I spend a lot of time thinking about what art can do. Political events are often convoluted. Conversations about them involve a lot of exclusionary language that discourages the average person from participating in those conversations. The Flint Water Crisis is a spectacular example of a political event that seemed so vast it resulted in mass dehumanization. The crisis felt so huge that I couldn't begin to understand how it came to be or its impact. Theatre, as a form of storytelling, can help bridge that gap. By analyzing the rules of a theatrical world, you can better understand the laws of your world. Furthermore, adding character allows audiences to consider the human aspect of these relatively intangible political actions. However, sometimes, in an attempt to tackle the complexity of an issue, theatrical artists create pieces that are equally convoluted as the issue itself, nullifying the clarifying potential of the play.
The Poisoner is a neo-noir thriller written by M.M. Haney and directed by Lee Sunday Evans that is currently premiering at La Mama. The piece follows Ron Finder, a hotshot journalist, as he returns to his hometown and uncovers a substantial environmental controversy. His investigation leads down a path of deception, abuse of power, and utter negligence of early 2000s Michigan water politics. It was clear to me that Haney, a documentarian herself, was most interested in the layers of bureaucracy that can cause a crisis like the Flint Water Crisis to occur and persist despite good intentions. Unfortunately, I was floating in a sea of facts without an emotional arc to anchor my viewing experience. I just—didn't care.
Haney describes the play as a noir, but it acts more like a procedural like Law & Order, so I will analyze its structure through that lens. This structure served the playwright's inquisitive interests and depersonalized the story in several ways.
A vital tenet of the noir style is the investigative narrator. In noir films, this narrator is the audience's eyes into a world we don't understand with characters we don't know. The style instructs us to judge these characters through our narrator's eyes. Our narrator, Ron Finder, is someone who "got out" of this town, which implies a class judgment of the other characters in this play as less intelligent or less valuable. He is not a part of the story and, therefore, does not have an arc of change; he's not personally affected by the actions of the play. Haney tries to remedy this problem by cramming in a narrative of Finder reckoning with the memory of his father and the abandonment of his childhood friend. Still, the mines that Finder had to excavate buried these stories. I am also artistically uninterested in narrators because writers often use them and direct-address monologues to shamelessly unload exposition that the characters can more artfully reveal through dialogue.
Another defining characteristic of the procedural style is the quick scenes. Often, our narrators/investigators discover a break in the case, and the show jumps to a scene right at the moment in dialogue at the most critical point. This brevity doesn't allow for compelling characterizations because, in a procedural, audiences only achieve empathy by recognizing a character's archetype: stool pigeon, innocent victim, misleading expert, gaslighting political leader, etc. When we tell these stories on television, we have numerous episodes to fall in love with the investigators despite the shortness of the scenes, and we aren't meant to remember the temporary ensemble. Unfortunately, we're left with an ensemble of one-dimensional characters when replicating this style onstage. Worse, when we theatricalize a real-life case, the characters' flatness bastardizes the real people's legacy.
Ultimately, the audience member leaving The Poisoner is left thinking about the intelligence of the creators rather than the subject matter. The creative team exhibits an impressively diverse expertise, ranging from the water filtration system to the structure of the emergency planning bureaucracy. The procedural structure highlighted this diversity of intelligence as Finder interviewed people from many different community offices. However, this illustration of research inundates the play with facts and legalese, desensitizing my experience of this tragedy despite the numerous deaths before the final bow.
My experience at The Poisoner made me question my understanding of the power of theatre. Can it bridge the gap between convoluted political events and the audience members intimidated by the complexity? This play reminded me of when I first discovered the tragedy in
Flint, Michigan. At the time, I was drowning in articles about numbers, policies, and legislature that made it impossible to understand the human impact. Then, on social media, I was drowning in pictures of the citizens of Flint, Michigan: the murky water, the children in hospital beds. These images and personal accounts forced me to recognize the human impact, but I still couldn't understand how the problem started or persisted for years. The brain and the heart need to work together to understand the complexity of an issue. Theatre, I believed, was the perfect salve because it has the intellectual capacity to explore the discourse surrounding a topic and the emotional capacity to humanize the topic. Was I mistaken? Is this union of logos and pathos too high of an expectation for a theatrical work? I don't believe so, and I think the answer lies in style and structure. In her play, Cullud Wattah, playwright and activist Erika Dickerson, Despenza takes a different approach to exploring the Flint Water Crisis.
Cullud Wattah is an Afro-Surrealist piece written by Erika Dickerson-Despenza and directed by Candis C. Jones had its premiere at the Public Theater in 2021. The piece centered on a family of Black women 936 days since Flint, Michigan, had clean water. They struggle to persevere through medical emergencies, layoffs, and familial tension. Dickerson-Despenza utilizes moments of poetry to abstract the experience of human erosion due to lead poisoning and emotional erosion due to governmental abandonment.
The main difference between the storytelling effect of Cullud Wattah that sets it apart from The Poisoner is that the former takes the discourse of the latter and places it in dialogue and characterization. Rather than discussing how lives are affected, Cullud Wattah shows us how those lives were affected. It prioritizes the human over the fact, but it doesn't sacrifice the complexity of the political. One of the show's main characters, Aimee, is investigating the city's political corruption because of how the lead poisoning has affected her and will inevitably affect her baby. The class action suit she's working toward would endanger her sister Marion's employment at the plant, threatening the entire family's financial security. This plot represents the marriage of discourse and emotionality that only storytelling can accomplish. I left the theater with my eyes opened to the roots of political corruption (as evidenced by how Marion is confronted with the decision to choose employment over justice) and the personal effects of such corruption.
Dickerson-Despenza's stylistic explorations add a third layer of understanding: interpretative.
Cullud Wattah's poetic moments do not engage with the discourse of the dialogue or its emotionality. They use visual and scripted metaphors to unleash a deeper understanding of the characters' circumstances that could not be uncovered by literal language alone.
If I've learned anything from comparing my experience with these plays, facts don't move hearts. They don't even activate the mind as effectively as you'd think. The arduous task of the storyteller is to replicate humanity. Even when the facts of a story initially incite the creator's interest, humanity causes the story to be heard, understood, and remembered.
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