Weather Man Frederick Mayer in Hell and High Water (Photo: Ellie d'Eustachio)

 

Hell and High Water

Written by
Jamuna Yvette Sirker

Directed by Lorca Peress

Hudson Guild Theatre

441 West 26th Street

212-868-4444

 

Review by Giovanni Palumbo

 

When dealing with a catastrophe of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina, we often forget that behind each statistic of death and loss there are countless stories, the vast majority of which will forever remain untold. Fortunately, Jamuna Yvette Sirker’s new play Hell and High Water or Lessons When the Sky Falls at MultiStages (its 2009 New Works winner) brings us one of these stories, drawing on the author’s personal experience as one of the many residents displaced by the disaster.

 

On what would be an otherwise uneventful summer morning in New Orleans, Teacher Alice is visited by a spirit in the guise of a bag lady who cryptically warns her of the pending devastation. Afterward, a colorful cast of neighborhood characters stops by Teacher Alice’s apartment: Nurse Claire, who invites her to mass; Phil, an amateur photographer waiting for his big break; Actor Eddie, who refills water coolers as one of his many odd jobs; the worldly chanteuse Lady Mississippi; and the humorous duo of Dave and Beaux, who manage a restaurant in the French Quarter. The story then follows Alice, Dave and Beaux through their displacement to Texas and subsequent return to the city.

 

Hell and High Water depicts life before and after the hurricane, giving equal weight to these two parts, which makes for a somewhat languid and uneventful first act. The play’s second act is by far the stronger of the two, culminating in a series of interwoven monologues after the characters reunite in the shattered city, each of their stories revealing horror after horror in a vast portrait of destruction. One of the play’s greatest strengths lies in the striking detail with which it depicts the lives of the displaced. Whether humorous, mundane or unspeakably horrible, these details, drawn from the author’s experience, enrich the audience’s understanding of the disaster, making it spring to life.         

 

The production’s strongest performances are given by the actors playing its supernatural characters. Joyce Griffen, as Alice’s spirit guide, Bag L, delivers her character’s earthy wisdom effortlessly and is endearing throughout. Federick Mayer, as the larger-than-life drag queen Katrina-Hiroshima, takes the stage as the embodiment of the hurricane with all the devastating force his character’s name suggests. One of the play’s most hilarious moments comes when Katrina-Hiroshima, representing the dizzying bureaucracy the victims of the disaster must face, concocts an endless series of qualifications needed in order to receive government aid. The rest of the actors are well suited to their roles, and under Lorca Peress’s direction, this motley crew of friends comes together as the perfect ensemble.

 

Though the production elements are rudimentary, even amateurish, they are sufficient. Jan Hartley’s projection design features photos documenting post-Katrina New Orleans and news coverage of the disaster. Peress’s set design, though a hodgepodge of interiors and exteriors in the first act, eloquently underscores the characters’ loss in the second by placing all that is left of their possessions behind them as a backdrop. In the end, though this is clearly a low-budget production, what it lacks in dazzle it certainly makes up for in sheer storytelling power, reminding us that sometimes our stories are all that we have.

 

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