The Breach: A Story About the Drowning of New Orleans (review)

The media plays a critical role in the construction of official narratives of events such as Hurricane Katrina. Those of us who watched the events surrounding Katrina unfold on our televisions were made witness to such a construction in the making. Exposed to images of death and destruction caused by the hurricane and the breach of the levees, we were simultaneously exposed to reports of looting, rape, and other unimaginable crimes perpetrated predominantly, as the media portrayed, by the African American community. As many critics have noted, the media maintained dominant social constructs of African Americans as criminals, and omitted narratives emerging from subjugated communities, including rumors that the U.S. government intentionally had bombed the levees.

As theorists such as Joseph Roach and Diana Taylor remind us, public performance can transmit the knowledge of subjugated communities in ways that often contradict official narratives. The Breach transmits knowledge, which the official narrative presented by the media excluded, to audience members who might not otherwise have access to that knowledge. Such was the case when Seattle Repertory Theatre produced The Breach.

The Breach, by Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Joe Sutton, has three distinct, interwoven plotlines. While none of the writers are from New Orleans, all three traveled there and throughout the Gulf region during their writing process. The play was then performed and workshopped throughout the Gulf Coast area and major U.S. cities before its premiere at New Orleans’s Southern Repertory Theatre, a production I also viewed. Filloux’s plot concentrates on Mac, a bartender who finds himself floating through toxic waters, taunted by Water, embodied as a sensual and seducing female, and hallucinating that his son, currently serving in Iraq, will rescue him. McCraney imagines the interactions among family members as they waited on their rooftop to be rescued: Pere Leon confronts his grandson Severence about his sexuality while Quan, the youngest grandchild, watches. Quan, we find out later, is the only one who makes it off the roof. Sutton’s plot focuses on a journalist named Lynch who, like the playwrights, is confronted with the challenges of understanding and representing a community that is not his own. The interweaving of the three stories challenges the media’s narrative, which is often cohesive, linear, and favors one perspective over the other.

Sutton’s curiosity about rumors that the levees had been bombed inspired his contribution to the play. His plotline most explicitly challenges the historical narrative created by the media about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina; he weaves his observations about the media’s interpretation of events into the interactions between Lynch and Aunt Sis. When Lynch approaches her to find out what is behind the rumors about the levees being bombed, she is distrustful of his motivations. She wants to know who he is, why he wants to “write about black people,” and what he understands about the rumors before she will share any information with him. This reflects not only the negative relationship of the media with these communities, but also the playwrights’ own processes as they attempted to gather information for the play. I am reminded of the opening scenes of The Laramie Project in which community members have been inundated by the presence of the media and are wary of the playwrights’ motivations. In both cases, the playwrights handled this tension by writing it into the play.

Kelly Conway (Chris), John Aylward (Mac), and Nike Imoru (Water) in The Breach. Photo: Chris Bennion.

Eventually Aunt Sis does talk with Lynch, and in these interactions the audience found out that there is historical precedence behind the rumors, including the fact that government officials intentionally bombed the levees in 1927 to save the more affluent parts of town. Aunt Sis also talks about the Tuskegee experiments, a forty-year-long experiment beginning in the 1930s, at the...