First things first.
According to rising playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza, New Orleanians who spoke out about government neglect and unpreparedness in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were prophets. “They were prophets,” she emphasizes, “who were not listened to.”
In San Francisco last week for rehearsals and filming of the SF Playhouse/Lorraine Hansberry Theater production her play [hieroglyph], about a 13-year-old New Orleanian girl displaced to Chicago in the wake of Katrina, Dickerson-Despenza, herself black and queer with an extended family based in New Orleans, pointed to the devastating 2005 storm as a harbinger of things to come—from the institutional unpreparedness that led to America’s embarassing year- long coronavirus fumble; to the blithe blindness about climate change that has left thousands of Mississippi households still without potable water after last month’s unseasonable Southern freeze.
Asked whether she felt audiences would be willing to focus on one national trauma in the midst of another, Dickerson-Despenza said she thought it was essential. And she suggested that we need to pay attention to overarching themes in our national conduct rather than chopping history into momentous individual events. “There’s a difference between remembering something and learning from it,” she stressed. “Nationally, we have learned nothing. Government failure has only gotten worse since Katrina.”
While Dickerson-Despenza currently lives in New York, over the past year she’s spent more time than usual in her family’s historic hometown of New Orleans. “I’ve developed an even deeper understanding of how the poor reponse to Katrina continues to impact life there, even today.”
Second things first.
[hieroglyph] is actually the second play in Dickerson-Despenza’s planned 10-part series about the post-Katrina diaspora. But echoing the disorderly jumble of life amidst disaster,
its world premiere production—staged for cameras last week and streaming on-demand from this Saturday night through April 3—will be available to most audiences before they’ve had a chance to see first installment, shadow/land. (Despite their connections, the two plays are written to work as standalone shows).
First presented as a staged reading in New York in 2019, shadow/land, which takes place as Katrina bears down on New Orleans, was significantly rewritten by Dickerson-Despenza to work as an audioplay, which will be offered as a free on-demand stream and download from The Public Theater beginning on April 13.
[hieroglyph] Video on demand, 3/13 – 4/3. Tickets from $15. www.sfplayhouse.org
shadow/land Audio on demand, from 4/13. Free. www.publictheater.org
