Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s CULLUD WATTAH is well-intentioned but heavy-handed

• By drediman
• November 18, 2021
• No Comments

Last night, Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s Cullud Wattah opened Off-Broadway, marking only the second fully-staged production to grace one of the stages of the Public Theater since the pandemic emphatically shuttered all in-person performances last March. Set in Flint, Michigan, Ms. Dickerson-Despenza’s new play tells the story of three generations of Black women on the fringe of society who are inflicted by the city’s long bout with the toxicity level of its water supply. Although the play’s characters are fictitious, its catalyst is not – Flint’s water supply has been and somehow continues to be tainted despite the media coverage and public outrage that have surrounded it.

In a few key ways, the work calls to mind two relatively recent works for the theater – Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s Coal Country and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. Both are issue-driven, necessarily political plays that also happen to have been produced Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. Like the former (a piece of docu-drama pieced together from interviews), it uses hard facts to make its case against real profit-seeking villains and incorporates music to bring poetic urgency to its call to arms. And like Ms. Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, it uses drama to accentuate the personal tragedies resulting from the overarching circumstances.

Although Cullud Wattah is obviously well-intentioned, the work – at least in its current state – is overlong and suffers from some heavy-handedness. Indeed, some of Ms. Dickerson-Despenza’s scenes have the awkward feel of a playwright still searching for the right tone and Candice C. Jones’s production could benefit from a purely naturalistic staging rather than forcing upon the piece the heightened intensity and grandiosity of Greek tragedy. And although the acting is impassioned throughout, the all-female cast often veer awfully close to melodrama rather than hard-hitting drama. Nevertheless, a number of the passages (particularly in the second act) pop with the urgency intended.

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

CULLUD WATTAH
Off-Broadway, Play
The Public Theater
2 hours, 20 minutes (including an intermission)
Through December 12