INTERVIEW: Climate crisis comes into focus at ‘Facing the Rising Tide’ digital festival
Photos: From left, Erika Dickerson-Despenza and Jessica Huang both have works featured at the Facing the Rising Tide festival. Photos courtesy of the artists / Provided by Seven 17 PR with permission.
The New Group, an off-Broadway company forced to cancel in-person theater events due to COVID-19, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have banded together for a unique festival that explores the themes of environmental justice and the climate crisis. Facing the Rising Tide, which runs July 20-24, is billed as a free digital festival of play readings and conversations.
Each night there will be a new play presented, followed by a thoughtful discussion on the festival’s overall themes. In addition, the two organizations will showcase a “New Group Now” panel discussion that looks at how art and storytelling can help save the world. All events will be broadcast on YouTube Live.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with two playwrights featured in the festival. Responses have been edited for style.
shadow/land
On Tuesday, July 21 at 7 p.m., the festival will virtually screen a reading of shadow/land by Erika Dickerson-Despenza and directed by Candis C. Jones. Dickerson-Despenza, according to her biography, is a Blk, queer feminist poet-playwright and cultural/memory worker from Chicago. Some of her accolades include the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award (2020), Thom Thomas Award (2020), L. Arnold Weissberger Award finalist (2020) and Princess Grace Playwriting Award (2019).
The new show serves as the first part of an epic 10-play Katrina Cycle.
“shadow/land is a water-logged supernatural disaster drama where we meet Ruth, who’s desperately trying to convince her dementia-ridden mother, Magalee, to sell Shadowland, the family business and New Orleans’ first air-conditioned dancehall and hotel for Black people,” Dickerson-Despenza shared in an email to Hollywood Soapbox. “Ruth’s recently taken up photography and photographs the property as a simple means of keeping Shadowland’s memories intact, but as Hurricane Katrina begins her ruin, Ruth is forced to wrestle with all that she’s ready to let go.”
The playwright stated that when the news coverage focused on New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there was a lot of attention given to the loss of homes, but what didn’t receive the same attention was loss of cultural institutions, Black land legacies and family histories. The writer believes it is important to document “what lives now only as memories of what the water took away.”
“Katrina is not over,” Dickerson-Despenza added. “This project traverses the Katrina diaspora in an examination of the ongoing effects of displacement rippling in and beyond New Orleans. Together, the 10 works underscore colonialism, environmental anti-Black racism and the erasure of Black land legacies through the distress of disaster, evacuation, displacement and urban renewal.”
As a writer, Dickerson-Despenza is responding to both Hurricane Katrina and “The Flood,” and the timeless lessons of both (she said these lessons “do not expire”). The playwright believes these lessons and underlying issues can be found in more recent cases like the Flint Water crisis, the treatment of Palestinians and migrants in Israel, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latinx communities know environmental racism intimately because we are the communities who experience it,” the playwright stated. “Our respective communities have long histories of abolitionist climate justice work and fighting environmental racism. We see that in the work of Grace Lee Boggs and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. We see it in Octavia Butler’s work and the work of her contemporary, the indomitable N.K. Jemisin.”
Other work that she mentioned: the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project, Black Millennials for Flint and 350.org.
The writer, whose play cullud wattah was originally going to play the Public Theater this summer, added that she is called and compelled to write, with a special connection to her ancestors and the land. “My paternal family migrated to New Orleans from Palermo, Sicily, in the late 1880s and have resided in Central City and New Orleans East ever since,” she wrote. “I have living relatives who survived Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent deadly flooding. Although all of them were temporarily displaced but many returned to ‘The City That Care Forgot’ to rebuild the only home the Despenza family had known for nearly 120 years.”
In 2005, when Katrina hit, Dickerson-Despenza was barely a teenager and didn’t initially grasp the fullness of the water’s destruction, “much less Black people’s historic traumatizing experiences with water in the U.S. As I spent more time in Crescent City, I quickly learned that New Orleanians have an uncanny intimacy with sensory detail. My great cousin’s stories of growing up in Shadowland were so vivid that I often found myself reaching out to touch them, asking for photographs. Each time, he’d give the same jolting reply, ‘I got memories not photographs; I lost them all in the flood.'”
Ultimately the idea for the Katrina Cycle came from this family history and the glaring omission of Black women writers and Black women-centered narratives in the Katrina canon, she stated. This new project has also continued her love of language, a love that goes back to when she was a child.
“I was speaking in full sentences at eight months old,” Dickerson-Despenza wrote. “As the story goes, according to mother, I watched my extended aunt Vern get ready to leave the house, and I ran across the room saying, ‘Aunt Vern I want to go with you!’ — frightening everyone present. I had advanced language acquisition and speech emergence but waited until I had something important to say. Writing has always been an extension of that for me.”
For the playwright, writing symbolizes many important things: a meeting place, the most intimate truth-telling and how she interrogates the world. “It is how I speculate the absence of archives of otherwise Black experiences and how I archive the right now for the future,” she said.
Mother of Exiles
Another play featured at the Facing the Rising Tide festival will be Mother of Exiles by Jessica Huang and directed by Seonjae Kim; the show will air on YouTube Live Thursday, July 23 at 7 p.m. The show follows the Loi family’s journey across 200 years, with scenes in California in 1898, Miami in 1998 and somewhere on the ocean in 2098.
Huang, according to her biography, is the inaugural recipient of the 4 Seasons Residency, the 2019 resident playwright at Chance Theater, a 2018 MacDowell Fellow and a three-time Playwrights’ Center Fellow. Her other work includes The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin (2018 Barry and Bernice Stavis Award, 2017 Kilroy’s List), Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying and Purple Cloud.
“I had been sitting with the idea for this play for some time — wanting to track interracial, intercultural love across time, and see how the family intersected with moments of xenophobia in American history,” Huang stated in a recent email interview with Hollywood Soapbox. “I created a huge timeline on the wall near my desk — part family tree and part outline of American history. The final version of the play zooms in on a few sections of this family’s history, but in order to write it, I figured out the whole thing.”
Huang said that Mother of Exiles focuses on what she sees as a constant: regardless of time period, there will also be brave and passionate people choosing to love each other, help each other and support each other, despite cultural differences and societal restrictions.
This theme becomes especially apparent in the final section, set in 2098. “This section of the play has inspired a lot of potent emotional reactions,” Huang stated. “I think we all are bracing ourselves for the impending climate crisis, and I hope we can use the teachings of our ancestors to help each other through it.”
In Huang’s overall writing, she is motivated by questions surrounding the reframing of collective history, honoring those stories that have been forgotten and one’s awareness of how their life impacts the future. Ultimately she’s after human connection and truth. “Before I was an artist, I had a brief career as a journalist,” she stated, “always hoping to shed some light on the truth and reframe the things I thought were being taken for granted.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Facing the Rising Tide, co-presented by The New Group and Natural Resources Defense Council, runs July 20-24. Click here for more information on the play readings and discussions.
