image, via The Rep

As I left The Rep last week after a showing of The Breach, I wondered if it would even be possible to write a subtle play about Hurricane Katrina.

The Breach tells three stories, all tied up together–the story of a family trapped on a roof as the waters rise, the story of an old wheelchair-bound man trying not to drown, and the story of a young reporter from New York attempting to find out the truth about what happened to the levees. At times, each of the stories manages to be effective. The grandfather and his grandson bicker and pick at each other on the roof while trying to stay on it at the same time. The old man, rescued, develops a terror of water while in the hospital and refuses to drink. And the young reporter picks and picks at the people he is attempting to interview until the resident he is harassing breaks down and screams at him.

But more frequently, things break down. The reporter’s story takes too long to go anywhere, and his frustrated arguing is much too literal a translation of the divide between the poor black locals and the white liberal media, and as such it becomes boring. And the grandfather and his grandson finally fall off the roof not because of the weight of their broken family or even during the rooftop baptism of the boy, but because he starts to confess that he is gay, which undermines the already realistically flawed family dynamic that they had spent the whole time fleshing out.

The set design is just plain nifty, with a lot of raining and swimming onstage. The transitions between the three stories are smoothly done and Water, a character in the old man’s story, shimmers around the stage with a voice that manages to echo. Still, I left the theatre feeling vaguely dissatisfied, like what I had been shown hadn’t quite lived up to what I had been promised.

Which might, in the end, have been a better comment on how Hurricane Katrina affected everything than the play itself was.