 16. For tickets and info: curioustheatre.org or 303-623-0524.
