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      Review: Racism Echoes Through Time in ‘the ripple’

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      The story of a Black family’s fight to desegregate public pools spans decades in Christina Anderson’s play at Yale Repertory Theater.NEW HAVEN — The story of teenage adventure that Edwin loves to tell his little girl, Janice, comes from his own life: the time in the early 1950s when he and some friends sneaked into an all-white swimming pool in their Kansas hometown, and one of them dived in for a speedy lap.“White folks scream and holler,” Edwin says, savoring the drama of a well-planned disruption. “Women scramble to get out while fellas jump in and try to get a hold of that beautiful, Black Aquaman!”No one ever caught any of them, Edwin adds triumphantly — and the pool was “shut down for three whole days.”“Why?” young Janice asks.“Sanitization,” her father replies. “A Negro ‘infected’ the water, they said.”Christina Anderson’s poetically titled new play, “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” lands a number of gut punches like that one. In Tamilla Woodard’s somewhat blunted production for Yale Repertory Theater, it spans decades to tell the story of one Black family’s tiny, Midwestern corner of the fight against racial segregation — both the kind that was once enforced by law and the slippery kind that came later, skulking around legality to maintain all-white preserves.Janice’s mother, Helen, was raised a passionate swimmer. Her own father ran a program teaching Black children to swim, and as a teenager Helen took up teaching, too. A few years later, two 8-year-olds she had taught drowned with a white friend in a lake where they went to swim together.This is the deeply felt tragedy that turns Helen (Chalia La Tour) and Edwin (Marcus Henderson) into local activists for pool integration and access. In a town that would rather close its pools than desegregate them — a Civil Rights-era practice called “drained-pool politics,” as a program note says — the cause consumes them for years. As a teenager in the 1970s, Janice (Jennean Farmer) comes to see it with some resentment as her parents’ battle, not hers. But the ripples of racism in American culture are inescapable.Janice looks back on all this from 1992 Ohio, around the time that four white Los Angeles police officers are being tried in connection with the beating of the Black motorist Rodney King. (The play does not mention it, but 20 years later King will drown in his own swimming pool.)The catalyst for Janice’s memories is an invitation — from the comically named Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (an excellent Adrienne S. Wells, who doubles in the role of Janice’s Aunt Gayle) — to return to Kansas for the naming of a pool in her father’s honor. That rankles as an erasure of her mother; her parents did everything as a team.A drama that is also about family and healing and home, “the ripple” cries out for a sense of intimacy that this production unfortunately lacks. It is foiled by slack pacing and Emmie Finckel’s vaulted set, which for all its visual appeal is a mismatch for the show. A thing of elegant beauty, beguilingly lit by Alan C. Edwards, it has a vastness that leaves the characters adrift, too far from us.the ripple, the wave that carried me homeThrough May 20 at Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; yalerep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Born of Grief, a Couple’s Off Broadway Incubator Marks 20 Years

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      Even as it celebrates with a gala, the Ars Nova family now faces another challenge as one of its founders confronts A.L.S.In 2002, Jenny and Jon Steingart founded the Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova as a way of honoring Jenny’s brother, Gabriel Wiener, who in 1997 died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 26. Now, as the nonprofit theater is marking its 20th anniversary, the couple is facing another wrenching struggle: Jon has A.L.S., the severe neurological disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.“Every painful experience in my life — if I have to live through it, I am going to come out on the other side with a lesson and a way to give back in some way,” Jenny Steingart said in a recent interview at their home on the Upper West Side. “Because a loss without some meaning behind it is really hard to live with.”So this anniversary, to be celebrated with a gala on Monday, also finds the Steingarts feeling great satisfaction, having created an institution that — in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — has played a crucial role in the professional development of so many artists.Among those who have worked at Ars Nova are Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail, Christopher Jackson and Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame; Bridget Everett, the actress and cabaret performer of the acclaimed HBO series “Somebody Somewhere”; and Dave Malloy, who created “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” at Ars Nova.More recently, Ars Nova presented Heather Christian’s widely-praised music-theater piece “Oratorio for Living Things,” after being delayed by the pandemic shutdown.“This theater has done the good work of incubating extraordinary artists,” said the “Hamilton” producer Jeffrey Seller, adding that Mimi Lien, the scenic designer for his current Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd” — who won a Tony for “Great Comet” — came out of Ars Nova. “Many people make things,” he added, “but few of them are vital 20 years later.”When Ars Nova offered Everett a creative home, she was performing in karaoke bars. With its support, she developed her brash 2007 solo show, “At Least It’s Pink” at Ars Nova. “I was taken aback by their enthusiasm for me because I wasn’t getting anything anywhere,” Everett said. “I would not have a career if it wasn’t for them seeing something in me.”The improvised rap evening “Freestyle Love Supreme” had its beginning at Ars Nova, which also helped birth the musical “KPOP.”The director Alex Timbers (“Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”) got his start at Ars Nova, with Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s doomsday comedy “Boom.” “It was the first time I’d been hired professionally to direct and given access to designers I would never have gotten to work with on my own,” he said. “It was not only a gift, but a leap of faith.”The cast of the 2017 Off Broadway production of “KPOP,” which occupied two floors of a building in Hell’s Kitchen.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesLucas Steele, left, and Denée Benton in the 2016 Broadway production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” at the Imperial Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the gala, Ars Nova will announce a financial pledge from the Steingarts that will enable a more consistent presentation of comedy in addition to its current variety show, “Showgasm.” Citing, for example, Ars Nova’s “Creation Nation,” a popular live variety program that featured the comedian Billy Eichner, Jon Steingart said comedy — as well as music — taps into “where youth culture is right now.”Jenny Steingart, 55, a Manhattan native, said her parents — Michael A. Wiener, who helped found the Infinity Broadcasting chain of radio stations, and Zena, a music teacher and singer — encouraged her to follow her passion. “‘What are you aligned with?’” she recalled them asking. “‘What is the thing that sparks you?’”Jon, now 55, grew up in Southern California and was a producer of the Broadway show “Julia Sweeney’s ‘God Said “Ha!.”’” They married in 2002 and now have three children, ages 19, 16 and 13.After the death of her brother, who produced recordings of early music, Jenny said she and Jon “let his legacy inspire the creation of new art.”Jenny Steingart and Anthony Veneziale accepted a special Tony Award for “Freestyle Love Supreme” in 2021. Theo Wargo/Getty Images For Tony Awards ProIn the early years, the Steingarts, together with the theater’s founding artistic director, Jason Eagan, were out every night trolling for talent, an approach that continues to this day. “We’re looking at artists with potential,” Eagan said, “rather than artists with résumés.”Ars Nova, which planted its flag on West 54th Street, quickly established itself as a space where artists could take big chances, where “you can say, I want to make an electro pop opera about a slice of ‘War and Peace,’” said Renee Blinkwolt, the company’s producing executive director, referring to “Great Comet,” which won Tony Awards for lighting as well as scenic design. (In 2016, the show’s commercial producers agreed to revise how it credited Ars Nova’s contributions to “Great Comet” in Playbill.)Despite having cemented its status as a staple of the New York theatrical landscape, Ars Nova, which in 2019 opened a second theater at Greenwich House in the Village, remains relatively scrappy, with an annual operating budget of about $4 million and a staff of 14. A ticket subsidy program keeps prices low and this season offered pay-what-you-wish.During the pandemic, no employees were furloughed, thanks in part to the Paycheck Protection Program, which covered about 10 percent of the funds required to keep paying artists and staff.These days, the Steingarts are less involved in running the organization, but they continue to play a strong supporting role. Jon spends most of his time researching his disease — “I don’t quit,” he said — recognizing that he is fortunate to be alive five years after his diagnosis. Sitting in a wheelchair at his kitchen table, Jon also described himself as “pretty even keel about acceptance.”“I’m not a person who, win or lose, spends a lot of time asking why me,” he said.Jenny, however, is a little less accepting, although she is doing her best to keep it together.“I don’t want to be Debbie Downer, and I also don’t want to be Pollyanna,” she said. “It’s really important to me to lean into the gratitude I have and the blessings that have come from even the worst stuff.”Though Ars Nova’s close-knit extended family has had to adjust to the prospect of a future without one of its parents, the artists are trying to do what they’ve always done: stay positive and persevere.“The tragedy of losing her brother and what Jon is going through — it’s the brutality of life,” Everett said. “But I’m really glad that what Ars Nova has given does sustain. Putting people on course and giving them a chance — what better gift is that?” More

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      Adam Brace, Director of Ambitious One-Person Shows, Dies at 43

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      He worked with stand-up comedians to develop shows — one of which is headed for Broadway — that were more than just collections of jokes.Adam Brace, a prolific British director renowned as an incisive collaborator with stand-up comedians and other performers on a string of acclaimed one-person shows, one of which is to open on Broadway next month, died on April 29 in London. He was 43.Rebecca Fuller, his partner, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a stroke.For more than a decade, Mr. Brace worked with more than a dozen comedians and actors, up-and-coming as well as established and most of them British, to craft stage shows that were thematically and structurally more ambitious than conventional stand-up sets, more in the tradition of shows starring American monologists like Eric Bogosian, Colin Quinn and Mike Birbiglia.Mr. Brace, who had once been a playwright, helped edit the shows with a sophisticated ear to what audiences wanted.“He looked after so much more than the jokes and the laughs,” said the American comedian Alex Edelman, whose show “Just for Us” is scheduled to begin performances at the Hudson Theater on June 22, after an Obie Award-winning run Off Broadway. It was also staged in London and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the annual performing arts extravaganza. “He looked after the intangibles that can turn a good comedian into a great comedian.”Mr. Edelman, who also worked with Mr. Brace on two other one-man shows, added: “Comedians are maniacs, and he dealt with us at our rawest and most eccentric. He’d take these personal stories and translate them into accessible shows.”“Just for Us” tells the story of how Mr. Edelman, after drawing the attention of white nationalists online, decided to infiltrate a group of them in Queens. It was praised last year by Laura Collins-Hughes in The New York Times as “a brisk, smart provocation of a monologue” about “race and identity in American culture.”The coming move of Mr. Edelman’s show to Broadway follows by several months the opening in London’s West End of “One Woman Show,” Liz Kingsman’s theatrical parody about a playwright who decides to write and perform a confessional monologue. It was nominated for an Olivier Award for best entertainment or comedy play and will open Off Broadway, at the Greenwich House Theater, next month.“With my show, he changed everything,” Ms. Kingsman, an Australian-born actor and writer, said by phone. “It could have been a show that didn’t have a lot of depth, but together we dove down and figured out everything underneath it and everything we wanted to say with the best delivery method.”She added, “I never wanted my show to be a soapbox thing, I never wanted it to sound like I was preaching, so it was about us finding the form where we could make everything funny and digestible.”For Mr. Brace, directing one-person comedy shows like Ms. Kingsman’s was mostly about being a dramaturg, the literary editor of a play. He had held that job at the Soho Theater in London before becoming its associate director.“The term ‘director’ is not a useful or accurate term in comedy, but it’s one we’re stuck with now,” he told The Stage, a British performing arts publication, in 2022. “I don’t really tell anyone to do anything.”“What we’re doing,” he added, “is shaping the whole event. It’s hard-core dramaturgy and, at the most involved level, co-creation.”Mr. Brace and Mr. Edelman working on the Off Broadway production of “Just for Us” before it opened at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2021.Monique CarboniAdam George Brace was born on March 25, 1980, in London. His father, George, an architect, was killed in a bicycle accident before Adam was born. His mother, Nicola (Sturdy) Brace, was a theater administrator. As a teenager, Adam stuffed envelopes with her theater’s season announcements and watched its productions. His paternal grandmother nurtured his interest in theater by taking him to the Edinburgh Festival — where many of the shows he later directed were performed.After receiving a bachelor’s degree in drama from the University of Kent in 2002, he taught English as a foreign language in South Korea and acted at a children’s theater in Kuala Lumpur. He also worked as a gardener, a security guard and a journalist at The Irish Post. In 2007, he received a master’s degree in writing for performance at Goldsmiths, University of London.While studying for his master’s, he traveled to Amman, Jordan, where he researched what turned out to be his first full-length play, “Stovepipe.” The story of the recruitment of private British military contractors during the Iraq war and an ambush that kills one of them, it opened in England in 2008. The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, writing about a 2009 production, said that Mr. Brace’s script “crackles with tense dialogue and gradually reveals a cunning sense of structure.”His next play, “They Drink It in the Congo” (2016), about a young white Londoner’s efforts to start a festival to celebrate Congolese culture and raise awareness of the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was his last. By then, he had begun directing one-person shows. He also worked as an associate at the Gate Theater in London, from 2011 to 2013; as an associate dramaturg at Nuffield Southampton Theaters, from 2013 to 2016; and, most recently, at the Soho Theater.He also worked regularly with Sh!t Theater, a theater company consisting of Ms. Fuller and Louise Mothersole, whose performance art includes music, comedy and multimedia elements.“We called him our directurg,” Ms. Fuller, who performs under the name Rebecca Biscuit, said by phone. “He helped you see connections in things that weren’t visible.”In addition to Ms. Fuller, Mr. Brace is survived by his mother; his brothers, Tim and Alex Hopkins; and his stepfather, Nigel Hopkins.Mr. Edelman said that after a show, he and Mr. Brace would assess how well he had executed several goals, including whether he had found the right balance between stillness and momentum.With Mr. Brace’s death, he said, “One of the things I’m thinking about is, who will be the person to talk to about that execution with me?” More

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      Nataki Garrett to Step Down at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

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      Garrett began her tenure at the organization in August 2019, and plans to depart at the end of this month.Nataki Garrett, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is stepping down after a tumultuous period that concluded with a financial crisis so severe that the nonprofit theater warned that it was unclear whether it would be able to finish this year’s season.One of the most prominent women of color to lead an American theater, Garrett began her tenure in August 2019. She plans to resign effective May 31; the decision was reported on Friday by American Theater magazine, and then announced by the theater.Garrett has encountered a series of crises during her time at the helm of the organization, which has been one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious nonprofit theaters. Based in the southern Oregon town of Ashland, it is a destination theater, meaning most of its audience travels to get there, and it stages much of its work during the summer; before the pandemic, it had been attracting 400,000 patrons annually.Garrett faced not only the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the theater, like most others, to shutter in 2020, but also the impact of climate change, which has particularly affected the Oregon Shakespeare Festival because it has repeatedly been forced to cancel performances when smoke from wildfires has worsened air quality.She has also received pushback to her programming, which some longtime theater patrons objected to as overly left-leaning, and she hired security personnel after receiving death threats.The organization has experienced considerable turnover during her tenure — some of the leaders she brought in to help run the festival have since left — and in January she took on the title of interim executive artistic director after David Schmitz, who Garrett had hired as executive director, departed amid a leadership shake-up. Last month the company began a $2.5 million fund-raising campaign with the dire tagline: “Save Our Season. Save OSF.”Garrett declined, through a spokeswoman, to be interviewed, but issued a statement saying, in part: “We are at an inflection point in our industry, where outdated business models must evolve in order for our theaters to survive. But these challenges also pose great opportunities — to rebuild in a way that reflects where we are today and where we want to be in the future — with actors, staff, audiences, and artistic leaders who reflect the richness of our country’s diversity. This is what excites me. This is the work I came to do.”The company said in a statement that a board member, the playwright Octavio Solis, “will be stepping in to help oversee and support the artistic leadership team during this transitional phase.”The theater currently has two shows running, a production of “Romeo & Juliet,” directed by Garrett, which is described on the company’s website as exploring “the financial and class divisions of our current time,” as well as a production of “Rent.”The theater’s board chairwoman, Diane Yu, said in an interview that the fund-raising campaign is going well and that she is optimistic that this season’s other shows, including productions of “Twelfth Night” and “The Three Musketeers,” will go forward; the theater has canceled its holiday show, and Yu said what happens next year remains unclear, but that “the board is focused on keeping this theater viable — it’s important for the region and it’s important for the American theater.” More

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      Laura Pels, Devoted Supporter of Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 92

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      She led a foundation that underwrote productions for numerous theater groups, as well as playwrights like Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller.Laura Pels, a leading benefactor of nonprofit theater through the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater, which has helped a multitude of companies stage plays in New York City and beyond, died on Wednesday at a hospital near her home in Manhattan. She was 92.The cause was complications of Covid-19, her daughter Juliette J. Meeus said.Ms. Pels took control of the foundation that now bears her name in a divorce settlement with the media executive Donald A. Pels.“I decided that I was going to do exactly what I wanted with it: help the theater,” she told Playbill in 1995.She did just that, diligently guiding the foundation from the 1990s until recently.“She was incredibly involved and ‘hands on,’” Hal Witt, the foundation’s former executive director and a member of the board, wrote in an email, adding that Ms. Pels had “read all of the scripts that were submitted for funding.”There were rules: Productions had to be run by accredited nonprofit theaters; a full script, along with a 500-word statement, had to be submitted; and musicals need not apply.Ms. Pels forged relationships with leading playwrights like Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, Mr. Witt said, and with artistic directors like André Bishop at Lincoln Center Theater, James Houghton at Signature Theater and Todd Haimes at the Roundabout Theater Company.Mr. Haimes, who saved the Roundabout from bankruptcy (and who died last month at 66), said in 1995 that “as traditional sources of funding are drying up, a person like Laura who will sponsor productions makes a huge difference to nonprofit theaters like ours.”He added, “The fact that Laura is a creative person who can come up with her own projects and yet doesn’t tell us how to run the company is the nicest combination one could ask for in a supporter.”Jack Brister, the foundation’s treasurer, said in an email that during his 20 years with the foundation it had granted more than $5 million to nonprofit theaters in the United States.Josette Jeanne Bernard was born on May 1, 1931, in Saint-Vivien-de-Monségur, a village near Bordeaux, France. Her parents, Raymond and Jeanne Yvette (Dauvignac) Bernard, were schoolteachers.She grew up near Bordeaux and then studied mime and acting in Paris, before she decided that the stage was not for her. (Her daughter Juliette said her mother changed her name to Laura in her 20s because she disliked Josette.)At 25, she moved to London to study English and met Adolphe Meeus, a translator for the United Nations. They married in 1956.After living for a time in Ethiopia, the couple moved to New York City and divorced in the mid-1960s.She married Mr. Pels in 1965. A communications executive, he took control of Lin Broadcasting in 1969 and served as its chairman and president for the next 20 years.Starting in the early 1980s, Mr. Pels invested heavily in cellular communications, buying up licenses from the Federal Communications Commission that became increasingly valuable as cellphone use spread. In 1989, McCaw Cellular bought a controlling interest in Lin in a deal valued at more than $3 billion. Mr. Pels’s personal profit was estimated at nearly $175 million (more than $420 million in today’s money).Not long after, The New Yorker reported that Ms. Pels and her husband had donated more than $1 million to help the actor Tony Randall start the National Actors Theater, originally out of the Belasco Theater on Broadway, to present affordable shows by playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov and Miller.The Pelses filed for divorce in 1993, and Ms. Pels became the foundation’s leader. (Mr. Pels died in 2014.)The foundation also funded Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. And it provided educational grants to up-and-coming artists at institutions like the Juilliard School and the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.For many years Ms. Pels owned an apartment in Paris and Le Théâtre de L’Atelier in the city’s Montmartre neighborhood, which she ran with her daughter Juliette. In New York, she endowed an annual $10,000 cash prize for midcareer American playwrights for PEN America.In addition to Juliette, she is survived by another daughter, Valerie A. Pels; a son, Laurence, who is on the foundation’s board; and four grandchildren.In 1995, Roundabout staged a production of Mr. Pinter’s “Moonlight” at a newly opened 399-seat venue on West 46th Street, the Laura Pels Theater.“I thought it was an honor I didn’t deserve,” Ms. Pels said at the time. “But I realized that giving up a little anonymity could have a positive impact on the work I want to do.” More

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      Review: In ‘Dimanche,’ a Climate Emergency Comes to Stay

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      Tornadoes whoosh dinner from the table and a shark swims through a flooded living room in a clown show that brings the environmental crisis home.A clown show and a climate tragedy, “Dimanche,” a collaboration between the Belgian companies Focus and Chaliwaté, makes a comedy of the climate crisis. Absurd and nearly wordless, the brisk 75-minute show at BAM Fisher is composed of a series of vignettes. Each is a devastating example of the climate emergency, expressed playfully — with toys, puppetry, acrobatics and nifty practical effects. “Dimanche” succeeds, in its macabre, elliptical way, in bringing the issue home, with tornadoes whooshing dinner from the table and a shark swimming through a flooded living room. The catastrophe, it’s here, there, everywhere already.The play, written and directed by Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux and Sandrine Heyraud, who also star, begins somewhere in the Arctic Circle. As “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” plays, a three-person camera crew bump along in their van, eager to capture footage of a glacier calving. The shoot almost immediately goes awry and the crew shrinks to two. A similar disaster befalls an expertly puppeteered polar bear and her cub. (Although given that polar bears are prodigious swimmers, this sequence seems more melodramatic than likely.)In the third sequence, set in an ordinary home, the problem of warming has traveled south. A husband and wife and his mother (another remarkable puppet) swelter in their living room as several fans blow ineffectually. The heat then grows so terrible that the very furniture begins to melt, like the clocks in Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory,” imagery as disturbing as it is delightful. These moves between the camera crew, the natural world and the domestic space repeat as first a tornado and then a tsunami threaten. There are more Paul Simon songs, too. Our illusion of control over the environment, it’s slip sliding away.Simon’s lyrics aside, words are sparse in this production and entirely untranslated. (What spoken language there is, it’s in Bulgarian.) The title, the French word for Sunday, is never explained, though it suggests the late-in-the-day nature of the catastrophe. Gorgeously realized and sneakily terrifying, the play moves restively from the silly to the dreadful and back and forth again. I was told that “Dimanche” was appropriate for school-age children. This will depend on how much your children enjoy the violent, weather-related deaths that end most sequences.Is clowning, however ghastly, an appropriate response to the climate crisis? We are in our current predicament, with worse to come, because too few people have taken it seriously. But some of the current remedies (carbon offsets, tax breaks for corporations who dabble in green energy) can feel like a game, so a playful approach makes a kind of sense. I am someone who tries — recycling, composting, buying secondhand, buying less, turning off lights and appliances fanatically — even as I know how little any of my trying matters. Which can lead, on darker nights, to feelings of despair. “Dimanche” — ingenious, horrifying — suggests an alternative: Sometimes, you just have to laugh.DimancheThrough May 13 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      ‘shadow/land’ Review: What the Storm Washes Away

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      In the play, at the Public Theater, a mother and daughter endure the devastation of Hurricane Katrina inside the bar that connects them to their pasts.There are mothers who will tell you, no matter the circumstance, exactly what’s what. Even as the sky crashes down, they’ll judge your evacuation outfit and then remind you who’s to thank that you’re still standing on two feet. In Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “shadow/land,” which opened on Thursday at the Public Theater, that unfiltered candor is both a loving reflex and the lifeline for an endangered legacy.It’s 2005 and Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on Central City in New Orleans, but Magalee (Lizan Mitchell) has forgotten her purse inside the bar that’s belonged to her family for generations, where she and her daughter Ruth (Joniece Abbott-Pratt) dally just long enough to get trapped by the storm. Ruth is ready to cast off the club, named shadow/land, like an albatross; she wants “a bottomless, sweepin joy” that she’s not getting from tending bar, or from her husband, who’s already sheltering in the Superdome with their teenage daughter.As mother and daughter unknowingly await disaster, Magalee urges Ruth not to sell the club, though it’s a husk of what it was in its heyday. In half-lucid reveries, the 80-year-old Magalee recalls its geneology, reaching back to tenuous boom times for Black enterprise. Ruth knows the story well enough to join her mother’s refrain in a kind of call-and-response. “Learn how to desire what you already got,” Magalee bluntly says of her daughter’s hard-won inheritance.Of course, what they already have is about to be drowned in oil-black water. It’s a collision course that Dickerson-Despenza and the director Candis C. Jones render in 90 dread-filled, soul-seeking minutes, zooming in on the devastation of lives otherwise seen by outsiders only from a drone-footage distance. Behind the bar, a wall of black-and-white photos chronicle Magalee and Ruth’s ancestors, as floodwaters gurgle up through the floor and leave their survivors stranded on the bar top (set design is by Jason Ardizzone-West).As in her play “Cullud Wattah,” which explores the fallout of the Flint, Mich., water crisis, Dickerson-Despenza dramatizes the consequences of environmental racism and its disproportionate impact on Black women. “shadow/land,” which the Public Theater produced as an audio play in 2021, is a poetic excavation of memory, tracing the ripple effects of triumphs and trauma through generations. Magalee also remembers, for example, when the authorities blew up a levy that flooded poor Black neighborhoods when she was a girl. Katrina’s wrath would also hit Black residents hardest, and its aftermath reverberated long after the water receded.Dickerson-Despenza’s language is rich in lyricism and figurative association, with annotated influences in the text that include Adrienne Rich and Zora Neale Hurston. And her dialogue calls attention to, among other things, colorism, queerness and the cultural imperialism of New Orleans tourism. It may be that the play tries to take on too much, feeling at times more like a treatise than a character-driven drama, but that’s partly because so much is in danger of being lost. (“shadow/land” is her first in a planned 10-play cycle about Katrina.)Of the expressive tools that “shadow/land” deploys, the cast is the most immediate and legible. A third character, known as the grand marshal, (Christine Shepard) haunts the show’s periphery, snapping limbs in tailored and shimmering Creole finery, interjecting verse that illuminates the allure of the city’s native eroticism and proximity to death. (The movement director is Jill M. Vallery and the costumes are by Azalea Fairley.)Abbott-Pratt and Mitchell are challenged with playing characters who are held captive not only by society, but by the script, which is somewhat weighed down by the exposition inherent to oral histories. But they embody the push and pull of a mother-daughter bond with captivating ease and grace. At once imperious and fragile, Mitchell’s Magalee may not remember what she ate for breakfast, but she will never let Ruth forget the importance of honoring their predecessors, the sacrifices they made and the gifts they left behind. Who else will share their stories when the evidence gets washed away?shadow/landThrough May 28 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More