Stories from the spill

Leigh Fondakowski was sitting in on a discussion after a recent performance of The Laramie Project. As a co-writer of the play about the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, as well as the HBO miniseries that followed, she’s still heavily involved in the play’s continued life.

Someone at the discussion asked Fondakowski what she was working on next. She responded: a play about south Louisiana and the BP oil spill. “Oh, that’s a different kind of sadness,” the woman told her.

Fondakowski was struck by the statement and the idea of locating an easy-to-identify victim in such a devastating eventespecially having spent so much time interviewing nearly 100 people in south Louisiana affected by the spill, from fishermen to the families of oil rig workers who died in the explosion.

“I think there are some prejudices about people from Louisiana from outside the area,” she says. “Those guys out there [on the oil rigs] made good money, they knew the dangers they were getting into, so why should I feel sad for them? As a dramatist, it’s an interesting question. The convenience of how we live hinges upon them risking their lives, so when we stop to think about it there’s this side of uneasiness like, Well, he didn’t die because of me.’ But he kind of did die because of all of us, right?”

This month, the play and portrait exhibition Fondakowski developed with artist Reeva Wortel will have its world premiere at Swine Palace as Spill. The pair started the project in March 2011, visiting with people from Port Fourchon to Buras who had been affected in some way.

They recorded hours of interviews and Wortel painted portraits of the locals they met who would eventually become the 30 characters depicted by a host of actors in the play.

Wortel’s life-size portraits, glowing with personality, will be on display in an exhibition space at Swine Palace after each performance.

“It will give people a place to linger and talk about what they’ve seen as opposed to just running out of the theater to their cars,” Fondakowski says. “It can become kind of a communal experience.”

About staging the play in Louisiana:
“We were pretty committed to premiering it here before we went to other places in the country so that the people we interviewed could sort of have the experience of it. It’s scary to premiere it here. I would want it to be completely finished and have great reviews all over the world and then bring it back here … but this is like getting its sea legs. I think for me, it’s a way of getting the feedback: You trusted us with your stories, how did we do? … There is something about someone endowing you with this privilege of telling their stories and not just taking it and running out of here. … We’re wanting to honor that contract that we made with them.”

How the play might be received here and elsewhere:
“I think the way the play comes across is if you’re from here, you’ll recognize these smaller communities. But I think when we did the reading in New York it felt like one community. It felt like the whole community of the coast talking, and that was my aim—to really have it feel like the community is the protagonist in this story and the community is talking and telling its own story.”

Learning about life as an offshore worker:
“We got here and saw the details of the industry that I had no clue about. I got kind of drawn into that other narrative about how dangerous it is to drill, the careers people build [in offshore work], the prestige of being out on that rig.”

What they heard most during their interviews:
“We interviewed 99 people. Not one person said, ‘Stop drilling.’ People said to drill safer, to calculate the risks and the consequences …”

About collaborating with Reeva Wortel on the project:
“Reeva had been doing this kind of work independently—doing interviews [with people in struggling communities] and making portraits—and I had seen an installation of hers in Oregon. I just made a mental note, ‘Oh that’s cool. She’s doing what I’m doing but totally differently. Maybe that is something we can collaborate on in the future.’”

About any big statements the play might make about the oil industry:
“It doesn’t come down one way or the other on what we should do because I don’t think anybody ultimately knows exactly what we should do. But I think it really captures this moment, this sort of period where we are now.”

Adapting to the routines of coastal residents:
“This was very different from other projects I’ve done before. We’d call people [for interviews] and they’d be like, ‘OK, come over right now and have dinner with us and we’ll take you out on our boat.’ … You kind of have to just grab those moments because they are just very rare opportunities to experience a place and a culture.”