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    At Two Summer Theater Festivals, Reassuring Signs of Life

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    The industry is facing challenges, but in western Massachusetts the quality of the works is as rich as ever, our critic writes.Suddenly, out of the darkness, came one of the most thrilling sounds an audience can make: a collective gasp. This is how you know that the crowd is rapt, that the storytelling has taken hold. And so it had the other night during a performance of “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at Barrington Stage Company, where a different plot twist elicited another welcome noise: a mid-scene eruption of delighted applause. Humans can be a lot of fun to see a show with.That’s something to keep in mind at this crisis moment in the theater, whose prepandemic audiences have yet to return in their former numbers, and whose programming has shrunk accordingly. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has withered. Over a couple of days in Western Massachusetts last week, I saw two plays, one play reading and one cabaret, and if you looked at the quality of what was there — rather than the quantity of what was not — you’d hardly know that anything was amiss. And Barrington Stage, anyway, has not scaled back this year.“Blues for an Alabama Sky,” directed by Candis C. Jones on the Boyd-Quinson Stage in Pittsfield, Mass., is a tone-perfect production of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play, set in the summer of 1930, that has plenty of resonance in the summer of 2023. It also shimmers with the charisma of a terrific cast playing funny, likable, fully dimensional friends.Angel (Tsilala Brock), a role originated by Phylicia Rashad, is a Harlem nightclub singer with a voice to fit her name. Guy (Brandon Alvión) is a chicly fabulous costume designer with exquisite taste. In the middle of the Great Depression, they are both freshly out of work — since the night Angel told off her gangster ex from the stage, and Guy defended her. Now they’re roommates, sharing his apartment.Angel hopes that Leland (DeLeon Dallas), a conventionally religious Southern stranger, will swoop in and save her, even though they are a catastrophic mismatch. Guy plans to be rescued by Josephine Baker, whose portrait hangs from his wall like a deity. He sends his designs to her in Paris, fantasizing that she will whisk him there.Across the hall, Angel and Guy’s earnest, impassioned social worker friend, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), is helping to open a family planning clinic — and maybe falling for their nightlife-loving doctor friend, Sam (Ryan George), who delivers babies all over the neighborhood.“I’m not trying to make a revolution,” Delia says, and if her drably sensible suits are any indication, she means it. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”But self-determination — control over one’s own body in particular — has always been revolutionary, and freedom from straitjacketing social mores is what Angel and Guy have been chasing ever since they left Savannah for Harlem. As a Black woman and a gay Black man, they’ve each encountered violence aimed at them for that.“Blues for an Alabama Sky” is about the tenacity of hope, the limits of forgiveness and the romance of defiance. It’s a glittering spoken blues, layered with yearning.Bill Irwin in master-clown mode at the Williamstown Theater Festival, which is hosting a series of cabaret performances this summer.Emilio MadridAbout 20 miles north of Pittsfield, Williamstown Theater Festival is producing a drastically cropped season, none of whose offerings are open to review — because, a publicist said, they “are all in active development.” Fair enough. But the festival — which landed in trouble in 2021 when workers accused it of exploiting them, and in response produced a streamlined 2022 season — hasn’t lost its stardust, even without its customary fully staged productions.In the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, the festival’s longtime home, the WTF Cabaret set (by Se Hyun Oh) is stark, the lighting (by Emily Schmit) glamorous. Both audience and performers are onstage, with the auditorium’s rows of empty seats forming the backdrop for the show. A sculptural array of illuminated bulbs hangs in the air, like a constellation of ghost lights. Simplicity, this summer, is the festival’s friend.So, last weekend, was the actor Jeff Hiller. Lately risen on the cultural radar thanks to HBO’s heart-stirring friendship dramedy “Somebody Somewhere,” he hosted the cabaret, trying out comic material for an August show at Joe’s Pub. Bill Irwin performed in master-clown mode, and Jacob Ming-Trent knocked his songs so far out of the park that he could not have been a better advertisement for seeing him down the road in Lenox, Mass., playing Bottom in Shakespeare & Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Aug. 1-Sept. 10).The cabaret hosts and guests change each weekend, but the band and the core performers (Eden Espinosa, Asmeret Ghebremichael and Jon-Michael Reese) are constants. Reese’s fresh, textured interpretation of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” given a soulful flourish by the music director, Joel Waggoner, ought to be a constant, too.Nearby at the Clark, I saw a Williamstown Theater Festival reading of Cindy Lou Johnson’s “Plunder and Lightning,” directed by Portia Krieger. It would be unfair to evaluate the play, about a family of schemers teetering on the edge of ruin, but it was a genuine joy to watch Annie Golden rip into a substantial comic part, with the brilliant Johanna Day alongside her. Not a bad lineup for a Friday afternoon, or for a $15 ticket. And the legroom? Miles of it.Barrington Stage Company presented the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father,” a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, featuring Andy Lucien as the father of a premature baby.Daniel RaderBack in Pittsfield, Barrington Stage Company was also engaged in new work: the world premiere of Mike Lew’s “tiny father” — a comedy set in a neonatal intensive care unit, where Daniel (Andy Lucien) has become the father of a daughter born 14 weeks premature, and is soon a solo parent. Caroline (Jennifer Ikeda), a nurse on the unit, is his guide through this alien landscape — and sometimes, Daniel thinks, his opponent there.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, it’s a smart play about parenthood, and the ways race and gender play into expectations and outcomes in health care and elsewhere. (Daniel is Black, his baby’s mother is Asian, and Caroline is written to be played by an Asian or Latina actress.) But the script demands an exceptionally tricky balance of comedy and emotional complexity in the portrayal of Daniel, which this production has yet to find. Talking to the baby, Sophia, though, Lucien is lovely always.Good news, then, from a theatrical landscape lately festooned with co-productions. Though this “tiny father” has ended its Barrington Stage run, it will get a chance to go deeper when it moves to Chautauqua Theater Company in Chautauqua, N.Y., next week. Butts in seats, please.Blues for an Alabama SkyThrough Aug. 5 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org.tiny fatherAug. 4-17 in the Bratton Theater at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, N.Y.; chq.org. More

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      ‘Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘The Harder They Come’ Part of Public Theater Season

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      Two new works by Suzan-Lori Parks will be included in a season that delves into “relationships between Black and white America.”The Public Theater’s 2022-23 season will feature a mix of works rooted in history and new pieces that speak to current cultural shifts — toward racial justice, equity and disability rights. The season kicks off with a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s bid to move into a house in a white neighborhood of Chicago, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play,” “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”). Performances are scheduled to begin Sept. 27.This is not O’Hara’s first interpretation of the classic: He also directed a version in 2019, starring S. Epatha Merkerson, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. (The Public Theater said this will be a new production, not a remounting of the Williamstown staging.) He is also a playwright (“Barbecue,” “Bootycandy”), and in 2010 he wrote his own sequel to Hansberry’s play, “The Etiquette of Vigilance.”The season will also include the New York premiere of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” — conceived by Greig Sargeant, and developed it as member of Elevator Repair Service, and directed by John Collins — starting Sept. 24. The play re-enacts a 1965 debate between the writer and civil rights advocate James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and an architect of the 20th-century conservative movement, for which they were asked if “the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The show had its premiere last fall at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said he wants to help put Hansberry and Baldwin “back at the center of our dramatic tradition.” Baldwin, a towering literary figure, found less success as a dramatist, partly because of the mostly white cultural gatekeepers of the ’60s and ’70s. Hansberry became the first Black woman to be produced on Broadway when “A Raisin in the Sun,” premiered there in 1959, but died just a few years later in 1965.“It’s absolutely vital for our understanding of this current moment, particularly in terms of relationships between Black and white America,” Eustis said in an interview. “It’s also saying, ‘Hey, Shakespeare isn’t the only classic voice that matters.’”The upcoming slate of shows balances lessons from the past with insights into the future of theater. The New York premiere of “Where We Belong,” by Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe, grapples with the legacy of Shakespeare and colonization. Mei Ann Teo will direct the show, which is being produced with Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in association with the Folger Shakespeare Library. Performances are set to begin Oct. 28.For Eustis, Sayet’s solo piece fits well into the current cultural movement. “It’s a wave that has picked us up and thrown us forward, and said, ‘It is time to really deal with the legacy of slavery,’” Eustis said. “‘It is time to really turn and fundamentally alter race relations in this country.’”Artists who have previously had works staged at the Public — like Suzan-Lori Parks, the theater’s writer in residence; James Ijames; and Erika Dickerson-Despenza — will return this season with new plays.Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” which will be staged in November, began as a collection of plays that the playwright wrote each day from March 2020 to April 2021. It will be followed by “The Harder They Come,” featuring Jimmy Cliff’s songs and a book by Parks, in the winter of 2023. The work is a new musical adaptation of the 1972 Perry Henzell film, about a young singer (played by Cliff) in Jamaica eager to become a star only to become an outlaw after being pushed to desperate circumstances. Tony Taccone will direct, with codirection by Sergio Trujillo, and choreography is by Edgar Godineaux.“That longevity of a relationship with a major artist is hugely important, not only to Suzan-Lori, but to making a statement to the field that it’s possible to spend a life in the theater,” Eustis said. “You can actually keep your feet in the theater and ground your whole career.”“Good Bones,” written by Ijames (who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Fat Ham,” which is currently onstage at the Public in its New York premiere), will have its world premiere in the spring of 2023. The play, directed by Saheem Ali, explores gentrification and the growing price of the American dream. “Shadow/Land,” by Dickerson-Despenza (who won the Blackburn Prize for her play “Cullud Wattah”) and directed by Candis C. Jones, is the first installment of a 10-play cycle about the Hurricane Katrina diaspora. The Public produced it as an audio play during the pandemic. Performances also begin in spring 2023.Ryan J. Haddad will make his Off Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories,” about strangers he encounters while navigating a city not built for cerebral palsy, in the winter of 2023. Jordan Fein is directing the play, produced by the Bushwick Starr and presented by the Public. It probes discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. More

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      Review: Three Generations Awaiting Justice in ‘Cullud Wattah’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play follows one family of women affected by the water crisis in Flint, Mich.Water can be a force for life or death. That the municipal supply of Flint, Mich., is slowly killing three generations of Black women living under one roof isn’t a dramatic revelation, but the grim, yearslong reality embodied in Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah.”In a haunting and eye-opening production, directed by Candis C. Jones and which opened on Wednesday at the Public Theater, the playwright excavates the human costs behind familiar and devastating headlines.“Lead in thuh wattah,” five actors sing as the show opens. A riff on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” aligns present-day woes with Black traditions of perseverance. Emerging from the darkened periphery with jugs in hand, they recount the circumstances of the crisis like morbid poetry: When the city switched its water supply, who is responsible, how tea began to smell of sewage and rashes spread across their bodies.Urgency in the face of deadliness, “Cullud Wattah” points out, is not afforded to Black communities on the margins. The setting is November 2016, 939 days since Flint had clean water, and the repercussions continue to cascade.Marion (Crystal Dickinson) is a third-generation union assembly worker at General Motors, the city’s flagship employer. Her pregnant sister, Ainee (Andrea Patterson), is in recovery from crack addiction. The slight but indomitable Big Ma (Lizan Mitchell) keeps everyone in line, including Marion’s daughters, Reesee (Lauren F. Walker), a queer freethinking teenager with spiritual ties to the continent, and a sly 9-year-old named Plum (played by the adult actress Alicia Pilgrim), who has been undergoing treatment for leukemia.Out of both love and necessity, the women support and care for one another. Marion adjusts Plum’s wig before her first day back at school. Ainee applies lip liner to her sister when tremors in Marion’s hands flare up, from illness or nerves about dating again after her husband’s death.The set design, by Adam Rigg, suggests a house stripped to its raw wood foundations, with hundreds of bottles of murky water lined up and suspended in the air, one for each day it continues to flow from the tap. Bottles of clean water sit atop the refrigerator. (A filter promised by the city should arrive any day now.) The lighting design, by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, is anxious and spectral, while Kara Harmon’s costumes lend the women an everyday earthiness.From left, Mitchell, Patterson and Dickinson in the play, which, our critic writes, excels most when generating heat from familial conflict.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many bottles of water are needed to do things that most people take for granted — washing Thanksgiving vegetables, for example (26) — is the kind of granular detail the play brings into focus.The plot stirs around the effect that toxins have had on the family, both internally and externally. “We all marked,” says Ainee, who walks in the house one day with a flier containing information about a class-action suit. Marion’s job at GM, and a potential promotion to management, means she would risk their livelihood if she were to get involved — the moral compromise of capitalism and the weight of personal responsibility coming to a head.Dickerson-Despenza’s lyrical prose is laced with humor, and she creates lively and warmhearted characters. Which makes it all the more enraging to watch them struggle against a steady poisoning. Her narrative mode is one of querying the past, not so much to expose fresh facts as to ensure that what should already be known is also deeply felt.While the playwright generates affecting emotion throughout, a fair portion of the dialogue is used to deliver exposition and impassioned proclamations about the impact of contaminated water, even when characters are relating to each other. Jones’ fluid and intimate direction mostly keeps the text from feeling too bogged down in these details.“Cullud Wattah” excels most when generating heat from familial conflict. Performances by the winning ensemble members are nimbly attuned to the language of mothers and sisters, from knowing shrugs and sideways glances to the straight-on withering glares. And in the hands of Dickinson and Patterson, fireworks light up the story at its climax, when long-silenced resentments finally detonate in the sort of blaze that only arises from love.Inseparable as real-world calamity has become from the realm of art, Dickerson-Despenza’s “Cullud Wattah” is especially suited to a moment of environmental unrest. After the play comes to an abrupt end, the cast stands in silence before leaving the stage. They don’t return for a bow, as if this had not been a performance but a call to account.Cullud WattahThrough Dec. 12 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Williamstown Theater Festival Tries to Weather the Storms

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      The annual summer festival in Massachusetts has tried to adapt amid the pandemic and calls for more diversity onstage.I hate getting caught in the rain. But lately, with the mercurial weather and my new dog-walking schedule, I’ve found myself caught in bright sun showers, swampy mists and downright tempests. In my humble opinion, rain is nothing to sing about — Gene Kelly be damned.After a sunny bus ride to Williamstown, Mass., walking with a pup, a tote and a backpack, I was caught again — soaked down to the soles of my Converse. Roughly 15 minutes later the skies settled as suddenly as they had erupted. It’s a problem the Williamstown Theater Festival, which I was attending for the first time, has had to contend with all summer. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the usually indoor festival has tried to adapt with three outdoor productions. But the area has received an above-average amount of rainfall this season, disrupting these plans and leading the festival not to open its shows for reviews from critics.Adaptation, how the festival has successfully or unsuccessfully readjusted to the climate and the politico-cultural climate (namely the pandemic and the protests), was the theme of my weekend.One of the first sights I saw on my damp walk from the bus to the hotel was of a Black woman on a stage: delightful. This was an outdoor rehearsal for one of three 30-minute plays curated by the playwright-director Robert O’Hara for “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” In “The Master’s Tools,” cleverly written by Zora Howard (“Stew”), a Black enslaved woman named Tituba (a wonderfully devilish Rosalyn Coleman), like the victimized slave from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” recounts a treacherous storm that led to her mother’s decapitation. A storm is a “great equalizer,” she says, describing how nature howls “like it’s in heat” and how the trees shake “as though possessed.”It made me glance up to the sky again from my seat on the front lawn of the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, where the production was presented. A clamshell arched over the stage where Tituba told her story. Just a few minutes before she stepped onstage, ushers had handed out rain ponchos to the audience; the forecast had predicted afternoon rain.Rosalyn Coleman in Zora Howard’s “The Master’s Tools.”Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisThe rain never came. But by that point the audience, who sat on the lawn without any covering, had already been exposed to the vicious midday sun for an hour while watching the two other short solos, all directed by Candis C. Jones, that were being featured in the last week of the anthology production’s run: “Mark It Down” by Charly Evon Simpson, and “The Last……(A Work in Progress),” by Ngozi Anyanwu.In “The Last,” a queer Black man (Ronald Peet) reflects on a relationship, reeling from his isolation — a literal quarantine — and sense of loss. And in “Mark It Down,” a Black woman (Naomi Lorrain) takes account of her grief over her grandmother’s death during the pandemic.These works by Black playwrights were another way the festival reacted to the moment — not to the coronavirus, but to the recent calls for more diversity onstage. But when the plays were taken within the context of the community where they were being staged, there was a disconnect. My mother, who had joined me, and I barely saw any Black people in town all weekend, with the exception of the festival’s Black cast members. What’s the point of producing new work about Blackness in America if there’s not a more concerted effort to attract Black audiences to receive it?I asked the same question when I attended the experimental “Alien/Nation,” from the director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden. An immersive experience, “Alien/Nation,” written and devised by Eric Berryman and Jen Silverman, begins as a walking tour through the Williams College campus. (There’s also a version by car.) The audience is split into groups of about eight, and each group is led, via an app, along a path dotted with performers who act out bite-size, dance-heavy scenes about real events that happened in Western Massachusetts and beyond in 1969.Not only does this first act — mostly about Black student protests at Williams College — ring out as particularly relevant right now, but so does the second, which takes place at a Covid-19 vaccination center. The third, which includes an odd but beautiful reproduction of the moon landing and a planetary fashion show, makes a sloppy effort to tie the ending back into the racial themes of the beginning.“Alien/Nation” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes audiences on a walking tour through Williamstown, Mass.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisWhile some parts of the production connect (the site-specific format, the wondrously fluid synchronized choreography of Jeff Kuperman and Eamon Foley), others show how the festival’s attempts to adjust to an innovative, pandemic-friendly experience failed. The complicated tech — audience members need to download an app, and must forfeit their driver’s licenses in exchange for earbuds — was prohibitive to many, myself included. The app didn’t work well, the tour ate up more than half my data, and my audio kept going in and out. And the first part of the lengthy production, which one of the company members described, understatedly, as “a little bit of a walk,” wasn’t very accessible, especially given the ample hills of the Williams campus. (“This is too much for someone my age,” my 56-year-old mother testily complained to a company member. “Especially for someone who had a hip replacement.”)And, again, when looking at the makeup of the audience, my mother and I appeared to be the only Black people attending a play about Black civil rights and political action.It was my final show of the weekend, however, that best captured the festival’s attempts to adapt theater in unpredictable circumstances. With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, “Row,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is staged on wooden platforms in the beautiful reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute.This musical was inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir “A Pearl in the Storm,” about her effort to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. By presenting “Row” outside at the Clark, the festival uses a local setting (the gorgeous views) to present a tale of resiliency. Led by Grace McLean as Tori with a soaring voice (best showcased in the cascading bellows of the classic-rock-inspired “Drowning”), the show intercuts Tori’s narrative account of her journey with scenes from her past. Her story — acting out, growing up in a difficult home, then finding herself in a fight against nature — hits many familiar notes but is still novel, if only for the site-specific setup and the fact that her quest really happened a mere 22 years ago.Grace McLean as the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic in “Row” at the Clark Art Institute.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisBut the show has also been plagued by the poor weather, and some of the sound crew walked off the job one night, complaining of unsafe and unsatisfactory working conditions in the rain. In switching gears to deliver outdoor theater, the festival has been able to step up during a challenging time for the performing arts, but it has struggled to manage the logistics.“Bad weather’s on the way,” Tori says at one point in the show. During her long, treacherous time at sea, she constantly has to acclimate to the conditions in order to survive.The same could be said of theater during the pandemic; easier said than done.The morning after I returned from Williamstown, I got caught in the rain yet again. I’ve started wearing my rain boots, I just got a new raincoat, and at Williamstown I bought a blue rain poncho just in case. I’d rather be prepared for any bad weather on the way — not just run for cover.RowThrough Aug. 15 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours.Alien/NationThrough Aug. 15 in Williamstown, Mass; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes. More

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      Review: A Perfect Storm of Weather and Racism in ‘shadow/land’

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      Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s play about Black women struggling to survive Hurricane Katrina gets an ear-tingling podcast production.In its heyday, Shadowland, a New Orleans dance hall, bar and hotel, provided its Black clientele, many of them visiting jazz musicians, with the dignity and amenities (including air conditioning) they were barred from enjoying at whites-only establishments.But on the day that Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s floridly powerful new play “shadow/land” begins — Aug. 29, 2005 — that heyday is long gone, and the place is in bad disrepair. Mostly memories live there now.If the date doesn’t ring a bell, that’s part of the reason Dickerson-Despenza must have felt the need to write “shadow/land” in the first place. It is the opening salvo in a planned 10-play sequence about Hurricane Katrina and its long, too often invisible tendrils of disaster.That the disaster is literally invisible here, in a thrilling Public Theater production that renders the play as a podcast, is all to the good. As directed for the ear by Candis C. Jones and performed by actors with extraordinary voices, “shadow/land,” may be better in your headphones than it would have been onstage.Surely its densely poetic language and cataclysmic events would be too much to take in a realistic context. Even without that, the play demands a lot, bending the familiar genre in which families wrangle over property — a genre that includes Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” and Horton Foote’s “Dividing the Estate” — toward bigger aims and expressionistic ends. Depending on your taste for it, the imperfect joinery of those modes in “shadow/land” is either a problem or a mark of a handmade and intensely personal art. For me it was both.In any case, the story is compelling. Though 80 years old and in middle-stage dementia, Magalee, the primary owner of Shadowland, shows no interest in closing what has been for many decades a proud family business. Her daughter Ruth, tired of the responsibility and cost involved, and knowing that their corner of New Orleans is in the last throes of decline, is eager to sell to a developer who promises a “face lift for the neighborhood.”On the overdetermined day Katrina will hit, she has come to take her mother to higher ground — and to force her to sign the inevitable “papers” she hopes will free them from their straitened, careworn lives.But living carefree is not a freedom equally distributed in a world that, as Dickerson-Despenza reveals it, is steeped in racism, especially the environmental kind. Ten minutes into the play, the storm announces itself with a violent gust of wind, a shattered window and a clock that falls portentously from the wall. Most of the city’s richer and whiter population has already evacuated, but Ruth and Magalee have waited too long; the day before, the roads were already “more congested than a chile with pneumonia,” Ruth says, and soon enough a live oak has “fainted” on top of her car.As the floodwaters rise within Shadowland, the conflict between mother and daughter intensifies: Ruth calling for help to get out, Magalee clinging to what’s left of an identity that has merged with the building’s.These scenes are framed by interjections from a griot, or traditional Black storyteller. This character, whom Dickerson-Despenza added for the audio version, speaks even more lushly than the others, a choice that may seem like linguistic icing or overkill depending on your tolerance for lines like “stars bedazzle a sprained black sky as the City untangles its raw limbs.”Still, as delivered by the New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson, the largeness of the wording comes to seem like the precise correlative for the largeness of the disaster.The balance of naturalism and otherworldliness is more complicated for the other two actors, but just as successfully achieved. As Magalee, Lizan Mitchell is wonderfully salty in her maternal mode and heartbreakingly childlike in her delusions. And as Ruth, Michelle Wilson (a star of “Sweat” at the Public and on Broadway) manages to create a fully rounded human character — with a husband, a lover, and a daughter to think of — while also serving as the play’s eyewitness to the terrible things happening outside the window.If that’s too much for a 70-minute play to wrangle, the problem is a better one for a playwright to take on than too little. In “[hieroglyph],” the second installment in Dickerson-Despenza’s Katrina Cycle — which I saw last month, in a filmed production from the San Francisco Playhouse and the Lorraine Hansberry Theater — the mechanism by which mere events were turned into drama was also noticeably clunky. Its characters, including a 13-year-old girl and her father, survivors of Katrina who wind up in Chicago with secrets to unpack, often seem to be serving the author’s needs instead of their own.There are times when “shadow/land” suffers from the same condition, one sign of which is the tendency of Ruth and Magalee to provide back story by telling each other (and thus us) things they would both already know.But this play is saved — and, more than that, lifted — by its tragic vision. The production also makes an enormous difference. Delfeayo Marsalis’s haunting music, bent and blurred through memory and, thanks to Palmer Heffernan’s immersive sound design, often morphing into the sound of the storm itself, helps us understand that what’s at stake is not just a building but an entire cultural history.That’s a big project, even before you multiply it by 10. Nor are the aftereffects of Katrina the limit of Dickerson-Despenza’s current theatrical interests. Her play “cullud wattah,” set against the backdrop of the Flint water crisis, last week won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwriting; the Public, which originally planned to produce it last summer, hopes to try again as soon as it is safe to do so.An astonishing start for a 29-year-old writer. Though Dickerson-Despenza says she does not consider herself primarily a theater artist but a “cultural worker” making space for Black women, she may, like her “shadow/land” characters, find that the emergencies of our day have a different fate in mind for her.shadow/landAvailable at publictheater.org and on major podcast platforms. More