Stuck on the roof

As life imitates art, so does art draw inspiration from reality. In a perfect world great events would lead to equally great art. If only it was that easy.

Katrina, the costliest and most deadly hurricane to ever hit the United States, devastated the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in August 2005, left more than $81 billion in damages, and displaced millions of residents, some of the hardest hit in New Orleans. A combination of indifference and incompetence on the part of the Bush Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state and local governments has turned mostly poor and Black residents of that city into homeless refugees, some still in trailers now approaching three years later.

Lower Ninth is a new Off Broadway play in production at The Flea Theater in Lower Manhattan set among the wreckage in that section of New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward, that borders the Mississippi River to the South and Saint Bernard Parish to the east. Mostly Black and working class, the neighborhood was left under water by the storm. People there lost lives and homes. Many have yet to return or rebuild.

The play tells the story of two men who have been stranded on a rooftop for three days. Malcolm (James McDaniel from ABC’s NYPD Blue), is an itinerant worker, now devout Bible-reader and stepfather to E-Z (Gaius Charles of NBC’s Friday Night Lights), a directionless young man seemingly angry with life and his present circumstances. A third man, Lowboy (Gbenga Akinnagbe from HBO’s The Wire) begins the play as a lifeless corpse wrapped in plastic, a former friend of E-Z who he rescued but couldn’t save from the rising waters.

In the small black box space at The Flea, set designer Donyale Werle has taken over the entire stage with a large, realistic rooftop set that creates a believable sense of abandonment. It is easy to imagine the water around them offering no hope for escape. Heather Dunbar’s costumes are appropriate for a hot, steamy New Orleans August and days spent without a bath.

Now, if only the actors and designers had a good play to work with.

Playwright Beau Willimon offers a one-act that understandably shifts the dialogue from subject to subject (what would you talk about all day if you were on a roof for three days) but quickly it just becomes blather. From last rites to games of twenty questions to how Malcolm met E-Z’s mother and more, he doesn’t spend enough time allowing us to know these men or care anything about them. Instead of mining the natural dramatic tension that might be drawn from an understanding of the circumstances that got them on the roof instead of away to safety, the playwright pursues middling attempts at sentimentality. In brief explorations of the relationship between Malcolm and E-Z, and E-Z and Lowboy, the story is neither compelling nor interesting, a mere collection of scenes, barely rising above the level of a bad made-for-tv movie.

Director Daniel Goldstein, like his actors, does a capable job with inferior material. In an inspired choice, to illustrate how these men are surviving both day and night, he plunges the theater in total darkness, the actors voices the only clue that anyone is still out there. If only they’d had more interesting things to say.

As Spike Lee has proven with his Emmy winning documentary on Katrina, that tragic episode is rife with artistic possibilities. Hopefully others will find a way to explore them for the stage.