Playwright: Shepsu Aakhu
At: MPAACT at Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln
Tickets: $19.50-$22.50; through June 10
Phone: 773-871-3000
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
There is a significant lack of anger in MPAACT's world premiere play Trouble the Water. For a play depicting African-American victims of Hurricane Katrina, you would think that playwright Shepsu Aakhu would unleash a justified rage at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's shocking failure evacuate and rescue people trapped by the 2005 disaster.
But instead of an angry indictment, Aakhu and director Mignon McPherson Nance use Trouble the Water to look for a sense of community and forgiveness while ruminating on African Americans' tenuous relationship with water.
Fueling Trouble the Water is the outdated, but very pervasive, stereotype that African Americans cannot swim. It also suggests historical links to this overpowering fear of water, drawing connections to being thrown overboard on slave ships and of lynching by drowning in the Jim Crow-era South.
To get all this in, Trouble the Water jump-cuts through time to tell non-chronological stories with plenty of glorious singing and artsy modern dance movement. We also get the spirits of slaves and lynching victims watching over modern-day African Americans coping with the devastating outcomes of Hurricane Katrina.
It's all an interesting concept, and it's executed with a vocal and physical dexterity by the play's very talented large cast. ( They also act up a storm as well. ) Designers Jessica Kuehnau ( sets ) , Maggie Fullilove-Nugent ( lighting ) and Nigel Harsch ( sound ) also build a visually and aurally entrancing production, punctuated by the ethereal flicker of dozens of candles.
Where Trouble the Water gets over its head is in its structural and potentially confusing mishmash of storytelling threads. The inclusion of modern dance movement by chorographer Lisa Johnson-Willingham is performed wonderfully by the cast, through it sometimes feels shoehorned in just for the sake of artiness.
A Biblical watery-origins-of-the-world sequence takes up far too much time at the top of the play ( even if it does make for some visually arresting movement and singing ) . The creationist beginning also saddles the rest of the play with a portentous grandiosity that doesn't fit comfortably with the later intimate stories of loss and spiritual guidance.
Aakhu's time-shifting and foreshadowing device of showing some characters' deaths before formally introducing them as living people is also befuddling. And though the play's harmonious conclusion depicting a suffering community galvanized together in song, it feels a tad disingenuous. With so much rebuilding necessary to bring New Orleans and other Hurricane Katrina-affected Mississippi communities back to full flower again, Trouble the Water's uplifting ending feels forced.
As it stands, Trouble the Water is a great experimental theater piece that blends song, drama and dance together to culturally explore a devastated community and a fear that has burdened African Americans for centuries. Trouble the Water may not make complete cohesive sense and its uplifting ending may be too rushed in light of actual events. But the sentiments behind the play's creation are genuine and MPAACT deserves plenty of credit for making that artistic leap.