Joan Marcus Photos
Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home starts with a perky voice on an answering machine, bright and insistent. The young woman on the other end is trying to get a hold of an older woman. The reason is a civic event, the dedication of a swimming pool, which is to be named after the older woman’s father. When the older woman — Janice — finally calls the young woman back, she is polite, but hesitant. There’s a little pain in her voice, and (the audience can see) more pain on her face. The phone call is bringing up difficult memories. Why would the renaming of a swimming pool do that?
the ripple, the wave that carried me home is a story told in retrospect about a family that decides to be part of the fight against racial segregation in a Midwestern town, the price they pay for it, and their reckoning with that price. The contested territory in this case is public swimming pools. The subtle intelligence and power of this play lies in its understatement. It quietly allows the bigger picture to move in slowly, to form in the viewer’s mind, and the effect is all the greater for it.
Chronologically, it begins with father Edwin (Marcus Henderson) recalling a childhood event in which he and a few others broke into the Whites-only pool, took a swim, and escaped. Edwin tells it like it was a prank — which, on one level, it was — but it has a deeper point. When his daughter asks what happened after that, Edwin’s tone changes. He is suddenly hurt. The pools were closed for days after that, he says, and the Whites-only pool was drained and cleaned. His voice and his eyes show the insult, the anger.
Fast forward a few years and the town suffers a tragedy. Four boys — two Black and two White — are friends and want to go swimming together. The Whites-only pool will not allow the Black boys by fiat. And none of the boys have never seen a White person at the pool designated for Black people. So they go to a nearby lake to swim. Something happens, and three of them drown; the story goes that the two Black boys weren’t strong enough swimmers, and one of the White boys died trying to help them. The friends can’t even be buried in the same cemetery.
For Helen (Chalia La Tour) and Edwin, enough is enough. They begin the long legal grind to desegregate the town’s pools. They’re ready for the fight against the authorities, and against the racist elements in the town arrayed against them. They’re not entirely prepared for the toll that fight takes on their family — especially when it turns out those costs are paid all too disproportionately by Helen and, in time, their daughter Janice (Jennean Farmer).
What sets the ripple apart from many other stories of fights for equal rights is the deeply humane decision, at nearly every turn, to tell the story gently. Most of the family’s story is literally told to us by Janice, with interludes for particular scenes regarding the rest of the family. The boys’ deaths are related to us through dialogue. And in 1992 — when Janice returns to town for the ceremony to rededicate the pool, in her father’s name only, and not both her parents’ — the fact that the riots in LA after the beating of Rodney King by police officials are saturating the news at the time is talked about, but the footage is never shown, and those actions are never dramatized.
This decision has profound effects. It places the family front and center, making the real drama of the play neither legal proceedings nor local and national politics, but personal relationships — first between Helen and Edwin, especially after Helen is stopped by police with Janice in the car, and in time, between Helen and Edwin and Janice. Words are said, and actions taken, that cannot be undone; for a time Janice goes to live with her aunt Gayle (Adrienne S. Wells), who offers both solace from her parents, an understanding perspective on the situation, and an alternative path toward Black uplift that, crucially, doesn’t throw Helen and Edwin under the bus, either. Gayle doesn’t take sides; she is trying to keep the family together. As the title of the play suggests, even in the moments when the nerves of everyone in the family are at their most frayed, and they don’t know how to connect with one another, there is still hope for reconciliation.
the ripple is ably served by its superb cast. Marcus Henderson shows Edwin’s compassion and vivaciousness at the play’s beginning the better for us to understand what he’s going through when he unravels. Adrienne S. Wells plays both aunt Gayle and another character billed as Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (“Young Chipper” for short) and the transformation between the two is pretty startling. As Gayle, she exudes abiding resilience and righteous indignation. As Young Chipper, she shows us the fragility and desperation beneath the sparkling surface. Chalia La Tour is a glorious Helen, teasing nuance after nuance out of her character, a woman who knows, as a comfortable member of the middle class, that she has it better than many Black people do, but is also keenly aware that, money aside, she is still a Black woman living in America, and must navigate its treacheries with near-perfect precision or suffer the consequences.
Ultimately, however, the ripple rests almost entirely on Jennean Farmer as Janice, and Farmer carries the weight with extraordinary lightness. In de facto narrator mode (as she frequently is), Farmer makes Janice charming and wise, a thoroughly winning presence to spend time with, though Farmer makes sure we still hear the lingering sadness in her voice, too. This is important for the scenes when she is playing Janice, daughter of Edwin and Helen, and niece to Gayle; in the play’s most difficult moments, we are already prepared for the anger we then see in Janice, as those very scenes then explain where the pain came from.
The humanity and intelligence of the ripple flow all the way through to the end, when the play allows its characters a resolution, a respite, that doesn’t cheapen the conflict that made it necessary. It also has a few deeper, harder points to make.
First, it points out that the fight to end segregation at beaches, pools, lakes, and rivers is far from over, and Connecticut is no exception to this. Segregation may have been defeated in law a couple decades ago, but it’s still all too real regarding, say, the scarcity of outdoor public pools, the steep prices to join private pool clubs, high admissions prices for non-residents to town beaches, and limited access to those places for people who don’t have cars.
Second, it matters that the family’s moment of quiet resolution in 1992 happens while Black people in LA are rioting. We have gone through, and are still going through, a political time in which we are asked to fix huge problems: police brutality, persistent segregation in housing patterns, the embarrassingly disparate income levels of Black and white people. There is a lot of anger attached to these struggles, and rightly so. In its gentle way, the ripple counsels that those who care about these issues, and join in the struggle, add patience, grace, and even a little humor to the mix. Just giving Black and White kids a place simply to swim together was the work of decades. Larger problems may require decades more. Perhaps there’s a way to make sure the cost isn’t too high. Part of that involves remembering to go a little easier on one another, and enjoy those moments of lightness when they come, as a taste of what’s possible, and a reminder of what we’re working toward.
the ripple, the wave that carried me home plays at Yale Repertory Theatre through May 20. Visit the theater’s website for tickets, show times, and more information.