Last year was the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which essentially ended public segregation.
About 75 percent of the current American population was born after the end of segregation. In 50 years, no American will have ever directly experienced segregation. The history of segregation will always exist in the annals of American history, yet as more people who lived during that period die, their personal memory will die with them.
Now enjoying its Houston premiere at Stages, Christina Anderson’s, the ripple, the wave that carried me home, is an attempt to remember American history through the memory of a Black woman who lived it and not through the impersonal words of a team of educators and consultants who write the textbooks.
In this poetic memory play, Janice (Lakeisha Rochelle Randle), living in Ohio, reflects on her upbringing in Kansas and the racism that seems to always be looming over her. She finds herself thinking much of her childhood whenever she encounters water.
Janice’s father, Edwin, (Joseph Palmore) and Janice’s mother, Helen, (Sarah Sachi) are community activists with the reputation in their small town for advocating for Black kids to have access to public pools. Their dreams bring them at odds with many of the white people in town who seek to use fancy accounting or contractual loopholes to cheat her parents and the Black people in the community from having access to what should be publicly available for all.
Young Janice is too preoccupied with dolls to grasp fully the extent of her parent’s struggle. As she gets older, Janice grows more distant from her parents and their decades-long fight when she begins to believe that they value the struggle more than they care about her.
She becomes so disillusioned with the wasted efforts of her parents that water has become a sign of deprivation and sadness. She finds comfort from her Aunt Gayle (Deshae Lashawn) who has moved far away from the politics of swimming pools and buys a farm below the Mason-Dixon Line.
As she navigates back between both her current time period of 1992 and her childhood, swimming and swimming pools become a powerful reminder of exclusion and restriction that fundamentally alter Janice’s relationship with not only her parents but also water. How can anyone find peace of mind when they are at odds with their source of life?
This play does more telling than showing, and there are times when the need to provide exposition slows down the rhythm of the production, but overall, the director, Eboni Bell Darcy does a good job in bringing home the themes of redemption, healing and compassion that flow throughout this almost 100-minute performance.
This play excels when Janice’s parents are at the forefront of the narrative. Over the course of the play, Sachi and Palmore establish a rhythm with each other that grows more natural and synchronous as their relationship evolves.
Palmore’s initial charisma and sense of humor makes it easy to see how he becomes the “face” of the movement. His impassioned storytelling and playful sense of humor quickly endears himself to the audience. Being serious about his desire for justice does not make him unable to create joy in his daily life through dance and music.
Palmore’s becoming less playful and joyful as the play unravels speaks to the gradual loss of hope and humor as one goes against an unjust system and is unable to make any semblance of a dent.
Sachi’s presence gradually grows throughout the play as it becomes clearer that she is just as important to integrating the pools of Beacon, Kansas than her smooth talking and charming husband. Sachi has the connections and upbringing that enable her to have access to the ears and resources of more connected people.
Both Sachi and Palmore’s performances feel rooted in reality. In a play where the dialogue shifts arbitrarily between more heightened and poetic language to the everyday, it’s important to have actors who triumphantly navigate those shifts and make it feel organic to the world of the play.
There is so much this play wants to remember. It wants to remember the wives and women of activists who typically go unnamed and unrecognized at the sake of the charismatic man. It wants to remember the history of segregating public pools and the long term effects of barring Black people from learning how to swim. It wants to remember the past instances of racial violence to call attention to just how much racism hasn’t changed from 60 years ago.
At times, this play feels like Janice isn’t recollecting her life. Instead, she’s teaching the audience. About racism. About the difficulties of being Black. About how the retelling of activism erases the role of women.
The scenic design (Torsten Louis) does not help to avoid the classroom-like feeling. The floor of the stage is a painting of a river and its nearby rocks. The painting looks like something from a Pre-K playroom. Then as the river extends and the gaze looks up toward the background, the design looks more like a mural seen outside an elementary school office.
Distractingly reminiscent of the juvenile, the set evokes being back at a time in life where children play with blocks and color outside of the lines rather than being in the world of Janice’s memories. Having a literal drawing of a source of water seems oddly unimaginative for a play with such an abstractly profound relationship with water and water’s role in creating identity.
The play ends on a satisfying and healing note. The ending is worth the lack of overall dramatic action. It points toward the true purpose of this play which is to celebrate the fruits of the hardships that they have overcome. How could watching the women enjoy and bond in a pool that decades earlier excluded them not leave a smile on your face?
Performances continue through March 23 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 2:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Stages at The Gordy Theatre, 800 Rosine. For more information, call 713-527-0123 or visit stageshouston.com. $56-$96.
