Water metaphors abound in Christina Anderson’s poetic memory play the ripple, the wave that carried me home, which centers on a young woman coming to terms with her parents’ legacy as activists for ending segregated public swimming pools in 1950s Kansas. Beneath the surface calm, Anderson imbues her drama with hidden depths and some shocking outbursts of violence, both from unseen white antagonists as well as members of our heroine’s own family.
The story kicks off when Janice (Alana Raquel Bowers), an alumni relations manager at a small Ohio college in 1992, gets an invite to attend a ceremony renaming a pool in her hometown for her father, Edwin (Biko Eisen-Martin). The request comes in voice messages left by a character named Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (the tartly comedic Marinda Anderson, who also doubles as Janice’s box wine-drinking aunt). The woman’s upbeat tone is as jarring to Janice as the idea of revisiting a cause that she always associated more with her parents than herself. Plus, she worries about the possible erasure of her mother, Helen (a haunting Crystal Lucas-Perry), who was the more effective organizer of the pair and let her husband play the more public role.
Christina Anderson’s play jumps backward and forward in time, charting the experience of Janice’s family around the simple activity of swimming. Her grandfather led swimming lessons for Black children at the city’s Blacks-only pool, while Black boys sneaking into the community’s two whites-only facilities led to three-day shutdowns for “sanitization.” After a 1953 tragedy where three boys drowned in a lake (two Black, one white), Edwin and Helen take up the fight to integrate all the pools. The city responds by shutting down all public pools, prompting the establishment of private whites-only swimming clubs. The couple’s battle continues, this time to create a new space that will welcome all.
Growing up in the 1970s, Janice is a witness to her parents’ frustration, their endurance through institutional racism and race-based violence, and their doggedness in pursuing the fight for integration. But she never adopts the struggle as her own, and in fact never embraces swimming herself. (“I don’t like water,” she tells us early on. “I hate the way it feels against by skin.”) Her feelings, articulated by Bowers with a mesmerizing mix of intelligence and emotional reserve, are complicated by her conflicting attitude toward her parents. (Eisen-Martin nails the contradictory qualities of a man whose temper and drive sometimes override his better judgment.) The fact that Janice is reassessing her emotions in 1992, during the trial of the L.A. police officers who brutally beat motorist Rodney King, adds a further dimension of self-reflection and regret. (Ironically, King drowned in his own pool two decades later.)
Director Tiffany Nichole Greene elicits remarkable performances from her four-person cast, and uses the design team to draw out visual and aural metaphors for the action on stage. Lawrence E. Moten III’s marbled-wall set suggests a luxe pool facility, but one that also reveals surprise cracks of light (lighting by Lap Chi Chu) that animate the mounting conflict. Christopher Darbassie’s sound design occasionally intrudes so that the actors’ voices seem to be calling out to us from an underwater past.
Christina Anderson’s play captures how the act of remembrance can roil the waters of our mind, enabling us to confront episodes we’ve strenuously avoided and to re-examine others that we might not have seen quite so clearly in younger versions of ourselves. There’s an undeniable power to her lyricism, and to the ways this production brings her ideas to the surface with theatrical originality. the ripple, the wave that carried me home is worth the plunge. ★★★★☆
THE RIPPLE, THE WAVE THAT CARRIED ME HOME
Playwrights Horizons, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 29 for $64 to $119