In Russian, the most common word to describe a play is “спектакль,” a spectacle. As a writer, I’ve always been in awe of the play as an artistic event. In contrast to the solitary quietude of the page and the domesticated sedateness of most literary readings, plays seem like wild beasts, full of intensity that quickly vanishes into memory. Plays are not permanent things the way poems are, attempts to create something that lasts for the ages. You can’t really film a play and capture it. A play is a presence, something that happens in real life and then is gone. Because of their transience, plays seem to me to be poignant endeavors, soul work. In contrast to much of art’s greed for material permanence, plays seem ecologically minded, flowing and evanescent.
Fire on the Water (co-directed by Raymond Bobgan and India Nicole-Burton) is an aptly wild commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the burning of the Cuyahoga River, an event woven into the battered self-image of Cleveland itself. That we can mention the river burned with rueful astonishment is actually a testament to how far we’ve come in public awareness. That rivers and other bodies of water could catch on fire was a common occurrence in our polluted country, we learn in the play; the Cuyahoga River had burned at least twelve times before the infamous burning in 1969.
After a brief welcome to the play, we walked behind the curtains into a space shimmering in a watery blue light, a true theater-in-the-round experience where we were immersed in (and sometimes doused by) sound, music, and action. Fire on the Water takes the tradition of Brecht’s breaking down the fourth wall and extends it into a new intensity of engagement, where audience is implicated (sometimes directly, with actual actors’ fingers pointed at individuals, for their—and all of our—complicity in the status of our water). Even the chairs where we sat were on wheels and part of the action, as we were encouraged (and sometimes gestured) to move around to make room for the actors. We needed to be fluid, subject to change. During intermission, a fellow audience member approached my wife and me, and said, “I’ve been an usher at Playhouse Square for 39 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this!”
As befits an event of such magnitude, Fire on the Water is a production that involved six directors and seven playwrights, and employs a variety of styles and tones—from the mythic to the documentary, from the post-apocalyptic to the realistic. Some worked more powerfully for me than others, but that’s to be expected in such a massive undertaking. It was also not afraid to hector its audience, to make us uncomfortable—and given its subject, that feels completely appropriate. We are living on the edge of climate changes that we only dimly have acknowledged personally and politically.
I loved how the play begins with the spirits of the water, water nymphs stationed throughout the theater, giving words to what is the essential raw material of human life. “I was here long before you,” the voices hauntingly echo and amplify, and suggest the long prehistory of human reliance upon and care for the earth. We so easily take for granted this fundamental ground of all life.
The play also gives a shout to the indigenous people who cared for the land. That relationship, as we know, changed radically with the arrival of colonizers and their industrial innovations, and the river’s voices let us know that we would have to face a reckoning.
The play’s scenes are punctuated by oral renderings of news articles, speeches, and op-eds about the problems with pollution in the river. When we hear their dates at the end of each quote, we’re struck by the fact that industrial abuse of the waterways lasted for over a century before local and national political action changed that. We’re still trying to clean up today.
Among my favorite scenes: the hauntingly alive river of blue plastic bags that come to consume one character; the post-apocalyptic ones in which characters dowse for water in “The Erie Waste” and wonder about a time when people took whole baths in water; the struggle of Mayor Carl Stokes between dealing with poverty and dealing with an environmental catastrophe; and the terrifying trapeze work of Adam Seeholzer and Faye Hargate.
By the second act, I noted moments where recurrence of scenes felt redundant or when didacticism sapped some of the theatrical trance—in the form of a scientist, for example, ironically enough, telling us that science had eliminated our belief in magic. The play could benefit, perhaps, from some paring back. After all, Fire on the Water, in its best moments, creates an original, haunting spell that transports us into worlds where Erie is a dry waste, or where plastic bags are a water monster, or where water speaks.