Of the countless untold Hurricane Katrina stories drowned in its wake, “Rising Water” is “just one of those hundred and hundreds of stories,” said Loyola English professor and local author and playwright John Biguenet.
Winner of the 2006 National New Play Network Commission Award and recipient of the 2007 Access to Artistic Excellence development and production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Biguenet debuted his play Wednesday at the Southern Rep Theater in The Shops at Canal Place.
The play follows a trapped New Orleans couple as Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters pour into their home. They find themselves inside their attic, where they are surrounded by their memories, souvenirs of the past hiding in the dark corners of the room, reminding them of “old wounds and old joys,” Biguenet said.
With only flashlights to illuminate the attic, the darkness lends itself to a natural setting for the telling of ghost stories to pass the time while the couple waits for the storm to settle and the sun to rise. Biguenet introduces the second act as the couple breaks through their roof while the water enters the attic. Camille, too large to fit his body through the hole, lifts only his upper torso through the roof, while Sugar is slender enough to squeeze through. It is on their roof that these characters “encounter a world they have never seen before,” Biguenet said.
Rather than facing a room of memories and forgotten stories from their lives, the couple enters a world that is seemingly invented only in dreams. They emerge from the attic into the fantastic as they witness the sinking homes and engulfed city before them.
Their response is one of disbelief, thinking of the impossibility “an American city decimated,” Biguenet said.
These circumstances lead to a metaphor for a much larger question, according to Biguenet. The couple must grasp the idea of a certain loss of life that comes with age, grappling with how to continue loving one another despite the inevitability of death. Biguenet’s initial inspiration for “Rising Water” developed from a post-Katrina column for the New York Times, seeking an answer for the deaths of those in circumstances similar to his characters.
“I began to think about being trapped, with no power, in pitch dark, thinking we had dodged a bullet,” he said. “But the real problem was finding a form that would be appropriate for such a complex experience.”
Biguenet focused this experience in a tale of two people in their attic as the levees broke, sending Katrina into the forever-changed lives of New Orleanians. “The first drafts were angry,” he said. “But the more I wrote, the more I began to let the two characters tell their own story.”
After many drafts, the play’s turning point came during the 2006 National Showcase of New American Plays, with only theater professionals in attendance. The session encouraged Biguenet to develop the absurdist drama underneath, reminding some early viewers of the work of absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett. Biguenet also decided to make the play as local as possible, including the use of New Orleans idioms within dialogue and the naming of the two characters.
“The premier audience knows as much about the subject as I do,” he said. “This play will become a conversation among a group of neighbors.”
But with this strong local presence, Biguenet hopes the play will speak universally. “I hope that the audience will leave the theater thinking we got it right,” he said. “And the fact that it gets it right will awaken the rest of the world to what happened here – we are not victims of a natural disaster but of a man-made catastrophe.”
Alex Woodward can be reached at [email protected].
