Alana Raquel Bowers and Crystal Lucas-Perry in the ripple, the wave that carried me home. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

“Water is a complicated element,” says Janice Collen, the protagonist and narrator of Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home. “It heals, destroys, rescues, erases. It drowns. It saves. It holds memory. It washes away pain.” It’s a necessity of life–perhaps the central public good. The play lives in Janice’s memory, shuttling between 1992, when she’s a married mother of two working at a small Ohio college, and her childhood in a Kansas town in the 1960s and 1970s, where her parents fought over their Black community’s access to water, in the form of a public swimming pool. It’s the perfect example of what author Heather McGhee calls  “drained-pool politics”: a species of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face whereby denying a public good to all is preferable to sharing it with all. 

McGhee, in her 2022 book The Sum of Us, talks about a public swimming pool in Montgomery, Alabama, built to be used only by white children. In 1958, a federal court ruled this segregation unconstitutional. When faced with the requirement to integrate their public facilities, Montgomery’s leaders closed, and then paved over, the Oak Park pool rather than have white and Black people swim together. Drained-pool politics paints progress as a zero-sum game: Any gain for the formerly oppressed must come at the cost of the former beneficiaries of oppression.

Anderson looks at the way political struggle can become a different kind of zero-sum game inside one family: A daughter feels she’s paying the price of her parents’ focus on progress for the community. Anderson maps the Oak Park story onto the (I think fictional) town of Beacon, Kansas, which has three segregated pools until 1958: two for white residents, one for Black. Then integration is instituted, and by the time Janice (Alana Raquel Bowers) is born that same year, there are no pools in Beacon, no community swimming lessons for anyone. Private swimming clubs will soon open, but, as Janice notes, those clubs “are willing to pay Black folks to launder towels, serve refreshments, mop the decks,” but not to take their membership fees. And so Janice’s mother, Helen (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and father, Eddy (Biko Eisen-Martin), will spend her entire childhood organizing the community to get those pools reopened. 

As a teenager, Janice grows to find her parents’ cause embarrassing. She doesn’t want to spend her life “chasing after white people begging them to let me play with their toys.” Swimming has become a white thing now in this community, and when Helen tries to take Janice to a pool in another town to keep up her lessons, even in 1973, they’re forced to operate clandestinely, not welcome to share a pool with white patrons. 

That embarrassment grows into a philosophical rift, and then a real one: Where her parents fight for artificial bodies of water, Janice is drawn to earth sciences, to her aunt and uncle’s farm. “Water,” she says, “literally slips between our fingers….Why do I need it? Why should I want it?” 

By 1992, Janice has intentionally put distance between herself and her family: a few hundred miles of good solid earth. She’s established a set of boundaries–they’re not estranged, exactly, but she rarely visits, spends holidays with her in-laws, and budgets phone calls for prescribed days and special occasions. But Beacon is now naming a pool after Eddy, who died a few years ago, and a very determined volunteer (known only as Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman and played by Marinda Anderson with a bulletproof determination) wants Janice to come for the dedication. Helen and her sister, Gayle (also Anderson), both widowed, still live in Beacon, but it’s a stranger who’s trying to persuade Janice to recognize her father’s legacy. (The fact that it’s her father, not both her parents, being memorialized is another issue that gets under her skin.)

All the characters in the play are Black, but the play never lets us forget the white world that presses in: The segregated pools that Helen and Eddie grew up with and the white mob violence that erupted when they were integrated. The white cop who pulls Helen over for no reason. All the other director-level employees at Janice’s job. And now, in summer 1992, as the Rodney King verdict is announced and King is deemed responsible for his own violation, Janice is at the airport on her way to Kansas, the only Black person at the terminal. Subtly, from a chore, her homecoming shifts into a recognition of community–a place to not be “the only one” and a chance for her family to be together in the water again, both metaphorically and literally, at a water aerobics class Helen and Gayle are taking at the newly renamed pool. After all the time we’ve spent teasing out how this distance grew, its mending comes a little too quickly, but it’s still a welcome development.

The pool is the engine of the plot, but the role of water as “complicated element,” as metaphor, is even more important to the play. It’s right there in the title, the tides and currents moving us inexorably to a place we did not perhaps want to return to. It’s in our bodies, sixty percent made of water, give or take. It’s in the structure of the piece: The effects of a single event spread out like widening ripples to impact a family and a community for generations. It’s in the roots of Janice’s family: Her grandfather and mother taught swimming lessons; her father was taught to swim by her grandfather. It’s in the tragic history of Beacon, Kansas: The year before she was born, three local boys died while swimming in an unsafe lake. Two of the boys were Black and the other white; they were in the lake because the town’s pools were segregated and wouldn’t let these friends swim together. 

There are times the metaphor threatens to drown the narrative, where we lose sight of character in the service of the theme, but it’s still the thing Anderson keeps circling back to, the underground stream, if you will, that even when covered over, keeps rushing through. But if the script sometimes strains a little to marry plot and structure, subtext and text, the production’s energy lifts the whole. Director Tiffany Nichole Green adds the fluidity the piece needs as it shifts in time, crossfades from past to present with Janice as the anchor. Her hand is delicate but steady, eliciting compelling performances that convey all the layers of feeling in these characters.

The shifts between the younger and older versions of the family are subtle but unmistakable: We see Janice’s childish faith in her parents and her unthinking acceptance of their ideas slowly sour, pushing her to evolve from a passionate teenager to a more guarded adult. Bowers, so good as a child character in Cold War Choir Practice, at first seems so contained as to be emotionless as an adult; her narration is studiously neutral, but as the play goes on, and as she opens up to Young Chipper, we start to see how intentional, how hard-fought, that is. Lucas-Perry’s and Anderson’s performances, too, show the work of time and grief on Helen and Gayle with nuance.

And while Janice thinks of her parents as a political unit, Eisen-Martin and Lucas-Perry clearly show us the differences: Eddy’s fierce determination to keep fighting no matter what meets Helen’s understanding that some things will never change. The expression on Lucas-Perry’s face as she returns to the car with her teenaged daughter after being pulled over for no reason at all is the single image that will stick with me.)

The design elements support Green’s work beautifully. Rodrigo Muñoz’s costumes help with the time transitions. Janice remains in neutral denim throughout: clothes that could belong to kid or adult, and always to someone trying to live a grounded life out of the limelight; Helen and Gayle get 70s shapes and color palettes. Lawrence E. Moten’s set hits both the water theme and the community roots, framed with walls painted to resemble marble, evoking both rivers on a map and the august architecture of municipal structures. Lap Chi Chu’s lighting glows through hidden cracks that map the marble patterns (and seem to grow bigger and brighter as time goes on). And Chris Darbassie’s sound brings echoes from the past right into the present, memories from family history: Helen’s lessons with her daughter, Eddie’s brash teenage invasion of a white pool.  

Those swimming pools of Beacon are a key plot engine: Janice’s parents’ activism in restoring them becomes–to mirror the metaphor–a rising tide that threatens to drown their relationship. But their ultimate success, and what that success does for their community, will also become the titular wave that carries her home. As Eddy tells the young Janice, she is a member of the community too. The way out of drowned-pool politics is to embrace a public good when you see it–for Janice, that looks like jumping into the pool with her family.