Katrina
Reviewed by Socks Whitmore
Sawyer’s Playhouse at The Loft Ensemble
Through Feb. 19
“Black folks can’t afford to lose their memories — they’ve lost too much already.”
In the middle of a story about two individuals lost in a storm, this powerful phrase underscores a gut-wrenching context to the worst natural disaster in American history. The quote comes from Katrina, a one act by Ladarrion Williams at the Loft Ensemble’s upstairs black box space, Sawyer’s Playhouse. The show takes place inside a hospital room in 2005 New Orleans, furnished with two beds and the unconscious strangers in them, covered in dust and debris. The pair of patients fumble to remember who they are and how they got there as newscasters report with alarm on the raging hurricane outside. Over time, Nyla and Dante puzzle out pieces of their identities, but the longer the amnesiacs are trapped, the more they wonder if it’s possible to make it out alive.
Katrina is a highly sensory play; from an excellently crafted hurricane soundscape to a backdrop cleverly painted to meld with the projections of a churning sea, the audience is encouraged to feel immersed in the storm. The recounting of Hurricane Katrina is communicated by footage, voice over, and the acted-out broadcasts of two newscasters. (A note for theatregoers: the seating arrangement will give those seated by the entrance a close-up view of these actors from behind.) The weatherperson and reporter step in and out of the fourth wall throughout the show, sometimes reporting live on the 2005 tragedy, and sometimes speaking directly to the audience about what it was like. All four talented Black actors that make up the cast are at their most powerful in their characters’ moments of greatest distress, but a favorite moment was the temporary levity during Nyla’s a capella solo “Give Me Some Blues” as she sang and danced with Dante.
Playwright Ladarrion Williams reports that Katrina was written in 2011 as his first play, won first place at the Alabama State Thespian Conference under the title Concrete Rose, and was part of A Noise Within Theatre’s “Noise Now” series. His goal as a writer is to “cultivate a new era of Black fantasy” and that mission manifests in Katrina through attention to the facts. The oscillation between dialogue and horrified lecture is designed to both shock and educate the audience on the event, and to contextualize the disaster via the individual lives of those who went through it.
The premise itself is solid — however, signs do remain that the play probably hasn’t changed enough since 2011. Putting two amnesiacs in a locked room is difficult to pace well; the characters slow the plot by asking every question the audience is thinking out loud without knowing the answer. The dialogue’s syntax and the clumsy balancing of periodic laughs with stilted trauma-dumping could both use a second pass to make the characters believable and compelling. There are several moments that seem awkwardly inserted in the larger work, like the nightmare sequence featuring ghostly hands pressed against the door window, and the plot’s resolution relies on a somewhat overdone plot twist, albeit with a slightly new spin on it.
Katrina still has a little bit of that “playwright’s first play” flavor, but ultimately its message is powerful and its impact is sound. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, so audiences who enjoy dramatic stories rooted in real life and want to support emerging artists of color can attend before it closes on February 19.
Note: The performance venue is reached via a one-flight staircase and may be physically inaccessible to some audiences.
Sawyer’s Playhouse at The Loft Ensemble, 11031 Camarillo Street, North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; thru Feb. 19. https://www.loftensemble.org/mainstage-events
