Lower Ninth

HIGH AND DRY Charles, left, shares a roof with father McDaniel.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Stranded on a warped rooftop after Hurricane Katrina, a father and son in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward bicker and sweat as they wait for help; beside them lies a corpse in a black garbage bag. Unfortunately, this stark image—framed by Donyale Werle’s stunning set of a submerged house—is almost all there is to Beau Willimon’s watery slog of a play, which makes Beckett seem overplotted by comparison.

The bulk of the script consists of dull recriminations and a halting reconciliation between teenager E-Z (Charles) and his estranged, newly Bible-thumping father, Malcolm (McDaniel). Willimon and director Daniel Goldstein boldly stage a longish bedtime-story scene in pitch blackness, but the content—alternate versions of the Noah’s ark tale—would bore a Sunday school silly. Lower Ninth does spring to life for one ten-minute scene, when a dehydrated E-Z hallucinates the brief resurrection of Lowboy (Akinnagbe), a gang kingpin who drowned trying to save his car. (“Always thought I’d die with a bullet in my head,” Lowboy muses. “Never thought it’d be ’cause I couldn’t swim.”) This slice of magical realism has real dramatic muscle and ironic spark. And it may be counted as a refreshing departure from expectations that Lower Ninth chooses not to lower the boom on institutional neglect of the poor black South, apart from a passing dis of “Massa Prez’dent.” But minus such a critique, or even a simple cri de coeur, this play is like a long desert-island cartoon with no punch line.

—Rob Kendt