A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick

The more you know...

If you've seen A COOL DIP, you've undoubtedly come away wanting to know more about the water issues explored in the play.  If you haven't seen the play (what are you waiting for?), here's some valuable information to whet your appetite:

A CNN.com report on the effects of drought in Orme, TN, referenced in the play.

The official website of Masaru Emoto, a Japanese author known for his controversial claim that if human speech or thoughts are directed at water droplets before they are frozen, images of the resulting water crystals (see above) will be beautiful or ugly depending upon whether the words or thoughts were positive or negative.  Emoto’s theories figure prominently in a scene from the play.

A PBS.com chronology of the conflict between the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia and Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of US corporation, Bechtel, from 1998-2002.

Two articles from The Guardian about Nestle’s demand for compensation following the nationalization of one of their subsidiaries in Ethiopia.

Dam Displacement in Africa:  Media Resources

BBC “Our World” – Sustainable Energy in Ethiopia.  A two-part segment from the BBC about the Gibe III dam and its impact on the people and environment of the Omo river valley in Ethiopia.

Part I (about 10 mins)

Part II (10 mins)

Flooded and Forgotten: The Story of Inanda Dam Displacement, Parts 1-3

Though this is about an Apartheid-era South African dam project, the stories of the displaced people sound very much like Seyoum’s.

Part I (about 10 mins)

Part II (10 mins)

Part III (10 mins)

Drought in Africa: Media Resources

Kenya Food Crisis:  a family in Kenya grapples with severe drought and famine.  The situation is dire.  The husband has left, the children cannot focus in school, there are no crops, and there is no water.

Drought in Kenya – One Family’s Perseverance – Gorta:  an Irish overseas development agency whose motto is “Make Hunger History.”  In this video, a Gorta representative speaks with a family who has benefited from the water tank, goat, and other provisions Gorta has given them.

Thanks to Alec Strum for compiling this valuable information.

BROOKLYN RAIL: IN DIALOGUE: Kia Corthron’s Cool Dip

Check out this fantastic interview with Kia conducted by her sister Kara Lee Corthron (pictured, left).  It just appeared in the Brooklyn Rail.

A brief excerpt:

KARA LEE: What I really love about your work is that, as you say, you always begin with a political impetus, but you also always have a personal impetus. How soon do characters and character relationships figure into your writing process and are your characters often based on people you’ve come across in your research?

KIA: Because, yes, I always do start with a political impetus, it means mountains of research before I ever get to the writing. Matter of fact, I finally have to make myself stop researching and start writing, or the research could go on forever. Somewhere in all that a personal story strikes me, and I start flying with that.

NEW PODCAST! Kia Corthron discusses writing, life, A COOL DIP...

Click the bar below to listen to A COOL DIP playwright Kia Corthron discuss her writing process, her anomalous upbringing in Western Maryland, and how she empathizes with characters in her issue-based plays (8:50).

Kia Corthron

Exclusive! COOL DIP lighting tech ACTION starring Mr. Ben Stanton

The Sharp Theater lobby is packed with supplies, a sure sign that tech is in motion.  It will be cleaned and readied for audiences in time for Thursday evening's first preview.

Below:  Lighting Supervisor Doug Filomena, Lighting Designer extraordinaire Ben Stanton, and Asst. Lighting Designer Carl Faber confer.

Exclusive! COOL DIP scenic design renderings by Kris Stone

Here is a sneak peek at the concepts for the set design of A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, as realized in 1/4" scale by the amazingly talented Kris Stone.

Kris’s set designs have been seen throughout the U.S., Scotland, England, Ireland, and Australia in over 100 productions, earning her a nomination for The Irish Theatre Award for Best Set Designer, an NEA/TCG Award for Set Design, a 2006 Bay Area Critics Award for Best Set Design, a Featured Designer at the 2007 Prague Quadrennial, and a nomination for The Drama Desk Award for Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner’s Opera Brundibar.  Recent Theatre designs have been seen at: Vineyard Theatre – NYC, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Yale Rep, Hartford Stage, Old Globe, Abbey Theatre - Dublin, Long Wharf, New Victory - NYC, Huntington Stage - Boston, Riverside Studios - London, Alliance Theatre - Atlanta, The Dublin and Edinburgh Theatre Festival, Arizona Theatre Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Asolo Theatre Festival, Women's Project, The Vineyard, Hartford Stage, Rattlestick, San Jose Rep, and The Royal Theatre in Tasmania.  Kris has designed the World Premiers of many plays such as;  God's Ear by Jenny Schwartz (Vineyard), Act A Lady by Jordan Harrison (Humana Festival), Gum by Karen Hartman (Yale), The Black Eyed by Betty Shamieh (The Magic), Rules of Charity by John Belusso (The Magic), But the Giraffe by Tony Kushner (New Victory), Suburb a musical by David Javerbaum and Bob Cohen (York Theatre), Slag Heap by Anton Dudley (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), All About Al by Cherie Vogelstein (EST), Deaf Day by Leslie Ayvazian (EST), Goodbye Oscar by Romulus Linney (EST), Urgent Fury by Allison Moore (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), Fortune by Deborah Zoe Laufer (Juilliard), Dublin By Lamplight by Michael West and The Corn Exchange (Irish Tour, London, & Tasmania), Natural Selection by Eric Sobel (Humana Festival), The Four of Us by Itamar Moses (Old Globe), Wonton Destruction by Jill Szuchmacher (3 Legged Dog) and Older Testaments by The David Dorfman Dance Co. (Joyce Theatre).  Opera Credits include: Don Giovanni (Florentine, Nashville, & Cleveland Opera), Brundibar and Comedy On the Bridge (Chicago Opera Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Yale Rep, and The New Victory), Maria Stuarda (Lyric Opera - Baltimore), and Burning Bright and Orfeo Ed Eurydice (Opera Festival New Jersey at The McCarter).  Kris studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, holds a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA from The Yale School of Drama in Stage Design, and has taught stage design at Vassar, NYU’s Tisch School, and Swarthmore.

Literary Manager Adam Greenfield on the work of A COOL DIP playwright Kia Corthron

In my ongoing attempt to place our season’s playwrights in a cultural context, I find myself sitting in a cubicle far past office hours, my desk strewn with pages from a variety of plays written by the idiosyncratic Kia Corthron, trying to pin down what exactly we mean when we say that a play is “political.”  In anticipation for the 2001 premiere of her play Force Continuum at the Atlantic Theater Company, former Times critic Don Shewey wrote a profile article about Corthron entitled “A Playwright Who’s Unafraid to Admit She’s Political.”  I find this silly, the implication that anyone – particularly a playwright – would be expected to feel afraid to admit she is political.  I suppose it’s a bit disingenuous for me to feign surprise, though, in an era that seems to celebrate the absence of thought; last year, when the not-exactly-revolutionary song “Jesus Christ Superstar” was innocently performed by a teenager on “American Idol,” fans nation-wide chastised the show’s producers for condoning a song so controversial.

So, before I can start writing about Kia Corthron’s expansive commitment to probing the human stories that bring political ideas into our homes, I’d like to register a complaint:  there is a misconception that politics and theater do not mix well.  An often-spouted opinion is that the stage isn’t an appropriate place to affect change, and any writer who takes this on fights a prejudice that political theater is unavoidably bombastic, haranguing us with strident messages and unwarranted guilt.

This isn’t so, and the work of Kia Corthron is a case in point.  While each of the sixteen-plus plays she has written in the last two decades surrounds a socio-political issue, what has made her such an undeniable presence in contemporary American playwriting is not her political agenda but the seemingly effortless way she manages to write these ideas and agendas into the hearts, into the lives, of the characters she paints onstage.  “I consider myself a political writer with a political point of view,” she told Shewey, quickly adding, “I don’t write agit-prop because I think the point gets across much stronger if the audience feels something rather than being told something intellectually.”  From Bernard Shaw to Bertolt Brecht, from Augusto Boal to Charles Ludlam, the question of whether political writing is better off appealing to the intellect or to the emotions of a theater audience was one of the great discussions of twentieth century theater.  “My plays were meant to induce,” Shaw wrote, “not voluptuous reverie but intellectual interest.”  On the other hand, feminist artist Judy Chicago said of her early performance-based work, that she brought her audience “into an unfamiliar world, where their only guides were their feelings, themselves as atrophied as our muscles for assertion and independence.”  A combination of painstaking, detailed research, heart-felt character writing, and exquisite lyricism, Corthron’s work strikes a rare, delicate balance between feeling and intellectual thought, awakening us to the many sides of an idea or issue through the human story behind it.

A connoisseur of titles, which this next paragraph will attest, Corthron has proven herself unafraid to rip into any topic that catches her zeal.  It’s overwhelming to consider the sheer range of themes and ideas that comprise her body of work thus far.  Life By Asphyxiation, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 1995, is a chilling examination of the death penalty, and Force Continuum (2001) looks at the relationship between the black community and the N.Y.P.D.  Seeking the Genesis (1996) was written in response to the failed federal violence initiative program, which sought to use drugs like Ritalin to suppress genetic tendencies toward violence in children, and Slide Glide the Slippery Slope (2003) explores human cloning, genetic engineering, and the role heredity plays in shaping our personalities.  Moot the Messenger (2005) is a damning critique of the American media, while Light Raise the Roof (2004) takes on homelessness in New York, and Breath, Boom, which received its American premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2001, is a searing character drama set among the lawlessness of girl gangs in the Bronx.  Both Safe Box (1999), which investigates industrial pollution, and Splash Hatch on the E Going Down (1997), which sheds a horrific light on the health hazards of Harlem tenements, are concerned with our relationship to the environment; A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, the Playwrights Horizons’ Time Warner commission up next in our Sharp Theater, continues this theme in her work.

But while this partial list of Kia’s plays might read like talking points in a presidential debate, her body of work is populated by scores of indelible, dynamic characters who reveal again and again the electric brand of lyricism and rich emotional pull which asserts her singularity and importance among today’s American playwrights.  Her work is propelled by characters as questing and tenacious as she is, trying to take control of a troubled reality that threatens to overwhelm them.  When Corthron’s clear-eyed view of political realities meets her uncanny ability to craft potent, expressive vernacular speech, we’re left with a breed of political theater that transcends didacticism.  She brings guts and grit to each issue she takes on, exploding it open from the inside so we can come closer to understanding all of its moving parts.  And, while to understand a cultural problem is by no means to know its solution, her plays bring us so many inches closer to charting our course.

Time Warner Inc. provides leadership support of The American Voice: New Play and Musical Theater Development at Playwrights Horizons.­  Special thanks to Time Warner for commissioning A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick.

Literary Assistant Alec Strum on the history of bottled water

In 1976, when the average American consumed 5.7 liters of bottled water annually, he or she would be lucky to find a bottle of Perrier at a gourmet grocery.  A little over thirty years later, we each consume an average of 48.6 liters of the stuff and can choose from more than seven hundred domestic brands in gas stations and corner stores from sea to shining sea.  The ever-increasing ubiquity and endless variety of bottled water is a recent (and for some, inexplicable) phenomenon, but the notion of water-as-commodity is centuries old, and the reasons for its current popularity are rooted in its long and complicated history.

Human beings, at the mercy of the planet’s water supply, have always imbued it with mystical powers.  For millennia, people have traveled to drink from and bathe in the healing waters of renowned springs and streams.  However, it was the Romans who first bottled water (from Source Perrier, among others) as a curative and transported it across long distances.  Centuries later, in 1824, a thermal bath in France owned by the King of Sardinia began to attract visitors.  Two years later, the King authorized the sale of its waters, and in 1829, a company was formed to bottle and distribute them.  It was named for the source—Evian—and it became the first commercial enterprise with exclusive rights to a potable water source.  A craze for water therapies swept Europe and North America, spawning numerous copycats—resort spas for wealthy clients eager to heal what ailed them by “taking the waters.”  The resorts—Perrier in Europe, Poland Spring and Saratoga in the US, to name a few—were happy to increase their cash flow by selling their water off-site.

By the 1920s, however, the fad was fading as twentieth century technology gave rise to artificially carbonated beverages, and by the middle of the century the resorts were mostly abandoned.  Bottled water remained a small industry throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, but soon, the very product that had almost been its undoing—soda—would facilitate its meteoric rise. The escalation of the cola wars in the 1980s led to a dramatic increase in American consumption of single-serve beverages.  But, while we were growing accustomed to drinking on the go and tossing the refuse, we began to think more about what we were drinking.  Rising awareness of American obesity over the last three decades has pushed many Americans to look for something to replace all that sugar without having to kick the plastic bottle habit, too.  Enter good-old calorie-free water.

The world now faces several new challenges.  Even if we are weaning ourselves off of soda (and that’s a big “if”), we’re still addicted to plastic.  Though people first began bottling water from pristine, mineral-rich sources, the health benefits they advertise have never been rooted in hard science, and today’s bottled water is, more often than not, indistinguishable from or even inferior to ordinary tap water in most of the developed world.  Bottled water is significantly less regulated and often more likely to contain contaminants (biological and chemical) than US tap water, and the lack of fluoride in bottled water is leading to a national rise in tooth decay.  The costs, both economic and environmental, of manufacturing and transporting plastic bottles to carry billions of gallons of water, are astronomical. 

The pale orange sun rising over snowcapped peaks on your bottle of Aquafina may stir in your subconscious an ancient yearning for a miracle elixir, but the purified tap-water that Pepsi-Co fills it with isn’t worth the cost of all that advertising.  As the characters in A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick come to understand, water is no more a commodity than the blood in our veins, and it may be dangerous for us to accept the proposition that it is.

Alex Prud'homme Reads from New Book April 11: seats limited, so sign up SOON!

Journalist and author Alex Prud’homme will be reading from his latest work Clean, Clear and Cold at 5:00pm on Sunday, April 11 in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater following the 2pm matinee performance of A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick.  The reading will be followed by a discussion with Mr. Prud’homme.

Clean, Clear and Cold tackles the challenges of fresh water today – from polluted tap water and the bottled water wars, to record floods and droughts – and presents some potential solutions.  The book also concerns the perilous state of the world’s fresh water, the people and forces that are defining how we use it, and why water will be the central issue facing the planet this century.

Alex Prud’homme’s work includes My Life in France, co-written with his Aunt Julia Child (pictured, right), about her coming of age in postwar Paris and Marseille.  He has also written The Cell Game, about the ImClone scandal, and Forewarned, with Michael Cherkasky, about terrorism.  His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Talk, Time, and People.  He is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont.

This event is free and open to the public, as well as to those who choose to see the 2pm matinee performance or arrive early for the 7pm evening performance.  In order to reserve a seat for the reading and discussion, please call Courtney Beam at (212) 564-1235 x3152 e-mail marketing@playwrightshorizons.org and let us know how many tickets you would like.

Kia Corthron on the genesis of "A Cool Dip..."

In January 2007, I traveled with the Foundry Theatre, who partnered with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Hip-Hop Theater Festival, to the World Social Forum in Nairobi. Sixty-six thousand internationals descending upon the Kenyan capital, and of the literally thousands of political sessions, I was most drawn to the ones focusing on water: who has access, who doesn’t, and the consequential power structure. On the edge of the city, where remarkably few of the activists ventured, was Kibera, an enormous slum.  My fellow traveler Katy Savard befriended and introduced us to Kiberan resident Kennedy Odede, the 23-year-old director of a local community center (in a space that Americans would consider a shack but which held for Kiberans boundless possibilities) from which a youth theater had been founded.  In Kibera there is no running water.  I stood on a hideous cement bridge staring down at the filthy grey stream, its banks crammed with garbage.  When Kennedy and his partner came to visit us in our hotel, they joked about bathing in the fountain outside, its constant fall of sparkling clear water.  Kennedy spent the night in one of our rooms, and in the morning twisted the shower handle, awed by the confidence that water would invariably flow from the spigot.  This was the beginning of A Cool Dip before I knew there would be A Cool Dip.

Ten months later, November of that same year, I sat at a desk at a Sewanee, Tennessee writer’s retreat with plans to spit out a first draft.  I cracked open volumes and skimmed websites evoking droughts and megadams, aquifers and the melting Arctic, doing research and notably little writing, and I discovered eBay.  After exhausting various antiquated methods in a search of many years, I finally located an obscure Brook Benton album from my (deceased) dad’s old record collection, something my sister and I had enjoyed as very small children.  The task seemed to be more than a mere diversion from (not) writing – but what could this personal nostalgia journey, my yearning to replace a childhood loss, have to do with water (a very finite resource)?  Sewanee at that time was selling some of its water to the neighboring town of Monteagle whose reservoir had recently run dry.  Meanwhile Atlanta was suffering its own dehydration issues— the Southeast?  Sure, put up a city in the desert—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Dubai—and don’t be surprised you come up thirsty, but the humid Southeast?  When did that happen?  How?

In the early days of the retreat I spoke with my fifth-grade nephew.  The father of his classmate had just shot and killed his wife before turning the weapon back onto himself.  In the coming spring of 2008, white boys in my nieces’ high school would suddenly start draping the Confederate flag over the beds of their pickups, drive them to school, then stand in the classroom doorways, blocking the black kids, threatening them to cross the line.  My nieces and nephew live in Cumberland, Maryland, the ninety-five percent white Appalachian town where I also grew up.   (I was usually the only black kid —the only kid of any color—in my class.)  Perhaps I should not have been shocked to ascertain that such red-neckedness in my birthplace endures into the 21st Century:  Cumberland’s Army reserve base was the incubator of the Abu Ghraib soldiers.  Some paradox—reconciling many fond childhood memories with the smiling face of that young woman from Fort Ashby, WV (thirteen miles due south of Cumberland) splattered all over the notorious photos.

Back to Confederates and murder-suicide: These two incidents­­ were completely unrelated.  Except: If I live in a once-booming factory town where all the factories closed decades ago, where the official label of “depressed” goes far beyond the economy, if a job is my only sense of self-worth and jobs are nowhere to be seen, maybe the God-given confidence that I’ll always be white is the one thing that can keep me from ending it all—or not.

Haven’t you digressed a bit? you ask.  What in the world has all this got to do with water? 

I pondered this myself in the spring of 2008, staring at a stubbornly blank page.  More research: Seventy percent of the earth is water.  Sixty-five percent of our bodies is water.  Sixty percent of our blood is water, blood and water, water and blood.

Summer of that year marked the first of several of my visits to the Museum of Natural History’s excellent “Water: H20 = Life” exhibit: the usable 1% and tap versus bottled and staggering American consumption rates and public versus private and one particularly mesmerizing display, a model of humble buildings constructed on stilts, a community hovering above a lake.  Tonle Sap annually and naturally reverses its course and overflows its banks, flooding the bordering Cambodian villages with carp and shrimp and giant catfish: food.  The good flood: What an exquisite contradiction!

And I began to write.

—Kia Corthron, January 2010

Photo by Aaron Epstein

Tickets onsale today! Order now and SAVE.

Tickets are now officially on sale for A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick!  The show runs March 4-April 11 in Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

Just for reading this blog, we are happy to provide a special DISCOUNT:

Order by March 28, and tickets are:
$30 (reg. $50) for performances March 4-21
$40 (reg. $50) for performances March 23-April 11

Limit 4 tickets per order.  Subject to availability.

How to order (with code CDBL):

Online:  TicketCentral.com by clicking here or visit www.ticketcentral.com
Phone:  (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily)
In person:  Ticket Central, 416 West 42nd Street between 9th & 10th Avenues (Noon-8pm daily).