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The Watering Hole by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 74; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2022.0009

1086-332X

Danielle Drees,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Reviewed by: The Watering Holeby Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon Danielle Drees THE WATERING HOLE. Conceived and created by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon, in partnership with Christina Anderson et al. Signature Theatre, New York City. July 6, 2021. The Watering Holeflooded New York's Pershing Square Signature Center, filling three stages, the lobby, and various backstage spaces in this off-Broadway venue with water-themed multimedia installations. Although The Watering Holeprimarily deployed water as a figure for communal healing, it also suggested that water can be a powerful force, sweeping away the old and clearing space for something new. Like a flood, The Watering Hole—helmed by Signature's resident playwright Lynn Nottage—aimed at a deep unmooring of American theatre's structures. This goal aligned with the broader social project announced in a 2020 open letter to "White American Theater," signed by 300 BIPOC theatre artists (including Nottage), calling for "a transformation of our theatrical ecosystems" and demanding that American theatres remake themselves as antiracist, equitable institutions—not just in the heated moment of summer 2020, but for the long haul. By inviting seventeen artists of color to participate in creating The Watering Hole, Nottage and Miranda Haymon experimented with one iteration of that transformative vision. The Watering Holeraised new challenges for accessibility while charting a course toward a more humane and reflective theatre industry. The Watering Holeoutlined expansive aspirations for theatre on a hand-painted banner in the Signature's lobby. The banner announced "a desire for a Theatre that can sustain the complexity and the multiplicity of our desires," including "artists understood as human beings," "absented voices made visible," and a "goodbye to the product over process mentality." In keeping with the desire to center process over product, the ten fragmentary pieces that comprised The Watering Holefelt like first drafts of artistic works. After entering with timed tickets, spectators were divided into groups of four and escorted through the building by a guide who stopped us for five to ten minutes at each small installation. Most were prerecorded solo performances. At "This Room Is a Broken Heart" in the building lobby, we watched videos of a butoh dancer and listened to a song on loop while looking at two small, elaborately decorated boats. At "Freequency," we sat on a stage in the dark on small metal stools, facing empty audience seating, while a recorded voice-over invited us to align our chakras. The pieces had a raw, unfinished quality, stripped of the many layers of production and revision that typify off-Broadway theatre, exposing the messy process of imagining a new future for the industry. One video installation repeatedly asked: "Can we come back when this has become someplace new?" Another closed with the half-question "A whole new paradigm for theater, right?" While it is hard to imagine The Watering Holebeing revived in this version, I hope some of its forward-looking component pieces can go on to be workshopped, expanded, and restaged as the work toward equitable theatre continues. The Watering Holerooted its work to reimagine the theatre industry in individual reflection, rather than interaction. Many of the installations featured recorded monologues or other solo performances; some asked spectators to reflect on their own needs as well. In one monologue, which played over a speaker as spectators climbed Signature's main staircase, Nottage recounted a "massive race riot" in 1900 very near Signature's current location: "Black folks were . . . beaten and dragged from the street" by white people, with no protection from the police, until a "massive thunderstorm . . . in the middle of the summer" ended the riot. While a deluge of water may have saved lives that day, Nottage's speech implicated the white bystanders, who were a less reliable intervention than random rainstorms. In the final piece of The Watering Hole, viewers were given miniature boat sails and invited to write down what they needed to feel safe, before pinning their sails to the mast of a boat moored in the theatre's lobby. Perhaps that boat might sail forward to Signature's next production, with a record of its patrons' needs onboard. These needs...