“I dreamt that I was walking with hundreds of people down LA‑1 towards Grand Isle,” wrote Nick Slie of Louisiana-based music and theater troupe Mondo Bizarro, about the inspiration for Cry You One. “It was the last day we could all live in Southeast Louisiana and we were parading from New Orleans. Everyone I consider an important part of my Louisiana experience was present, all carrying meat and vegetables. When we arrived at the beaches of Grand Isle, the most renowned Louisiana chefs took our food and placed it in the world’s largest gumbo pot as we all walked towards the Gulf. At the water’s edge were hundreds of rafts, each with a famous Louisiana band. We then decided which raft we wanted to leave on, said our goodbyes and off we went, into the Gulf, never to return to Louisiana.”
Mondo Bizarro first performed Cry You One, an “outdoor processional performance,” in St. Bernard Parish, La., in 2013. Full shows followed in 2014 in Kentucky and Vermont. Last year, the troupe was also part of the Arts and Ideas Festival as a musical act. This paved the way for a run of full performances this year of Cry You One — not on the Green, or in a theater, but on the Regional Water Authority-owned land around Maltby Lakes, just off Rt. 34 just past the New Haven town line in West Haven.
The show, connected to Arts and Ideas’ environmental and theater programming, runs through June 21.
This heavily forested yet swampy landscape is probably the best place in the area imaginable for a piece like Cry You One, which tells the story of the fight over how to deal with Louisiana’s disappearing land — “about a football field every 20 minutes,” Slie’s character Tom Dulac said near the piece’s beginning — as the land is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico as water levels rise. The fight is a bitter one, tapping into Louisiana’s fraught history of river and land mismanagement, economic disparity, and out-and-out racism. It is compounded by the fact that the oil and gas industry has found a great deal it wants in the region, and is eager to claim those resources while it still can.
Judy Sirota Rosenthal Photo
But the land keeps sinking. And the people who live on that land just happen to be a part of one of the richest local cultures in the United States, one of the most unique in the world. Louisiana used to be shaped like a boot. It has now, as character Zelda Culotte (Lisa Moraschi Shattuck) pointed out, “lost its sole.”
When the land goes, where will the people go? Will the culture go, too?
The six characters in Cry You One — Dulac, an oil worker; Culotte; Dr. Dr. Carol Carl (Hannah Pepper-Cunningham), a scientist with two Ph.Ds; Sabine Jean-Louise (Rebecca Mwase), a community activist; Martin Bea (Jon Greene), a digital storyteller; and Zohar Israel (himself), a griot — wrestle with these complicated questions while also coming to terms with the simple, inexorable fact that Louisiana really is going underwater.
After an introduction to the characters — and the problem — near the entrance to Maltby Lakes, the troupe divided us into smaller groups, each named after an animal and led by one of the characters. (Technically, to see the whole piece from each character’s perspective, you’d have to go multiple times.) This reporter was assigned to the spider group, placed in the clutches of Dr. Dr. Carol Carl, a scientist who has stepped inadvertently into the muddy pit of racism while attempting to create a land reclamation program. Pepper-Cunningham played Carl as a delightfully awkward control freak, completely uncomfortable in her own skin and still, at the age of 34, figuring out even the most basic social rules for dealing with humans, let alone navigating Louisiana’s complex racial politics.
Over the course of Cry You One, we watched as Carl peeled back the layers of her misunderstandings, and the character moved from comic to tragic figure. This partially involved her turning into a spider (just go with it), which revealed Pepper-Cunningham as an astonishingly chameleonic actor and dancer, impossible not to watch, even when Carl instructed us not to look at her. In her most intense moments toward the end of the piece, Pepper-Cunningham psychologically stripped her character to the schizophrenic bones. It was eerie, and sad, and moving.
Like Beasts of the Southern Wild, however — the first great movie about climate change that, in this reporter’s humble opinion, was robbed at the Oscars — if Cry You One is a funeral for Louisiana, it’s a jazz funeral, a celebration of life as much as an expression of grief. As our guides led us around Maltby Lakes, we converged several times. Sometimes we witnessed some very powerful theater, delivered by the group with complete conviction. Sometimes we were a parade through the woods. And sometimes we were a dance party, because what else are you going to do? As griot Israel put it, “when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.”
At one point, the troupe asked us to pair up with whoever was next to us and dance as the troupe threw down glorious Cajun waltzes and two-steps. We were then supposed to tell the person what we would take with us if we had to leave, right now.
“My fiddle,” I told my partner. “A water bottle,” she told me. Dulac, in character, collected more answers. A seedling tree. A husband. A pair of glasses.
Sometimes the storm is coming, Dulac said, and it’s coming fast, and you don’t have time to do anything but grab the nearest thing. “I don’t know if you can relate.”
“Oh, we have storms here,” a woman in the audience said. “We have storms.”
In that moment, a connection was made that lasted throughout the piece. The connection ran between troupe and audience, between New Orleans and New Haven, between Louisiana and the rest of the country, maybe the rest of the world. The land may be sinking in Louisiana faster than anywhere else in the country. But the water is rising for all of us, and if we can’t stop it, we can choose how to react, how to treat one another, and how to try to get through it together.
Cry You One has performances today at 4:00 p.m., June 18 at 4:00 p.m., June 19 at 4:00 p.m., June 20 at 2:00 p.m., and June 21 at 2:00 p.m. It takes place at Maltby Lakes, 585 Derby Ave. Click here for more information.
