The Way of Water Blog Posts

by Hank Willenbrink

On Friday, April 13 the University of Scranton Theatre Program in conjunction with Dr. Yamile Silva of the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the University of Scranton’s Task Force on Sustainability produced a reading of The Way of Water directed by Dr. Hank Willenbrink in the Loyola Science Center on campus.  Forty members of the university community attended the reading which featured five students:  Casey Kelly, Claxton Rabb, Kiley Lotz, Vanessa Relvas, and Tim McCormick.

For those of us in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the reading held a special significance.  This past fall, the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee pummeled the area leaving thousands evacuated along the Susquehanna River just south of Scranton.  Though disconnected in time and space from the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, this past September has been a harsh reminder of the way of water as our community continues to rebuild.  Also underscoring the reading was the continuing debate and unsteadiness in the community around fracking in the Marcellus Shale.  We are well aware of disasters here, both man-made and natural.

These concerns where present in the discussion, which followed the play.  During the open forum, a number of audience members expressed their displeasure at the handling of the Deepwater Horizon spill and recalled where they were when news broke out about the catastrophe in the Gulf.  Kiley Lotz, who read Rosalie Robichaux, shared a story about shaving her head, after hearing about the oil spill, and donating the hair to help the cleanup efforts.  Many expressed how powerless they felt in response to the size of the catastrophe and responded that the play had allowed them to reengage with those terrible days two years ago.

As a Jesuit university, the University of Scranton’s mission is dedicated to two pedagogical pillars—social justice and reflection.  Plays like The Way of Water are imperatives for us who teach at the University as they allow a broad reflection on larger social justice issues.  Questions about poverty, class, economics, and governmental assistance arouse in the discussion as well, as we all struggled with how such a disaster shows how quickly the fabric of a community can be undone by an irresponsible pilfering of natural resources by profit-driven machines.  While a number of members of the community recalled their fears and powerlessness, it was amazing to see how many had pitched in and, though they may not have shaved their head, gave generously to help the situation in the Gulf.  The play had the added benefit of being the first artistic performance in the University of Scranton’s new multi-million dollar Loyola Science Center—a space we chose to illustrate how the arts and sciences can reflect and expand upon one another in productive ways.

As I write this, new photos are showing up on the web from Greenpeace displaying the trauma of the spill on animals in the Gulf.  Amid these journalistic documents, it seems to me that the most proper way to deal with events like the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is to bring communities together to commemorate the great and, all too often, stupid things that we have done.  These moments prove instructive through the marking of an occasion as well as through the community-defining practice of artistic production.  

The Way of Water by Caridad Svich was read at the University of Scranton on April 13th, 2012, directed by Dr. Hank Willenbrink and the students of the Department of Theatre in conjunction with Dr. Yamile Silva of the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the University of Scranton's Task Force on Sustainability. See more on the university newspaper "The Aquinas".

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.