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As reported by the Associated Press on April 30th, 2012, a pipeline owned by Exxon Mobil spilled 80,000 gallons of oil in the Point Coupee Parish, Louisana. Please let THE WAY OF WATER team know if you find any follow-up articles.

Washington Post's April 30th, 2012 article.

From NOLA.com.

Clip from the Rachel Maddow show as posted on the Gulf Leak Watch's blog.

Follow this link to the May 7th, 2012 Huffington Post article with thirty-five photos from Greenpeace after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. 

As reported by David Hammer from the Times-Picayune, a conversation between a BP employee onboard the Deepwater Horizon and an engineer in Houston that something "wasn't right" fifty-seven minutes before the explosion, but operations continued. Read further for Times-Picayune reportage...

Meanwhile, as reported by Mark Schliefstein of the Times-Picayune, the civil trial of the BP Deepwater Horizon has been scheduled for January 14th, 2013. Read more.

My team approached the Way of Water essentially as a counter narrative. Accordingly, as we reconstructed Svich’s brutal portrayal of life in the margins, we had to deal first and foremost with why this story mattered to the now. Past suffering is not a justification for a work of art. To capture a moment of human betrayal cannot be our aim in recreating the voices of the voiceless. If we were simply to concentrate on the pain of the catastrophe, the story could not fulfill its full potential as combative truth to BP’s propaganda campaign. In fact, to emphasize the reality of the pain as opposed to the reality of the solution would be to play right into BP’s current narrative of the wound which is being remedied.

by Matthais Jung, Director/Founder of Sustainable Awareness in Houston, TX

This performance hit home with me. Why? Because the driving force for me in life these days is the common health of my fellow human and the environment we share across the globe. It eats at me! It eats at me because so many are complacent or non-acceptant to the realities we are facing in our environment. We, as a society, as a world, are in dire straits. I see folk toss styrofoam cups to the side of the road, plastic bags roll in the wind as if it were normal, all the chemicals we dump into ourselves and into the drain, how is it possible to wake up from the allusion that this is ok. I get that the awareness of how things are is sometime a more complicated road to venture, but the reality is we have little time to squander. Our environment is a direct reflection of ourselves; we treat ourselves as we treat the environment that supports us, with utter negligence. It's not ok, the world is on the brink of being lost to our miss handling. It will take the brave and the honorable to rise up; it will take a movement much greater than any time in history. Our values are at the core of this, our integrity is at stake, and the reality of our children’s rights is being tampered with. Why is it ok that Exxon Mobil executives sit at the board of cancer treatment funds, raising over a billion dollars to find a cure and focus on "care" (treatment strategies), when it is very clear that carcinogens have everything to do with it. The cure is clear to me. Stop producing "products" that fill the air with toxins, stop draining the waste into the streams and stop feeding us all this bull shit!!! I am tired of the negligence; I'm tired of watching children and neighbors finding themselves filled with cancer and pure lies. The reality is we are stronger than this, we are more powerful than this, we do have the strength to provide a world class life style and not discard the lives of our fellow human. We have the ability to rise to a higher self and offer a world with plenty. But it will take the majority to sway the pendulum. It takes conversation, protest, outrage and even forgiveness; but change must be done with vision, accountability and all hands on deck.

The Way of Water by Caridad Svich was read at the Main Street Theatre in Houston, TX on April 30th, 2012, directed by Rob Kimbro.

by Emily Anne Gibson, Dramaturgy, History, and English, CMU '14 

Last semester at Carnegie Mellon University, the dramaturgy department hosted Anne D’Zmura, who taught a course on devising eco-drama, and our professor Wendy Arons is highly involved with the subject. As students of the CMU dramaturgy program, Sara Faradji, Olivia O’Connor, and I were familiar with the concept of eco-drama even before we hosted the reading of Caridad Svich’s The Way of Water in mid-April. In her introduction to Readings in Performance and Ecology[1], our professor Wendy Arons writes: “Ecodramaturgy is theater and performance making that puts ecological reciprocity and community at the center of its theatrical and thematic intent.” The Way of Water is undoubtedly a piece that fits right into this growing theatrical niche.

What makes it successful, in our opinion, is that although it’s a story that involves facts surrounding the BP oil spill of 2010, The Way of Water is still, at its core, a play about people. As we discussed the play after the fact, Sara said she considered it to be “good eco-drama, as the factual environmental concerns are presented in a way that informs the reader about the reality of the BP oil spill while providing a compelling reason to sympathize with the human characters depicted in the play.” This is significant, because an important thing to consider when dealing with ecological issues in theatre is scope. The sheer size of the problems that came out of the Gulf oil spill is overwhelming, but by sharing stories, we share experiences and educate each other. The story of Jimmy and the other characters in The Way of Water speaks to the story of thousands of others.

In my mind, theatre is all about storytelling. There are different ways to go about it, and as Olivia pointed out, it “makes you think, how will we tell our grandchildren about this event? How will this event come to shape the history of the place, the realities of the land?” The Way of Water takes a shot at telling the human story that makes this catastrophic event tangible for us. “It connects us, as people, to events that can feel very alien,” Olivia continued. “The corporations, and even the environment…those things can feel like far-away intangibles. But the impact they have on lives and relationships: that’s something we can all understand.” Sara agreed, saying that “a play can essentially serve as an educational tool that allows one to understand a national crisis from a creative perspective that is not based on cursory discussions by talking heads on a national news network.” It brings the story, the consequences, home, and it forces each person who reads or sees the play to question how we can reconcile humanity with nature – after all, as we discover each time there is an ecological disaster, we are not separate from the world we live in.

by Peter A. Campbell, Associate Professor of Theatre History and Criticism

We have been lucky to have Caridad on campus a few times this year, as she was selected as a Schomburg Visiting Artist at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, at the border of New York State and about 25 minutes drive from the George Washington Bridge.  My students were already familiar with her work, as she had visited several classes and did a talk on her translation of Blood Wedding, which was performed on campus in March.

When Caridad first gave me the play, in January, I was struck by the voices and their political power.  The tension in communication, the intensity of the relationships, in a time of tension and intensity.  The struggles to love under the pressures of life.  The universality of it.

But what happened in our reading was that the actors and the audience saw the specificity of these renderings, and especially of their place and time.  And that specificity allowed them to also see the specific political and social problems that the play addresses.

Mahwah means “meeting place,” and fulfills that definition in many ways.  Historically it has been a meeting place for armies in battle and in making peace; it is still a boundary line of sorts for the Ramapough Mountain Indian Nation and the states of New Jersey and New York.

But most resonant in terms of The Way of Water is that Mahwah is where the Mahwah River meets the Ramapo River, which runs through some of the most populous areas of northern New Jersey.   These rivers have a history of being polluted, most famously by a Ford plant in Mahwah that produced more than 6 million cars and dumped most of its waste in the river.  The Ramapo River downstream of the plant was designated a Superfund site in 1982, and continues to be polluted with lead, arsenic, and other chemicals that still seep into the groundwater and the river basin.  More recently, Hurricane Irene caused several oil trucks from upstream in Sloatsburg to be dumped in the river.  The entire basin, which eventually empties into New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, remains highly polluted, and with every new incident of flooding there are warnings of polluted groundwater, parks, and playgrounds.

So our reading, then, in this context, had its own specificity.  We live in a place where the discussion of water and its safety is second nature.

The students reading the play, and those who made up most of our audience, were quite struck by the way that the play roots out political and public activity through the everyday lives and conversations of the characters.  The characters are genuine, idiosyncratic, unusual, poetic.  And powerful.  The actors were excited to be able to give them voice.  And the response from our audience was of shock and recognition, of the currency of the play and the issues at hand.  As one student audience member noted, the staged reading was a powerful tool in engaging the audience to think about the spill and its effects without being preachy or pedantic:

"It is a story about…people in helpless, life-or-death situations.  The drama was realistic and believable leading me to wonder how much research Svich put into her work.  Were the characters based on real stories that she had read about or seen on the news?  Even though it was only a reading, the actors were still able to deliver strong performances that enhanced the serious dilemmas of the four men and women.  The dialogue was naturalistic in the way that average people would talk about the spill and their problems. 

Despite my enjoyment of the material, I never became so completely immersed in it that I forgot about the big picture.  None of the drama enfolding in front of me would have occurred if not for a man-made disaster.  Instead of performing it as a full play, the four actors simply sat on stools and read from scripts…The lack of theatricality is a constant reminder to the audience of the play’s messages.  It never…allows you to forget about the spill and its effects.

I was also impressed by the knowledge I was able to obtain without realizing I was being taught.  As ridiculous as that sounds, I never knew of the hazardous effects of the chemicals that were used to clean up the area and disperse the oil.  A 16 year-old boy was killed in the play by these chemicals.  Again, by cleverly working this point into the never-unrealistic conversations, the play was able to inform without preaching, for which I was quite grateful.”

This was a special experience for our campus and our community, one that gave us the chance to learn about those distant but not so far away.  We are grateful to Caridad and No Passport for giving us the opportunity.

The Way of Water by Caridad Svich was read at Ramapo College’s Adler Theater Berrie Center for the Arts on April 10^th, 2012. The cast included Christopher Kent (Jimmy), Vanessa Rappa (Rosalie), Frank Hughes III (Yuki) and Melissa Mugica (Neva). Directed by Peter A. Campbell with sound by Nick Cornwell.

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"The Way of Water"



Playwright Caridad Svich and Houston stage-director Rob Kimbro talk about Ms. Svich’s play The Way of Water, written in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Theater companies across the country are presenting staged readings of the drama, marking the second anniversary of the nation’s worst environmental disaster in history. The local reading takes place at Main Street Theater’s Chelsea Market playhouse.

Caridad Svich and Rob Kimbro talk with St.John Flynn.