Three cities, three plays and one much-lauded Louisiana playwright. This March and April, theaters in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette each will host a production from John Biguenet’s Rising Water trilogy.
“Plays have a relationship to the place in which they are performed that differs significantly from other forms of storytelling,” says Biguenet, who received the 2012 Louisiana Writer Award in Baton Rouge last year during the Louisiana Book Festival. “The accent of local actors, for example, subtly alters the script so that the audience hears itself on the stage. In fact, if one considers the history of theater, plays were typically the medium in which particular communities considered issues central to their cultures.”
Two of these plays premiered years apart at Southern Repertory Theatre, but this is the first opportunity to see all three in a back-to-back fashion.
In 2007, Biguenet’s play Rising Water premiered at Southern Rep, soon becoming the theater’s bestselling show, a record broken when New Orleans still hadn’t regained much of its population. The play began winning awards before its premiere, including an Access to Artistic Excellence production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The second play in the cycle, Shotgun, premiered at Southern Rep in 2009, also winning accolades. Mold, the final play in the trilogy, will premiere at Southern Rep this month.
In Rising Water, coming to LSU’s Swine Palace this month, a couple wakes up in bed hours after Hurricane Katrina has passed to find water filling their home. The couple, Camille and Sugar, climbs to the attic, eventually breaking through to the roof, where they wait for help. As they climb through detritus and mementos, they reflect on their lives together. Swine Palace’s staging is co-directed by George Judy and Ben Koucherick, starring Judy as Sugar with Cristine McMurdo-Wallis reprising her role as Camille from the original production.
Judy calls Rising Water “an ideal choice” for Swine Palace, as the theater is celebrating Louisiana writers as part of the bicentennial season. “An amazing relationship is revealed in the play, and discovering those lives promises to be an exciting collaboration on stage that will speak to important issues that continue to haunt not only New Orleans but our country,” Judy says.
Rising Water will be staged in the intimate studio theater, allowing a performance that creates “the feeling of the entire theater being ‘trapped in the attic’ of our emotional past and present lives,” Judy says, calling this a memory play in the tradition of Tennessee Williams. Koucherick says he feels “a great sense of honor and responsibility to share this story with this community.”
Acting Unlimited in Lafayette will present the second of the trilogy, Shotgun, directed by Walter Brown March 9-17 at Theatre 810 on Jefferson Street. Shotgun takes place a few months after the levees broke and flooded the city. A black woman takes in her father, who has lost his home in the Lower 9th Ward, and rents the other half of her shotgun to a white man and his teenage son. Marie Delahoussaye-Diaz, the producer of Shotgun, says that it is the story of two families “who you come to care about quickly.” Acting Unlimited also plans a very intimate design, with little space between the audience and the stage.
Aimee Hayes, artistic director of Southern Rep, says each play is a love story. “We live in a difficult place,” she says, and Mold deals with “love of home,” asking the essential question of “Do we stay or do we go?” She describes the set design—the buckled floor of a ruined house, a ceiling fan with wilted wings, the mold—all of which she says many audience members will recognize.
The trilogy organizers hope audiences will travel to each city in order to experience the entire cycle. Hayes says this is a “tremendous opportunity to celebrate a Louisiana writer, one of our great treasures.”
• Rising Water at Swine Palace in Baton Rouge, March 6-17
