Playwright Kia Corthron Takes a Cool Dip with a Hot New Drama
About the author:
Kia Corthron has never shied away from writing plays with political themes. Whether it’s police brutality (Force Continuum), girl gangs (Breath, Boom) or hidden carcinogens (Safe Box), Corthron takes stands on pressing issues in her thought-provoking dramas. Her latest piece, the memorably titled A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, centers on an African preacher-in-training who comes to a drought-stricken rural American community to further his studies in religion and water conservation. There, he encounters a mother and daughter haunted by tragedy and a young orphan starved for guidance. The play, currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, was inspired by Corthron’s real-life travels in Africa, as she explains in an essay for Broadway.com.
As I write this, we’re in the middle of tech rehearsals for my new play A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, a time when the design elements are added and everything we learned in our very short rehearsal process falls apart. (And everything was never quite together anyway because, after all, it was a very short rehearsal process.) It’s an interesting time for me to start jotting down thoughts on the theme Why Did I Write This Play—because right now, all I am thinking is Why did I write this play?!
In January 2007, when I was in Nairobi, the idea of it would not have been so baffling. At the invitation of Melanie Joseph and the Foundry Theatre, who partnered with Ma-Yi Theater and Hip-Hop Theater Festival, I traveled with about 25 others, mostly theater artists, to Kenya’s capital for the World Social Forum—a gathering of 66,000 world social activists. I was drawn primarily to the sessions focusing on water. Katy Savard, a fellow traveler, befriended Kennedy Odede from Kibera, the enormous slum on the edge of Nairobi. We traveled by matatu (city minibus) to Kibera, where electricity and running water do not exist and the stream is gray, its banks packed with garbage. Back at our hotel in the center of town, Kennedy joked about bathing in the clean water of the fountain, marveling that water in the hotel room showers would reliably appear at the twist of a handle.
Three years before in Liberia, as its civil war was finally winding down, I stayed with a family in Monrovia. They lived in a modern home but, with no running water (or electricity) as a result of the hostilities, the household was dependent on a public pump in the neighborhood courtyard. I pumped water into a bucket, put the bucket into the tub in the bathroom and washed myself, used the dirty water to wash my hair, and reused the dirtiest water to flush the toilet. My awareness of the American privilege to take water for granted was no longer merely academic.
And yet hints of scarcity in the States keep arising: We build cities in the desert (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix) and should not be surprised when they come up thirsty—but I spent time in Sewanee, Tennessee, in the fall of ’07 at the time the reservoir of neighboring town Monteagle had dried up, leaving Monteagle to buy its water from Sewanee. Simultaneously Atlanta was undergoing its own dehydration issues, and the tiny town of Orme, Tennessee, had water turned on just three hours a day. When did this happen to the moist, humid Southeast.
My work is always sparked by sociopolitical issues and, in the case of A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, when asked what I was writing I would reply, “Water: who has it, who doesn’t, and the consequential power structure.” (Actually my first reply would be simply “water”; I would evoke the more pedantic answer after receiving the invariable blank stare.) Next, in response to my lofty but vague explanation, came the questions: “Do you mean the struggle over states’ control of the Great Lakes?” “Do you mean the unconscionable pre-paid water meters in South Africa?” “Do you mean the armed struggles over the Jordan River in the Middle East?” I quickly realized I couldn’t cover all the issues—that, in fact, I would endeavor at best to address a drop in the ocean.
I also quickly realized that to write on the subject of water, I would have to go beyond the sociopolitical: Spirituality would play an intrinsic role. Did you ever see that movie What the Bleep Do We Know!?, the weirdest documentary (sort of) on earth? It riffs on quantum physics, that fascinating intersection of science with the mystical, and the concept that stayed with me most was Masuru Emoto’s experiments with water crystals. The premise that under a microscope ice derived from water that had been “fed” loving words would form beautiful, intricate designs, while ugly messages would in turn produce vague, hideous patterns.
In A Cool Dip, Emoto’s theories are tested, Christian baptisms performed, the Tao Te Ching quoted: “Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.” And in joining the concrete/political with the ethereal, the structure of A Cool Dip is an amalgam of realistic and fantastical scenes, and the movement from one to the other should not be jarring to the audience but rather a natural flow, as both elements are organically part of the same world.
The truth lies in both.
