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Producer-director Brian Newell's carefully drawn staging features the Maverick artistic director's evocative sound and lighting design and an elaborate attic set transformed during intermission to a steeply-pitched rooftop.
The real focus of "Rising Water," though, are its two characters, the old married couple Camille and Sugar. Although accurate references to Katrina-related specifics – the construction of the levees, the fact that many victims simply assumed their rescue was imminent – are woven throughout the script, it's really a close-up look at two lives at a crossroads.
In their nightclothes, the irritable, practical Camille (Veda Franklin) and the softer, less practical Sugar (Rick Franklin) climb the stairs to the attic. As Sugar tries in vain to save photo albums Camille deems "not worth drownin' for," we get bits of humor to break the tension ("We got Lake Pontchartrain down there!"), a clever reference to Atlantis, and the couple's realization that "everything we own is gone – destroyed."
The swelteringly hot attic is cluttered with junk, boxes, lamps and such nice touches as a tiny rocker pony. As the couple pick through the rubble of their past (Camille's wedding dress, wedding day photos, costumes from a memorable Mardi Gras party), they reminisce. We learn that they married more than 30 years ago, when Sugar was 23 and Camille 18, and had a daughter who died as a little girl and a son now estranged from Sugar, a recovering alcoholic.
Newell's atmospheric music and the sound of lapping water create an evocative background to Biguenet's equally plangent verbiage. Sugar relates a ghost story his daddy told him in the 1950s about a hard-luck ship captain who was transporting cargo from New Orleans to Panama when his wife and tiny young daughter were washed overboard and drowned – a story that foreshadows a more frightening one from Sugar's boyhood.
Camille's anger rises with the realization that officials may have cut corners rather than upgrade the system of levees. Preferring to ignore the theoretical, Sugar calls the day's event's "God's will." Camille's sharp retort: "Is the drowning of innocent people God's will?"
As Act One comes to a close, the pair are able to remove a ventilation shaft, creating a hole which Camille uses to get onto the roof, while Sugar realizes he's too big to squeeze through.
Post-intermission, we see the couple bathed in the moon's bluish light, with Camille perched on the rooftop. There's humor and horror in the image of Sugar's head, shoulder and arm protruding from the hole and terrifying realism in the sight of Camille lying flat on the steeply pitched rooftop, sleeping, as Sugar sleeps standing up.
All during "Rising Water," Biguenet prompts us to ask ourselves what we would do in their situation – just as many asked themselves while witnessing televised images of the carnage wrought by the floods.
As the couple ponder their fate, that of their neighbors and the entire city, Camille notes that "our past is washed away, like Noah's Ark." The flood, she realizes, is an end but also a possible beginning. The question, then, is "can we forget the past and start over?"
"Rising Water" works because of Biguenet's text, Newell's direction and the presence of the Franklins – not just because they're actually married, but because they're such good actors.
Both are wonderfully spontaneous, their real-life bond lending verisimilitude to the couple's back-and-forth exchanges. Rick Franklin is a burly, bald-pated bear of a man whose Sugar, with his sweet, backwoods Cajun accent, is reminiscent of '60s film actor Dub Taylor: A none-too-bright good-old-boy who takes things easy and asks little of life.
With a less pronounced dialect than her husband, Veda Franklin strikes a regretful posture as Camille surveys the wreckage of the couple's lives. Her performance expresses the intense empathy of Biguenet's text – a mixture of horror, disbelief, anger and helplessness.
Because of Biguenet's skillful writing, which blends the real-life horrors of a disaster with the more prosaic, yet somehow more pressing, problems of married life, "Rising Water" emerges as a great American play – perhaps one of the first great plays of the 21st Century.
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