‘shadow/land’ Evaluation: What the Storm Washes Away

There are moms who will inform you, regardless of the circumstance, precisely what’s what. Even because the sky crashes down, they’ll choose your evacuation outfit after which remind you who’s to thank that you just’re nonetheless standing on two ft. In Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “shadow/land,” which opened on Thursday on the Public Theater, that unfiltered candor is each a loving reflex and the lifeline for an endangered legacy.

It’s 2005 and Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on Central City in New Orleans, however Magalee (Lizan Mitchell) has forgotten her purse contained in the bar that’s belonged to her household for generations, the place she and her daughter Ruth (Joniece Abbott-Pratt) dally simply lengthy sufficient to get trapped by the storm. Ruth is able to forged off the membership, named shadow/land, like an albatross; she desires “a bottomless, sweepin pleasure” that she’s not getting from tending bar, or from her husband, who’s already sheltering within the Superdome with their teenage daughter.

As mom and daughter unknowingly await catastrophe, Magalee urges Ruth to not promote the membership, although it’s a husk of what it was in its heyday. In half-lucid reveries, the 80-year-old Magalee recollects its family tree, reaching again to tenuous growth occasions for Black enterprise. Ruth is aware of the story properly sufficient to affix her mom’s chorus in a type of call-and-response. “Learn tips on how to need what you already bought,” Magalee bluntly says of her daughter’s hard-won inheritance.

Of course, what they have already got is about to be drowned in oil-black water. It’s a collision course that Dickerson-Despenza and the director Candis C. Jones render in 90 dread-filled, soul-seeking minutes, zooming in on the devastation of lives in any other case seen by outsiders solely from a drone-footage distance. Behind the bar, a wall of black-and-white images chronicle Magalee and Ruth’s ancestors, as floodwaters gurgle up by way of the ground and go away their survivors stranded on the bar prime (set design is by Jason Ardizzone-West).

As in her play “Cullud Wattah,” which explores the fallout of the Flint, Mich., water disaster, Dickerson-Despenza dramatizes the results of environmental racism and its disproportionate impression on Black girls. “shadow/land,” which the Public Theater produced as an audio play in 2021, is a poetic excavation of reminiscence, tracing the ripple results of triumphs and trauma by way of generations. Magalee additionally remembers, for instance, when the authorities blew up a levy that flooded poor Black neighborhoods when she was a woman. Katrina’s wrath would additionally hit Black residents hardest, and its aftermath reverberated lengthy after the water receded.

Dickerson-Despenza’s language is wealthy in lyricism and figurative affiliation, with annotated influences within the textual content that embrace Adrienne Rich and Zora Neale Hurston. And her dialogue calls consideration to, amongst different issues, colorism, queerness and the cultural imperialism of New Orleans tourism. It could also be that the play tries to tackle an excessive amount of, feeling at occasions extra like a treatise than a character-driven drama, however that’s partly as a result of a lot is in peril of being misplaced. (“shadow/land” is her first in a deliberate 10-play cycle about Katrina.)

Of the expressive instruments that “shadow/land” deploys, the forged is probably the most instant and legible. A 3rd character, often called the grand marshal (Christine Shepard), haunts the present’s periphery, snapping limbs in tailor-made and shimmering Creole finery, interjecting verse that illuminates the attract of the town’s native eroticism and proximity to loss of life. (The motion director is Jill M. Vallery and the costumes are by Azalea Fairley.)

Abbott-Pratt and Mitchell are challenged with taking part in characters who’re held captive not solely by society, however by the script, which is considerably weighed down by the exposition inherent to oral histories. But they embody the push and pull of a mother-daughter bond with charming ease and style. At as soon as imperious and fragile, Mitchell’s Magalee could not bear in mind what she ate for breakfast, however she is going to by no means let Ruth overlook the significance of honoring their predecessors, the sacrifices they made and the items they left behind. Who else will share their tales when the proof will get washed away?

shadow/land
Through May 28 on the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour half-hour.