Naima Khan talks to playwright Lisa Evans about her take on Hurricane Katrina in her new play The Day The Waters Came
"Somebody years ago told me I've got a black soul, which I thought was just wonderful. Didn't quite know what it meant but I thought, I'll have that.” So says Lisa Evans, writer of The Day The Waters Came, as she sits across from me at the National Theatre where the topical Blood and Gifts has just opened.
Political plays are doing well in London at the moment: The Big Fellah at Lyric Hammersmith deals with the aftermath of Bloody Sunday whilst Lisa's play The Day The Waters Came is soon to join their ranks at Unicorn Theatre.
"What made you want to write a play about Hurricane Katrina?" is a question I don't need to ask Lisa. Ordinary though they are, she feels the heroes and heroines of her play have given us more than enough reason to put them on stage. “It was ordinary people who behaved heroically,” she says. “There were guys who had stolen a car but they used it to help somebody. So you get your ordinary Joe and your regular people but they get a chance to shine. And people did wonderful things to help each other, partly because they were getting bugger all help from anybody else."
The Day The Waters Came shows Lisa's affinity for the way young people think, and puts that black soul of hers on display a little. It is, as Lisa puts it, “seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl, Maya, a year on from the hurricane. She still has nightmares of things she saw and things that happened to her. She loses her faith in the the authorities, the people who will fix things, the government, and she starts to question her part in all of it – which I think is what growing up is."
Undoubtedly, Katrina raised doubts and provoked questions across the globe. The devastation drew numerous celebrities in to the political debate and the flailing response from the US government continues to evokes a strong response from teenagers who see the play. “I think the thing that's always wonderful and passionate about teenagers is the sort of surprise,” she says. “They think, 'how can they do that? That isn't fair!' and that's something to hold on to. The cynicism happens as you get older and your response becomes, 'well, it's because as a species we're really rather rubbish'."
A playwright who's done particularly well in the States, Lisa admits , like so many, that Katrina shook her bond with the country: “I think something happened to me in terms of my relationship with America. It wasn't until researching Katrina and then hearing the response from what you think are intelligent people to Obama's health bill – I suddenly thought this country is more alien to me than Europe is. I have more in common with Europe than I do with America and I'd never felt that before. And I think because of TV, British teenagers feel like America is home but it's an alien place. That's one of the questions I've asked: how responsible is this super power? Obviously when you have Regan and Bush and people like that in power you kind of go, 'OK they're not on my side of the political spectrum but they're still on the side of democracy generally'. But I would seriously question that now."
Lisa hopes that showing the play in schools before putting the word out to theatre bods in the States will create a little more universal cohesion and give us an idea of the realities of what happened. Talking about her audience she says: "I think it'll give them some information about what it's like to be in a devastating natural disaster. You know, they get a lot of this on the news and it's somewhere far away, but how can you relate that back to yourself so that it moves you and connects with you? We're all joined up with the internet and stuff but not necessarily that emotionally joined up."
As the interview draws to a close I ask Lisa how she wants audiences to feel after The Day The Waters Came, and she recalls eavesdropping on the audience coming out of one of the performances at schools: “One of them said, 'imagine waking up to that!' That's what I hope more people will think."
The Day The Waters Came runs at Unicorn Theatre from 5th-9th October.
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