The women in Curious Theatre Company’s production of “Cullud Wattah,” from left: Reesee , Big Ma , Plum , Ainee and Marion . Jackson, Miss.; Cape Town, South Africa; Mexico City; Flint, Mich. If you’ve been paying heed the last few years , then this much-abridged list might suggest a “Jeopardy!” answer. What cities have been affected by water crises?Coloradans are no strangers to concerns about water, be they drought-driven, water-rights driven or heavy-minerals-tainted.
Playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza pours both the ritual and the real into her powerfully poetic script, weaving African gestures with journalistic details. “Cullud wattah” ambitiously deals with the many ways a family can be let down — by a nation, a state, a city, a corporation and sometimes even each other. God’s culpability, too, is considered.
Big Ma, Marion and Ainee make a prickly triumvirate, cohabitating more out of economic necessity than familial fondness. Their barbs, inside jibes and grievances with each other are familiar to many an intergenerational drama but the duress they undergo is particular to a crisis that disproportionately affected people of color and the low-income.
When the play opens, the women have been living with the rusty, brown and speckled tap water for nearly two years. While the water bill climbs and Marion’s property value plummets, they rely on costly bottled and ineffective boiled water to cook and bathe. The play deftly handles the journalistic information about the catastrophe, sometimes in the dialog. At other times, snatches of the disaster are caught in the ambient sounds of radio and television broadcasts.
Scenic designer Tina Anderson’s set is wide and deep and crowded enough to convey the sense of an abode grown claustrophobic with too many people. The sounds of water, dripping, flowing, swelling or receding is the evocative work of sound designer Joseph Lamar. The interplay of shadow and light reinforces moments of the mystical as well as a sense of inundation, of an overflowing.
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