Until the Flood
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Center Theatre Group, Kirk Douglas Theatre
Through February 23
RECOMMENDED:
The fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in 2014 cast a harsh spotlight on the community of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s killing (six bullets in the front) provoked riots and unrest, stirring righteous rage within a black community long subject to abuse and intimidation from an all-white police force (supported in turn by an all-white city council). The riots were countered with tank and military style weaponry purchased from the federal government. Unable to corroborate the account of the shooting by Brown’s companion — that he’d been approaching Wilson with his hands up, prepared to surrender — a local grand jury declined to indict. Meanwhile, a report by the DOJ also exonerated the officer — but that same report went on to note the systemic violation in Ferguson of African Americans’ rights: that they were twice as likely to be stopped, searched, cited and arrested as white people, the name of the game being the accumulation of revenue by the city, ultimately on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable.
The documentary film Whose Streets, co-directed by Sabaah Folayan (a filmmaker from South Central L.A.) and Damon Davis, is a passionate telling of this story from the vantage point of the oppressed. You can’t tell this tale of institutionalized terror too often, however, and in 2015 the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis commissioned playwright/performer Dael Orlandersmith to develop a play around these events. Orlandersmith interviewed hundreds of people, both black and white, and put together Until the Flood, an exploratory piece made up of a series of monologues, each a fictional composite of a citizen of Ferguson (or its environs). Each monologue relays this person’s point of view — and by extension the view of an American from anywhere — of community and race.
Directed by Neel Keller, Until the Flood is a palette of grays, as well as a map that tracks the fault lines and schisms within families as well as races. One of its most poignant themes is the “self-hate” among its victims that racism can breed. Louisa, a black retired schoolteacher, grew up chafing at her truncated horizons; she got up and out, attending City College in New York City and changing her life — but returning to the community was subject not only to belittlement by a white shopkeeper but also to the scorn of the shopkeeper’s black employee, another young woman like Louisa herself. The incident brought on an even more painful altercation with her parents, who refused to condemn the other girl, understanding as they did how internalized racism can be as destructive as the laws that keep it in place.
Orlandersmith also portrays Rusty, a white cop with 30 years on the force, who recounts his confrontations with young black men — perceiving their fear and anger and the nothing-to-lose despairing bravado that seems to dare him to shoot them. Rusty is ambivalent about Brown’s death; he knows there are cops on the force that abuse their power and shouldn’t wield guns, but on the other hand fellow cops are “brothers,” and he ultimately comes down on Wilson’s side.
Other characters include Hassan, a defiant teen who might be one of the youths Rusty faces off with; Connie, a white schoolteacher whose viewpoint — that the shooting was a dual-edged tragedy, for both Brown and Wilson — enrages her long time black friend and colleague (“Brown is dead!”) and ends their friendship; Reuben, a black barber contemptuous of the college activists come to save him; and Dougray, the landlord from Appalachia whose hard-knocks up-by-his-bootstraps story segues to a screed of hate.
The set (Takeshi Kata) is spare in the playing area, a couple of chairs, a lamp, positioned variously about the stage; around the rim are flowers, candles and other makings of the kind of memorial that people are wont to leave at the site of a tragedy. Nicholas Hussong’s projections are vivid abstracts in fiery red, blue and green to suggest the turmoil of time, place and event.
The writing itself is simple, eloquent, straight-to-the-heart storytelling, best suited to an intimate venue. Some of the power of these stories may be lost to the audience member seated, as I was, a distance from the proscenium, where Orlandersmith’s face — and the changes she undergoes as she shifts from one character to the next — are often too indistinct to be appreciated.
Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m., Sun., 1 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.; through Feb. 23. https://centertheatregroup.org. Running time: 70 minutes with no intermission.
